"We meant gay in the Shakespearean way, but here you are so serious about it. Whatever I see on TV in Australia is like gay parading. I've seen three gay parades in the ten minutes we've been sitting here. It's very scary."

Hank Von Helvete is surprisingly chipper on the eve of the maiden Australian Turbonegro performance. The hirsute singer is joined by bassist Happy Tom who is equally glad to chat over a drink at The Embassy Hotel on North Terrace. Dressed in civilian clothes and free of their trademark double denim and make up, Von Helvete and Tom just look like a couple of hairy, sleepless American truckers: Hank with a Dickies garage shirt and low slung jeans and Tom with his trucker hat and streaked mane. Von Helvete also has the biggest green eyes I have ever seen. I struggle to picture him as the dark lord that struts on stage twirling his sceptre and swooshing his cape.

Having arrived in the country just hours earlier, Von Helvete is keen to share his first experiences and thoughts on our country. "Well you know, I've been scared ever since we landed here because I saw like, poison spiders, snakes, sharks, and that was just the video to help me fill out the immigration form. They had to drag me off the plane kicking and screaming."

I thought that the Norwegians would meet me in their hotel room, dressed up and looking pretty, but Tom assures me that they are not like Kiss when it comes to make up. "We don't care. We might as well go without it."

"But you know, they take us for what we are even without the make up," Von Helvete adds. We were in San Francisco and Happy Tom got kind of lost. He went a couple of blocks the wrong way. It was a dirty area in San Francisco. And suddenly this boy girl came screaming at him, he was standing on the corner. 'You fucking punk! Get the fuck outta here!' and then he realised he was standing on their corner. And that was without make up. He was proud as a peacock the rest of the day." Tom smiles. "It thought I was a gay prostitute."

As for the Turbojugend, the band's legion of denim-clad tattooed fans, Tom clarifies that, "They're more like evil, and subtle. Kissarmy is just a fan club. Turbojugend is a huge navy." On the topic of fan clubs, Tom adds, "That was what got you laid in the 'seventies, what kind of fan club colours you were."

I ponder the possibility of Turbonegro getting played in karaoke bars in Japan to which Tom replies, "I'm sure there is. We have a small following there. But Turbonegro is one western pop cultural thing they just can't grasp. There's just too much info for them. They just want the look. Definitely very superficial."

In all honesty I didn't know what to expect from these two death punks. What I got were two warm and fiercely intelligent men who just happen to like talking dirty every once in a while. When asked what Turbonegro would be like if they were an all girl band, Tom quips, "We'd just be brilliant. We'd have really large breasts compared to girls in bands these days." On the subject of girls, Von Helvete muses "The thing in Scandinavia is, the girls that aren't that good looking, they never get laid in Scandinavia so they come either here, or to Greece." "But we've exported a lot of grade-A pussy, man. That and oil," says Tom in between sniggers.

Looking around the comfortable surroundings of The Embassy bar, I ask the guys what sort of bars they like to hang out in. Before meeting them I would have guessed some place like The Blue Oyster Bar. "Nah, hotel bars. Like mellow hotel bars with two or three business travellers and their call girls and a very good bartender who is totally focussed on us. I hang around in bars," Von Helvete answers before starting to sing in an off-key lounge style. "We always check out the scenester bars but they are very much the same wherever you go. Very pretentious and very heavily policed. We get fed up with that after a while."

But Von Helvete knows very well of the aforementioned type of bars, sharing, "Actually, a very famous Norwegian gay writer was writing about that bar scene that was happening in New York and San Francisco in the late 'seventies, early 'eighties. It was a big spreading ground for AIDS. That was when they had a lot of experimental sex like felching, hardcore, fist fucking, skull fucking, and stuff like that. Those leather boys were very hardcore. They need help."

I assumed the boys would be familiar with the term glory hole. "Ah! So that's what that hole was between our rooms, Tom?"

Lenin Simos