"FASTEST RISING HEAVY BAND IN THE U.K.? WE GET TWISTED-UP WITH EDDIE ODEJA AND JAY JAY FRENCH."

Dee Snider strides purposefully across the interview room at WEA Records as though he owns the joint, snatches a copy of Culture Club's last album from the firm grasp of press officer Barbara Charrone, and holds it out of the window he's just opened. Passers by in the streets below stare up at this madman who's screaming down at them, "Do any of you sick muthas wanna hear this?" Has the man no respect? Doesn't he know that this is no ordinary press officer, but Barbara Charrone, the Barbara Charrone, Keith Richard's biographer?

On the other hand, Twisted Sister are to be respected themselves as one of a very select bunch of American acts that have broken in England before their fellow countrymen have taken them to their collective bosoms (see Jimi Hendrix/Stray Cats).

Today I'm here to speak to the backroom boys, guitar players Jay Jay French, and Eddie 'Fingers' Odeja. After having my arm almost wrenched from its socket by Dee, who only wanted to shake my hand, he vacates the premises and I get down to business, which is exactly how Jay Jay and the band regard the rock scene.

Being an anxious sort of fellow, I'm keen to know how the Twisted ones feel about the reception they've been accorded by the Gentlemen of the English Press.

"People say we're getting more publicity than anyone's gotten in ten years... and we deserve it," opines Jay Jay. "It's GREAT."

Far from being the overnight success they appear, Twisted Sister have spent the last eight years of their lives hacking around the tri-state area (New York/New Jersey/Connecticut) of America's East Coast, playing for 4,000 people one night and 13 the next. Eddie picks up the story. "There was a big buzz going on about us here in England, there was a lot of people telling us, 'You guys should go over to England'. It was Ross Halfin (recent victim of a mucho sicko obituary in Sounds, the paper he smudges for) who first came to see us, and it was sort of through him that the push to come across originated."

"A BIG BUZZ GOING ON ABOUT US HERE IN ENGLAND... PEOPLE SAYING, 'YOU GUYS SHOULD GO TO ENGLAND'"

Before they arrived in Blighty, the band recorded a couple of tracks with producer Eddie Kramer, and once ensconced within this fair land, headed straight for The Sol in Cookham, Berkshire. The Sol, which is fast gaining a name as the place to record, is the property of Jimmy Page, former Led Zeppelin guitarist/film soundtrack composer/recluse. Here Sister knuckled down to the serious business of work, and after much sweat and toil on their behalf, emerged with an album, 'You Can't Stop Rock 'N' Roll', which also contains their fine UK debut single, 'I Am (I'm Me)'.

"He never showed up in the two months that we were there," complains Eddie Odeja, obviously disappointed at not meeting Mr Page in person. "He rarely comes by from what I hear, unless he's working there himself, but the Sol was very nice, it was a beautiful place, beautiful studio, nice surroundings."

"How did you come to play the guitar in the first place?" I quiz the swarthy one (Eddie). "I was watching the Ed Sullivan Show like a lot of other people in my age group I guess, saw the Beatles, and that was it. It sort of started with Elvis, I was maybe too young then, but when I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show I said, 'Hey, that's what I wanna do' and that sort of started the whole thing!"

For Jay Jay French it was different. "My brother is a lot older than I am and he was consequently more accomplished at everything he did, relative to my age of course, and he also played guitar on top of everything else, so I took up guitar because I wanted to be better at something than he was, and he's a genius of sorts, and it looked like he was just gonna kill me on that too, but eventually he stopped playing so he could go into the teaching profession and that allowed me to catch up with him, and all I did was practice for hours and hours and hours and hours."

"I SAW THE BEATLES ON THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW AND THAT WAS IT"

Jay Jay delivers this monotone rap, minus punctuation, in the machine gun manner that most Americans seem to prefer. "It wasn't until I was really sick once," he continues, "I was in bed for seven weeks and I got an electric guitar a week before I got sick, and looking back at it now it sounds like it was meant to happen, but I stayed in bed, and I was really ill, and all I could do was play and that's when it finally hit me, that's what I was gonna do!"

Eddie Odeja did in fact study guitar for a year. "After that I did it from my own head," he says, "because I've always admired that style of playing and it was different."

"I got my roots in folk guitar playing," reveals Jay Jay, "and the blues as well. If I was hanging about in a pub with some people, late at night and they just wanted to play, it'd be BB King or Albert King.

"Clapton's earliest work on Bluesbreakers was something that influenced me a great deal. There was just a burning tone to me that he got, that people to this day claim he never repeated once Cream broke up. But before Cream he had an even more passionate tone to his guitar playing."

"SOMETIMES I'LL THINK, 'WOW, MISSED A NOTE... NO WONDER I MISSED IT, IT'S SO FAST!"

"I agree," adds Eddie in threatening, clipped Brooklyn tones. "I'm an admirer of his also!"

When asked about his sound techniques in a recent interview, Jay Jay reasoned, 'I have fun with a Sunn, I was a bender with Fender, but I'm really effing partial to my hundred watt Marshall'. I ask Eddie Odeja if this is the entire truth of the matter. "V-A-R-L-U-M-E," he croaks, breaking into spontaneous laughter, "we go from nine to ten."

