“I don’t know who to choose though if I had to choose between a young Jane Fonda and a young Molly Ringwald,” Datarock’s Fredrik Saroea confesses to me painfully over the phone. “I just don’t know it would be so hard to pick.” We’ve been discussing the band’s influences for the past twenty minutes, a conversation that drifting from early 80s aerobics videos, Jane Fonda, and the bizarre casting of Chris Penn in both Footloose and Rumble Fish has now finally, and predictably settled on Molly Ringwald’s panties.

“Hey check it out,” he says excitedly. “Last week I saw Breakfast Club again, and you know the scene where the tough guy comes into the room and the teacher comes back in and he has to hide underneath the desk of Molly Ringwald? You know he, he is sitting under the desk, he is looking at her undies. So if you freeze the picture you can actually see Molly Ringwald’s panties, for you know a good couple of seconds, which would allow you to print a pretty nice picture of Molly Ringwald’s undies,” he exclaims in glee. “You got to do it,” he then commands, his tone shifting in a lower more threatening frequency. “You have to print it very large and put it in the ceiling of your bedroom and then every time you make love with someone you can think about… Molly Ringwald,” he finishes with a pause for emphasis.

Assuring him I’ll do it the first chance I get, I ask him about the band’s new album, Red, named in tribute to their trademark red jumpsuits. “ Red is sort of a continuing of what happened on the first album but it’s like the essence of the first album combined with the essence of our live show,” he explains in his charmingly broken English, calm at last. “What we wanted to do was to create an album that was perfect for our live show. It’s a little bit more energetic, it has a little bit more musicianship and it’s a little more suited to the high octane live show that we do,” he says. placing particular emphasis on “high octane”.

“For our live show, a good handful of the songs from the first album we’ve never really played live, whereas with this album, I think we could play this album from first track to last and that would be a great live show, if you know what I mean.”

His voice once again picking up that Scandinavian enthusiasm, and excitement is loud in my ear. “We already saw it happen,” he exclaims confidently. “We’ve already done quite a few shows, we just got off tour, and the response to the new songs has been as good as the best response from the old songs. I’m really happy about that actually,” he continues, laughing happily as he speaks. “Everyone says that it’s difficult the second album and I was just like what the fuck I don’t give a fuck, we’ll just make an album and see what happens,” he says.

“We didn’t really have pressure from our label, but we felt we had pressure from ourselves to make an album that would really work for the live show and would really entertain our audience. So making this album I have to admit it was kind of difficult and we spent about ten times longer in the studio for this album from the first. I think this album is really taking Datarock back to the fun and just having fun and doing our own thing like we did back in the days. We recorded the album back home and we really tried to do what we did back in 2005, instead of trying to please the US audience that didn’t really grow big till 2008. And the only country that picked up on Datarock the early was Australia and Norway.”

With Datarock on their way down under to play Come Together festival In Sydney this Saturday, as well as a gig in Brisbane tonight, Fredrik is then quite naturally excited to set foot once more on our sandy shores. “I’m really looking forward to coming back to Australia because that’s really where it all started and that’s why we’ve been touring all around the world so hard. You know if it works in Norway and it works on the other side of the world in Australia then you know, why not?”

Why not indeed.

Datarock’s new album Red is out in June through Warners, and you can catch the red jumpsuit brigade this weekend…

Friday 5th June – The Zoo, Brisbane
Saturday 6th June – Come Together Festival, Sydney