The Raveonettes: Unsweetened Danish

With short songs played in one key and using just three chords, the Danish duo The Raveonettes have little time for frills. Line Thomsen meets Sune Wagner and Sharin Foo, who tell her all about the joys of love gangs and untamed girls

Take one key (either B flat major or the "glorious B flat minor"), and play a song with a maximum of three chords, for no more than three minutes. Mix it raw, with no sugar or sweeteners, and no hi-hat or cymbals at all. Choose a band name that pays tribute to your heroes. And, voilà, a very restricted and bland version of music will appear. Or, if you are called Sune Wagner and Sharin Foo, you will end up with two critically acclaimed albums and success on your hands. The Danish rock'n'roll band The Raveonettes, fronted by the songwriter Wagner on vocal and guitar and Foo on vocal and bass, think it perfectly normal to have rules for making music, but don't think many others can pull it off as they have .

Sitting in a small dressing-room at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, drinking gin and tonic out of little plastic cups, before they go on stage as support for Cooper Temple Clause, the two of them are trying to explain why they like dogmatic guidelines. Both their albums, Whip It On (2002) and the recent Chain Gang of Love, produced by The Go-Gos and Blondie's Richard Gottherer, have followed this formula and left critics baffled as to their recipe for success.

"If you have to paint a picture using just red, blue and yellow only very few people can make a masterpiece. We made those rules to inspire us," says Foo, who looks an archetypal Scandinavian transported to Fifties America, complete with high boots, knee-length skirt, a tight top and not a little eye makeup. It is Foo's birthday today (simple mathematics makes her 29, though she looks five years younger), and two fans have come all the way from Brussels to turn up at her dressing room door, very wet from London's rain, with flowers.

"The special reason we can pull off following such tight rules sits right there," says Foo and points at Wagner. "Well, I just did it to simplify things, and to have one way to channel my ideas"replies Wagner. "Sometimes we break with the rules, you know, we even did a song ("Rave On") which is less than two minutes long."He's wearing a rocker's leather jacket, and has not-so-rock-star thoughtful eyes. He also has a not-quite-rock-star tattoo on his wrist as well - of Beat generation writer and performer Jack Kerouac.

Even if audiences can't spot Wagner's tattooed tribute to the beat generation, then the band have spelt out their debt to the period clearly in lyrics about the love of the road, and on the screen in one of their first videos, "Attack of the Ghost Riders". The video, featuring vivid scenes depicting Wagner dying in an electric chair (subsequently censored in the UK and America), only to reappear as a ghost on a Harley, is introduced on screen with the words: "A sin- steeped story of today's beat generation".

Do they want to be the new beat generation, then? Wagner demurs. "But I have been inspired by what they were," he says. "I like Kerouac's spontaneous way of writing. Kerouac also had guidelines for his writing, though his guidelines were perhaps more open than ours are." Well, though the band's songwriter Wagner is insistent on changing his reputation from being a born again beatnik, he does share a love of travelling the American roads with those American writers from the Fifties. And he is not shy of writing about this love in his songs, where there are boys called either Johnny or Jimmy, who, wearing leather jackets, with cigarettes in their mouths, travel the streets as a love gang, looking at prostitutes or untamed girls, besotted with New York. And while Foo has now moved to London, friends say Wagner mainly lives "on the road and everywhere". Just as you'd think from their black-and-white posters with Wagner on a bike and Foo looking deadly beautiful. As in "Attack of the Ghost Riders": "He is hell-on-wheels; she is fired up for any thrill."

Both born in small towns in Denmark, Wagner and Foo seem the perfect couple for export - what with their good looks, love of old-time rock'n'roll music and picture-perfect performances. "All Danes leave the country to become successful," says Wagner, quoting another export, Karen Blixen.

Sure enough, it was out of Denmark that the band got their initial success. "We were playing our fifth ever gig together, somewhere in New York and Rolling Stone magazine gave us a rave review. After that we could have our pick of 20 different record labels who wanted to sign us," says Foo, looking as if that is the most natural thing to happen to a new band.