Jay Jay: "As far as technique is concerned, Eddie and I have two distinct styles. Eddie is a more set, accomplished, smoother, adept player, and I'm a crazier player. What happens in the context of the group is, Eddie plays the solo fills that are more or less the straight ahead rockers that have certain melodic overtones in the solos, and I play the frenetic type stuff and it seems to work out quite well. We play so fast on stage, much quicker than on record, that I'll sit for half an hour and do exercises to get my fingers to that level before I go onstage.

Dee says, 'It's like a car, but let's go into fourth before we hit first, second and third.'... It's crazy, I don't know any band that can play that melodically, that fast."

"I GET BLINDED WHEN I WALK OUT ON STAGE — SOMETHING OVERWHELMS MY PERSONALITY. THERE'S A LOT OF REAL AGGRESSION OUT THERE..."

"Sometimes I'll think. 'Wow, I missed a note,' and then when I listen back to it I think, 'No wonder I missed it, it's so fast'," claims the swarthy one before he dissolves into laughter.

In the early days Jay Jay took to honing his technique by practising on the roof of his apartment block, 17 floors up, complete with Marshall stack, much to the disgust of his neighbours, and his mother. During this time he and Eddie managed to wade their way through a considerable number of guitars. These days, they insist, they've slimmed down their requirements a little, though you wouldn't believe it.

Eddie owns a BC Rich Bich, Charvel Strat, a pair of Fender Stratocasters, Guild acoustic, and Gibson ES345, his first serious guitar. Jay Jay has a 1953 Gibson Les Paul that never sees the light of day, custom refinished 1978 pink Les Paul, what he refers to as a Destroyer which is, near as damn it, an Explorer with a pearl dragon inlaid upon it, whilst in the studio he prefers to record with a pair of D'Agostino guitars.

The boys in Twisted Sister are most pointedly anti-drug, a healthy fact that came to light in the course of our meeting. Instead they reserve their energy by doing jigsaws and jogging in preparation for the assault course that most bands refer to as a live show.

"The reason we act like we do onstage," affirms Jay Jay, "is because there are parts of our personalities that need an outlet to vent the lunacy that does exist in our heads. People may make a mistake when they say that it's an act. Let me tell you something. If it wasn't for this business I could be in jail because I need that outlet to run up onstage and go nuts. I was in a lot of trouble at school, I mean a lot of trouble! I was thrown out of one school for starting a fire, I was thrown out of another for being involved in some revolutionary organisations, and all this crud, so I have a past of rebelliousness, and I notice what happens when I go onstage is something overwhelms my personality. I get blinded when I walk out onstage. Between the dressing room and the stage, in my head, I go out of it and so does Eddie, and so does Dee, and so does Mark - A J (Pero) too, so there's a lot of aggression on that stage and it's real aggression. It's not something that's posed, you can't rehearse that shit. If you could rehearse it, there'd be a million bands like Twisted Sister."

Animals? Maybe - but they sure act like pussycats offstage. Eddie tells me he sold children's baby pictures as a door to door salesman once upon a time. Far from denying the true facts about the former life of a Twisted Sister, he reveals all unabashed by the most hysterical fit of the giggles I've had in a long time.

"YOU'D BETTER WATCH YOUR ASS IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS"

"It used to be along the lines - "Hi, did you hear about the new child contest in town," I had a whole script I used to remember, it was real funny." (You're telling me.) "I'd have the housewife completely sold, and then all of a sudden the husband would wake up, "Get out, get outta my house," and I'd be there talkin' like half an hour to get a sale and this guy would just come up and throw me out. That's one job I had..."

Now whilst I wouldn't recommend you purchase a picture of your baby from Eddie Odeja, I do suggest you buy Twisted Sister's album, 'You Can't Stop Rock 'N' Roll', cuts like 'We're Gonna Make It' and 'I've Had Enough' are guaranteed to make the boys many fans and a few enemies amongst the hard rock/heavy metal school of bands who will naturally be jealous of Sister's tight as a ducks arse/melodic/no nonsense/power house approach. I have to admit I'm listening to the album even as I write, and the tracks improve by the groove after following the instructions on the sleeve, ie Play It Loud!

Aside from the music, Twisted Sister also hold a very professional attitude towards the business aspect, as Jay will testify.

"More importantly than being able to play a guitar run like Ritchie Blackmore, you'd better watch your ass in the music business. Better to be mediocre and keep your eyes on the scene than be what I call a basement Mozart. I have no respect for that. All I care about is that Twisted Sister keeps what it earns and we all watch it like a hawk, and we live very modestly. We've dedicated ourselves to the band for so many years that it's beyond the point now where at our first taste of success, out come the Rolls Royces, out come the Lear Jets. The band will live frugally forever, we do not need 5 star hotels, we prefer to save that money and buy expensive houses somewhere, once the money comes. We promised ourselves that we would never get into a position when somebody would say to us, 'Well you made this, you got to be this big, whatever happened to your money?' and the reaction is 'I don't know!' We can tell you exactly what happened to every cent of it. We'll never have to lose sleep at night wondering 'Did we get ripped off by somebody?'"

In case you still think Twisted Sister have had an easy ride to fame I'll leave the final word to Jay Jay French.

"The overnight sensation in England, of course, took seven or eight years to develop, and we'll go back to America now as English stars I guess, and people will say, 'That's cute,' but we worked for it. We are veterans of over 2,400 shows (six a week for the last eight years), more than most bands have done that have been together longer than us!" And as an afterthought, "Oh, and you need a unique product too."