"Here's a message for the children of England. Stay in school, don't have babies at an early age, and lighten up a bit, okay?" So says Peter Zaremba, one of five Fleshtones. (Bill Milhizer, Keith Streng, Jan Marek Pakulski and Gordon Spaeth are the other four.) They're congregated, haphazardly, around a beach umbrella outside the Tropicana motel, three yards from the newly-painted pool, ten yards from the newly-risen fellow visitors G.B.H., and looking like flood victims re-enacting a Martini commercial. It's morning, it's sunny, it's Hollywood. What do you expect?

"I don't care whether they buy our records or not," Peter continues, "because we're still going to make them, and they're going to be exactly the way we want them to be. And if you can't dig that, then - what's that line?" he ask no-one in particular, other than Bill, the man with the comic book hero (eat your heart out Duran Duran) chin, the others have dozed off in the heat like pensioners on a patio.

"I'm me. you're you. I'm me. What is it?"

'I'm in you. You're in me?' One of Frampton's finer observations?

"No. What I mean is we're just a rock and roll band. We're just trying to brighten people's lives a little bit. We're just trying to have some fun. Another message - to the British press. Why pick on us? You have Supertramp, you have Styx, go after the big boys! Leave the poor little Fleshtones alone! We're just trying to make a few people happy. I'm just trying to make my mum proud of me. That's all."

"And meanwhile," continues Bill, "there's a cadre of journalists who have to see this in terms of world-shattering news, the most important thing in the world, and it isn't. We're just playing rock and roll music - and everything gets blown out of proportion in the headlines in relation to what you're really doing, which gives it a real importance. And it's not important. Except to the fun-minded and the thrill-seekers and the teeny-boppers on the Strip."

And the French. Let's not forget (however much we'd like to) the French. In France, the Fleshtones - like the Gun Club, another bunch of American boys - get cover stories in rock mags, showings in the critics' polls and all the French pastries they can eat.

"They're beautiful people in France," say Bill. "They've got a bum rap in this country. Most Americans are Anglophiles."

"I think," say Peter, "they like very immediate, more driving sort of thing, honest music, and because they usually can't understand the lyrics anyway they're going straight for the emotion of the music, as if the vocals were just a sound. Whereas I think to a large degree an American audience and a British audience is very much into the style of what is being said."

Whatever, far be it from me to be daft enough to imply for a moment that the Frogs are wiser than the British in any respect (food excluded) but their appreciation of the Fleshtones isn't misguided. While there have been heathens in the British press (this mag included) that haven't exactly organised ticker tape parades when the Fleshtones release a record, and that are probably yawning ostentatiously at the news that they're coming to Britain this month on the way to the Continent, the Fleshtones have continued making music and making merry with mongrel American rock - everything from surf to psychedelia to dance-pop to funk to creole to rock and roll - which is crude and raucous and nifty and clever.

Onstage it's even more maniacal, the band conducting themselves with all the calm of self-consciousness of five men being butt-prod by a dozen wild baboons.

"We decided," says Peter, "to call this the Super Rock Hexbreaker Happening. And I think a Super Rock Hexbreaker Happening is a lot more fun than a Serious Moonlight Tour, if you ask me. Rock and roll is a serious art form - is that what they're trying say? Is it supposed to point out everything that's wrong with the world, to remind us if we're unhappy and make us reflect on it constantly?"

"It's supposed," says Bill, "to be for fun."

A BRIEF FOOTNOTE. We're not necessarily talking mindless go-go fun. One of the things I like about the Fleshtones is the sombre undertones.

"Actually we're all sort of sombre one minute and happy the next"; "Everybody in the band has vicious mood swings," say various Fleshtones. Someone murmurs something about suicidal depression. I point out the nearby pool, perfect Hollywood suicide tool. They decline.

"The world needs us. We're not ready to do ourselves in yet."

As you've probably gathered, they don't fit the archetypal picture of the chic, sophisticated new York band - that being where they come from, though you wouldn't think it these days with the amount of time they spend in L.A.

"We like it out here. We're 3,000 miles from New York, 6,000 miles from Europe, on the very edge of Western Civilisation, if you could even call it that."

"We've never been heavily identified with being a New York band anyhow - egghead guys and girls ugly haircuts and some guy who's really skinny and wears glasses and plays an out of tune guitar. I like that stuff actually," says Peter, "but I don't think we've ever been identified with the New York scene really. Do you think so? Or are we more like some guys from America in general?" Looks that way to me. "We represent," says Bill, "American rock and roll at large. Whole thing." Keith perks up with: "We're an American band."

They got together in New York way back in '75. Jan Marek was inoculating chickens in Maine when he visited his pal Keith in New York. They went for a drink with Gordon and Peter (Bill enters the picture later, so he wasn't along) and within an hour, the chicken-shooter decided to move to the big city.

They shared a house and learned to play instruments. They shared a basement with the Cramps who kicked them out for making too much noise. They played gigs at a Polish church with the Zantees and Nervus Rex. Alan Vega, ex-Suicide, discovered them and declared them the Next Big Thing.

He got them a deal with Marty Thau's short-lived Red Star label, which they gave up to become construction men. They turned down Sky Saxon who asked them to form the New Seeds, but they accepted a spot on the first American new wave festival in 1979, a record contract with IRS in 1980, and roles in a couple of movies, Marty Thau's and David Johansen's Soul City and Urgh! A Music War.

Ah yes. The new wave festival. Are they ashamed - what with new wave coming down to ageing women with fishbowls on their breasts and young boys with cheekbones - of having done that?

"No, because I think there's a certain amount of bands that really started something very fresh, kicking life back into what everybody said was definitely dead, or certainly seemed dead when you had people like Queen running around and guys with long bouffant hairdos."

"At least," adds Bill, "there's better bands now than there were ten years ago. I'd rather listen to Duran Duran than Queen."

Funny how America's picked up on old British new wave though, instead of making bands like the Fleshtones big stars. It can't be because they don't make videos - they do; good ones; one of them has been playing in childrens' film festivals across the country for years. Why then?

"They do like to see what's popular in Britain, what might be the new Beatles or Billy J Kramer or the new Queen. I saw them once, Queen. I couldn't believe his bucked teeth! Is he Moroccan, Freddie Mercury, or a half-breed Algerian-Libyan or something?"

I think he comes from somewhere beginning with P. Peru?

"Persia? Polivia? He isn't Polish. Anyway we're not here to give him any more free publicity. I prefer ZZ Top..."

Talking of ZZ Top makes me think of platinum albums which is what the Fleshtones told me their next album (i.e. this album), so infectious was it to be, would become. So what happened?

"They have to hear it first unfortunately, and we're not being played on the radio. When people hear our record, they like it. It's kind of like Ovaltine or Marmite or something; once you try it you like it. It just takes some listening to us to like us. Our music makes you feel good. And I think that makes us candidates for being very popular."

"We're selling more records than we used to," says Peter. "Of course we're trying to be more popular. Nobody likes to be despised, hated, hounded from town to town, playing a string of small, dark clubs that smell of stale beer and broken dreams."

"We do want a lot of people to hear our records," says Bill. "But as far as motivation, the band has been together for eight years and there was a time when there weren't even that many records out, and I for one am very happy to be going around playing different parts of the country and the world, because most people don't even get to do that. It's fun playing rock and roll."

IT'S APPROACHING three in the afternoon, time for a break to go and see a Kung Fu movie on the hotel TV. But a quick closing thought from the band.

"I want to say if you come to the show, you'll really see why we do what we do and why we enjoy it and intend to keep on doing it." But I have seen the show; dozens of times.