"Jon, can you do us a favour?" When Lawler nods indulgently, she continues: "Could you send the support band out?"
After an instant's bemused silence, he echoes: "The support band?"
"We really want to meet them," she explains.
"I'll see what I can do," he tells her and walks off, shaking his head as if he can't believe it. This must be one of the times when Lawler wonders whether selling 1.5m copies of the Fratellis' debut album, Costello Music, actually means anything. For every true believer who sings their songs at football matches and crams into venues to see them, there seems to be someone else who would rather meet the support band. Or, worse, is a critic who regards the group as beery louts.
There are reams of reviews, both for Costello Music and their new album, Here We Stand, that portray the Glasgow band as yobs making music for yobs. Like it or not (and they don't), the Fratellis have been designated this era's custodians of the oik-rock tradition. So Lawler and his bandmates, bassist Barry Wallace and drummer Gordon "Mince" McRory, are in an odd position. On the one hand, they're a proper pop phenomenon: Scotland's biggest group, winners of the 2007 Brit award for British Breakthrough Act, inescapable to anyone who watches football (Chelsea Dagger has become the nation's terrace chant of choice) and all-round band of the people. But on the other, they're reviled by many for the very reasons others love them. And that greatly annoys Lawler, who, as the middle-class son of two teachers, probably has more in common with the Fratellis' critics than with the people who buy their records.
"You can't pick your fans, can you?" he asks, having settled himself at an outdoor table overlooking the canal that runs behind the Paradiso. "But we're grateful to have fans. And I think when people describe us as a band to get drunk to, or a party band, it shows you how out of fashion rock'n'roll is. We get described as a pub band, but that's what rock'n'roll is. Twist and Shout was three chords and 'C'mon, c'mon, c'mon' - it was nonsensical. But that was why it was effective."
Lawler's passion is melody; he wants to write songs that postmen whistle and football crowds chant and radio stations keep on rotation. "People don't trust melody," he says. "I've always been a huge fan of the Beatles and Pink Floyd, people who use melody. I don't understand dance music. Melody, a tune - it's primal."
Is that what accounts for those 1.5m sales? He laughs softly. "I don't know the complex answer, but the simple answer is that a good band will get an audience. I knew as soon as we started to play together that we had it, 'cos I'd listened to the radio and it was all Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, and I knew from the first minute that this was the one that was going to work. There was a click, and I knew."
His instincts were spot-on. Brought together in 2004 by an ad posted in a Glasgow music shop, the trio played their first gig early in 2005. By the end of 2006, they had a No 2 album. Lawler was then 27 and had been around the block several times, working by day at a Ministry of Defence call centre - most of his wages went to his ex-wife, who he'd married as a teenager, and their son - and writing songs at night. Wallace and McRory were similarly dividing their lives between day jobs and nighttime music "careers" (the new song Shameless draws attention to the fact that many of their competitors are "half as old as I am" and seem "younger every night", though Lawler claims to be unfazed by the prospect of turning 30 next year).
The initial media coverage was adulatory, but the Fratellis reacted as if the media were a particularly pesky fly. In early interviews, they sulked, fabricated stories (their Wikipedia entry still lists Fratelli as their common surname, as per their lie that they'd all dropped their real names and adopted it) and failed to charm. "[The press] did dance around us for the first few months," Lawler acknowledges, making it clear that he hadn't been happy about it. Eventually, though, the press got the message: the Fratellis didn't like them. They responded in kind. "Lots of the bands we love, like Zeppelin and Floyd, were also hated by the press," Lawler says with an air of quiet vindication. "We did two cardinal sins with the press: we took the piss, then stopped talking to them."
Despite the chippiness, Lawler is very likable. He's articulate and introspective - in contrast to colleague Barry, who whiles away the pre-soundcheck minutes by showing a group of roadies that he can insert a lit cigarette into his belly-button and "smoke" it - and admits he's not a natural frontman. "I'm introverted by nature. I'd give it to Mince in a flash, 'cos he's got that exuberance." Well, there's a revelation, since Mince doesn't do interviews or photos, and today is out visiting Amsterdam's famous coffee shops.
Seeing himself as a lyrics-and-tunes man rather than a performer, Lawler now confesses that he doesn't think much of Costello Music. "I agreed with some critics about it. There was a decent percentage of it that I didn't like. It has a pop sheen, and we don't want to be a pop band." He's much happier with Here We Stand, which the band insisted on producing themselves. "The only reference people had for us was the first album, and that really bugged me. That's why we didn't use a producer on this, 'cos we didn't want anybody else getting their hands on it. It was the album I was desperate to make, and I think it'll change a lot of opinions."
A tiny spider chooses this moment to appear on the table. When he sees it, he blanches and hastily moves to another seat. "I'm scared of spiders," he says, mildly embarrassed, which leads to an anecdote about his wife phoning him on tour in Munich a few days ago to announce timorously that she had found a spider in their house, and what should she do? Mrs Lawler is a key character in the Fratellis' story, a burlesque dancer whose stage name was Chelsea Dagger, she was the inspiration for the band's signature hit. "Her name was a play on Britney Spears. I remember the night I wrote it - I found the notebook with the lyrics the other night. It came to me really quickly. I was going [sings the familiar refrain] 'Do-do-do-do-do-do' and it was so easy to write that I couldn't believe nobody had ever used [the melody] before."
He is, however, much more satisfied with the music on Here We Stand, which, unlike most second albums, is not much concerned with the experience of suddenly being famous. "I don't like to reveal too much or pour out my heart and soul, but I'm really proud of the lyrics on this album. When I hear them, I smile to myself and think I've done some good work. I'm really proud of a line in Shameless: 'Won't you make sure my mother gets half my weight in gold/ Tell her I just did what I was told.'"
He sits back and waits for my reaction. "Hmm," I say. He goes on: "If someone else had written that, I'd have been really jealous." But is he as pleased with Here We Stand's first single, Mistress Mabel, which is a load of rhyming gibberish ("Headline ratbag, so they told her/ Last night's nametag across her shoulder") set to mid-tempo pub-rock? He isn't. "Mistress Mabel is absolutely the worst lyrics I've ever written. I'd had the song for ages and just couldn't think of lyrics that meant anything to me."
Later, the Fratellis provoke the same reaction from their Dutch audience as they would from a British crowd: it's all unbridled dancing, singalongs and a sweaty sense of fraternity. The band's manager, Tony McGill, watches with me. Chelsea Dagger, of course, spurs the place into a frenzy of churning hands and feet, and McGill is shouting. It's hard to hear him, but he's saying something about the tune having been used as the theme to a Dutch TV show. Which seems about right. Pop like this is universal, and the Fratellis have earned their place in the pantheon of British groups who move crowds by hitting them with songs that they'll be singing all the way home.
· Here We Stand is out now. The Fratellis play the Glastonbury Pyramid stage tonight
See Also