If their love of Buddy Holly and The Ronettes at times can't be heard in songs that sound closer to The Stooges,the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Velvets or even the Beach Boys, then Wagner and Foo have spelled out their preferred heroes in their own band name. "We spent many long afternoons in libraries, looking for a good band name," says Wagner. "We went from being called Death Row, Slapping Bitches and Drunk Again, until one day I was reading this book, with a heroine called Ravonelle, which I thought was the most unusually pretty name I'd ever heard. Put in an E, like "Rave On", from Buddy Holly, end it with -onettes, like the Ronettes, and then our name would be a tribute!" The rest of the band, including the drummer Jakob Hojer and the guitar-player Manoj Ramdas, who have come to join us in the dressing-room, look relieved at the band names that they have been spared.

After a year of almost non-stop touring, the band say they have not yet had their fill of life as musicians. But do not expect them to play at a stage near you in 10 years', or even in two years' time. "This is just an experiment. We don't particularly want to play rock, we just want to try it. It is quite fun, but not something you'd want to be stuck in for ever," says Wagner, who leaves it open whether he may in fact opt for the next of his dogmatic guidelines to be for classical songs in C major, at a length of 30 minutes minimum. If the band should ever stop playing, they even have set guidelines for what to do. "I'll be writing a book on male groupies," says Foo explaining that they are in fact a too little represented - though highly amusing - breed. Wagner says that he intends to become a librarian.

But at the moment, The Raveonettes look very far from stepping off the ladder of success, whether they like it or not. This week their schedule includes an awards show in Denmark (they are up for two awards from Denmark's national radio, which gives a good deal of airtime to the band), playing the late night show 4Play on Channel 4, and starting their tour of America in Ohio's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Like most other bands who are trying to make it, they have schedules and plans that run long into the next year.

Given the presence of the other Danish bands, including Mew, Junior Senior and Kitty Wu, and their fellow Scandinavians The Hives and Turbonegro gaining column inches across Europe, is it accurate to speak of a new Nordic wave of bands? Well, The Raveonettes have no doubt that they are the best thing coming out of Scandinavia at the moment, and do seem happy to be in competition with Sweden who, historically, have hogged the spotlight (read ABBA, Ace of Base, Roxette and The Cardigans). "Of course we wish the other Danish bands success, but I don't think that there is gonna be a Danish wave happening," says Wagner, and Foo and the drummer Hojer agree.

In Denmark though, the critics are hoping that this is the time that the Danish bands have been waiting for. Jens Johansen, rock'n'roll specialist and assistant professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, thinks that the next few years could very well give even more success to Danish music. Why? "Well, for the first time in decades, the bands are aiming at the British and American market, more than the Eastern and Asian audiences. And, crucially, they are singing in English without too much of that Scandinavian accent". Apart from Aqua (remember "Come on Barbie, let's go party"?), which Johansen does not even want to talk about, as he considers it a bad example of Scandinavian music, the Danes have not had much success on the Western music scene.

"Danish bands such as Michael Learns to Rock in the Nineties, specifically targeted Asia, and became very successful over there. Then others like Kashmir went on to win over the German audiences, but I can't remember any time when Danish bands have been as successful abroad as now," says Johansen and he sounds like a happy, and hopeful, man.

In England, long-time Scandinavian residents say it feels different to be here compared to how it was a few years back. "Now Denmark is more than pastries!," says Helle Zinck, who left Denmark for London eight years ago. "And people can find my home country on a map - some of them even want to go there, buy Scandinavian-type furniture, hear my country's music and see my country's films.

The Raveonettes though insist the idea of a Danish wave has been slightly hyped up and laugh the whole debate off - and then go on to play a breathtaking gig to a wildly dancing and clapping audience at the Shepherd's Bush Empire.

The question that arises when you see The Raveonettes live is: what is the relationship between Wagner and Foo? Well, they maintain they are nothing but friends, who keep out of each other's love lives. Unlike another duo, they don't even want to pretend they are brother and sister.

But in front of an audience of about 2000, Foo and Wagner start slow dancing while singing a hair-raisingly romantic version of Buddy Holly's "Everyday". The two of them end up crouching on the floor and seemingly kissing intensely, while whispering the lyrics into a shared microphone. It would be no surprise, if love was part of The Raveonettes' recipe for success.

'Heartbreak Stroll' is out on Monday on Columbia