Three years ago Virgin records had the novel idea of importing a Mexican pop band. Titan were a wacky bunch. Their posters proclaimed a cross between "Public Enemy, Chick Corea, jalapenos and David Sole [sic]", while their early UK gigs were a riot of glinting eyes, Sol beer, frazzled funk jams and the occasional sombrero. Titan could hardly have been more Mexican if they had ridden in on horses. Critics raved, and when their uplifting Corazon chant appeared on a Rolling Rock advert, it seemed Titan couldn't fail. However, the UK's unreadiness for Mexican sounds was summed up by their appearance in a near-empty tent at the 2000 Reading festival.
Since then, the UK industry has viewed the prospects of Mexican pop acts as one might consider the notion of setting up a chip shop in Tijuana. But now one label, London, has woken to the smell of guacamole and brought us Monterrey five-piece Kinky. And this time, things are very different. Where Titan were stars only in their homeland, Kinky have already achieved success around the world, especially in the US. The band are up for the Short List Music Project award (the US equivalent of the Mercury), four MTV Latin-music awards, a Grammy for best Latin/alternative album and, perhaps most bizarrely, a Latin Grammy for "best rock album", even though their music has about as much to do with rock as Jack Daniel's has to do with mescaline. Most curiously, perhaps, Kinky are succeeding because, unlike Titan, they don't sound particularly Mexican at all.
This whole exercise is drenched in irony. For years, British acts have chased the Latin groove, donning desert shorts and attending classes in Latin-American percussion. Among them were Mancunian existentialists A Certain Ratio, appalling cabaret-pop act Modern Romance (remember Everybody Salsa and tremble), even Haircut 100. Now, it appears that the trick is to go the other way round. Clearly, Kinky have grown up in awe of British and American club sounds, thinking that Manchester's Hacienda - rather than a bona-fide hacienda - is the centre of the pop world. Kinky's debut reeks not of refried beans, but of the Chemical Brothers and Underworld, early acid house, 1970s American funk, the first Basement Jaxx album and even the jazz funk/fusion stuff that British law enforcers long since ran out of the country.
Latin acts have chased pop's beat before - from Madonna to Gloria Estefan - but these have generally been song-based acts. Kinky are about grooves. However, they haven't entirely been able to escape their homeland. South American sights and sounds seep in - carnival vibes, siestas, sundowns and brassy, tequila-slammin' music. Old-skool Tito Puente percussion explosions are filtered through house and disco on tracks with English and Mexican names such as Noche de Toxinas (about the toxicity of nightclubbing), Anorexic Freaks (presumably about the same nightclubs' occupants) and Sol. The result is hardly radical, but different enough to make Kinky's groove global while maintaining Latin as the most danceable music ever.
This is clever. In fact, you suspect a fiendish evil svengali is behind the entire exercise. Singer/guitarist/scratcher Gil Cerezo is surely too young and squeaky-looking to be a pop Dr No, and the band comprises engineers and architecture students. Thus, suspicion falls on the definitely non-Mexican Chris Allison, producer of the Beta Band and Coldplay, who apparently discovered Kinky while he was working with Monterrey's other most celebrated band, hip-hop duo Plastilina Mosh. Allison has smoothed the music's demented edges into a dancefloor sound that, with possibly suppressed smirks, the band are already dubbing "Decks Mex".
Shrewdly - or perhaps because he hadn't a clue what they were going on about - Allison has left the band's surreal Mexican lyrical vision untainted. We are reliably informed that singer Gil reads Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and that the sultry, shimmering San Antonio is a song about a local saint who, when hung upside down, helps women catch boyfriends. Cornman seems to include the line "Incense! Incense!" but is about an acrobatic corn-seller who does backflips for his customers.
Elsewhere, there are Parliament basslines, Moogs, timbales, more whistles than in the entire British police force and Sambita sounds that are curiously like Wham! tunes. Voyeuristic consumers will be disappointed to learn that, computer-generated nudes on the inner sleeve aside, there's nothing kinky about Kinky. That won't stop their sun-kissed carnival-goes-club fiesta soundtracking Britain's iciest months. By any standards, that's perverse.
