TWO 4 EVER
Jess Origliasso is the evil twin. Sort of. She is one minute older than her identical sister, Lisa, and has the most tattoos, the most piercings and the most attitude.
The Brisbane-born Origliassos are the singers and songwriters behind the shrill, sassy, explosively successful teeny-punk band the Veronicas.
Their first album, The Secret Life of the Veronicas, has sold more than 280,000 copies in Australia. If you see a schoolgirl wearing a pirate bandanna, hot pants over black stockings, and eye-liner as thick as crayon marks, she is probably a Veronica in her dreams.
There are cows grazing outside the offices of Warner Music, Zurich, Switzerland, as the Origliassos try to explain to the ruminant local media how to tell them apart.
"I'm the evil twin," says Jess. "Well, not evil, just naughty."
Clumsily sincere Swiss journalists, modelling fondue-pot haircuts and sensible sweaters, carefully mangle their questions.
"If a boy falls in love with one of you," begins Silvan Gertsch, representing "different newspapers and magazines", "does he ..."
"They always do, yes," says Lisa.
"... and maybe you fall in love with one of them as well?" Gertsch continues. "Has it ever happened that ...?"
"It has," says Lisa.
"... that he confused something?"
"A guy who Jess was with once went to kiss me," says Lisa, "but when he found it was me he looked horrified, and I was a bit offended."
"That's good," says Gertsch cryptically.
"Boys say, 'I want to go out with one of the twins,' " says Jess. "We're, like, 'Cool, which one?' and they say, 'I don't care. Either one.' "
The girls continually manage to look excited and flirtatious, even though they flew in from Los Angeles the night before, and have spent all day deciphering enigmatic inquiries such as, "Do your musician boys sometimes make a mess of your names?"
They are in Switzerland with two of their musician boys, guitarists Rob Guariglia and George Bezerra. Guariglia, who is also a record producer, spends the interviews mixing another band's basslines on his laptop.
"We used to play a lot of tricks on boys on the telephone," says Jess. "If Lisa was too scared to ring a boy, I'd ring him. One time she got bored of speaking to her boyfriend on the phone, so I took the phone and talked to him for about half an hour."
"We were, like, 13," says Lisa.
"It was six months ago," says Guariglia.
"Do you believe in God, or something?" asks Gertsch, suddenly on behalf of a Christian teen magazine.
"I'm a Wiccan," says Jess, evilly.
"What's that?" asks Lisa.
"A witch."
The girls laugh.
"Just kidding," says Jess. "I believe that crocodiles are Jesus." (The Origliassos are ambassadors for Steve Irwin's Wildlife Warriors, and Jess is wearing a "Crocs Rule!" badge.)
Lisa quickly takes charge, and says the twins think there is a God, but don't think anyone should tell other people what to believe.
"Wishes and dreams?" asks Ralph Ziegler, from a children's radio station.
"I wish for world peace," says Jess.
"I have a dream to marry Johnny Depp," says Lisa.
The difference in time zones is squeezing the life out of the girls. While Lisa takes a phone call from a French-language newspaper, Jess falls asleep on the lounge.
"Are we perfect twins?" repeats Lisa, echoing a distant reporter. "Well, I think we're perfect."
You don't have to be particularly evil to be the more malevolent Origliasso. Both twins are unnaturally, ingratiatingly, unfeasibly nice. I spend two days with them on their promotional tour of Zurich, and they describe everyone they meet as at least "cool", often "rad" and usually "awesome", even behind their backs.
They are successful, and they appeal to pre-teens. Their deal with Warner Music is believed to be worth more than $2 million. The Origliassos are 21, they're cute and they're hyped and they're girls. So they must be crap, right?
The record companies have earned our cynicism. They have turned too many actors who can't act into singers who can't sing; made too many interchangeable Popstars and Idols out of performers who are neither pop stars nor idols. In five years' time, Guy Sebastian could be playing in a Casey Donovan tribute band, and vice versa. Pop has eaten itself, harvested its own organs and sold them to survive. Today, it is functioning on one kidney and one lung, no heart and no soul.
"I wasn't particularly interested in getting involved," says the Veronicas' US manager, David Sonenberg. "They were described to me as 'twins from Brisbane', and I was thinking it was maybe kind of a novelty type of act. I thought it was an act, not an artist."
But the Veronicas write their own songs, and they write songs for other people: clay-footed idols such as Casey Donovan (What's Going On?) and even indie act the Sleepy Jackson.
The Origliassos had a publishing deal when they were 18, before they had a record deal, and it doesn't matter to anyone if songwriters are twins, or cute, or born on December 25, which the Origliassos were. ("They were seven weeks early," says their mother, Colleen, "so it was a special Christmas present. I wasn't real impressed at the time, mind you. I was in hospital by 9am, so I missed the whole of Christmas Day.")
Their surname is Sicilian, but the children were born on acreage just outside Brisbane and grew up in the northern suburbs, at Albany Creek. Their father, Joseph, owned or ran a succession of shops, and played in a local covers band, Purple Haze.
From the age of three, the twins would be "singing and dancing around the house", says Lisa. "Before dinner, me and Jess would make Mum and Dad - and anyone else who was around the house - sit down and watch us act out Cinderella or something.
"They probably just got sick of it," says Lisa, which is why their parents sent them to singing, dancing and theatre lessons. "But I'm glad they did."
They changed schools often.
"Schoolwork wasn't exactly our favourite thing," says Lisa, "so we never really cared too much. We always knew we wanted to be singers and performers."
Like their father, they sang hit songs in Queensland clubs. They won talent quests, played musical theatre and corporate gigs, and absorbed genre after genre, soaking up influences from AC/DC to Jesus Christ Superstar.
They skipped their final year exams. "We stopped bringing books to school," says Jess. "We used to write songs in class, and pass them to each other instead. We didn't graduate from Year 12, but we got to go to our prom."
They signed to Sydney independent production company Engine Room, whose big idea was to bypass the cash-poor Australian music industry and sell acts directly to the US majors. The twins came to the offices of Engine Room's Andrew Klippel in 2003 and sang a couple of their own songs, with Jess on acoustic guitar.
That is the Origliassos' real gimmick. Stripped of backing musicians or any kind of technical support, the twins still sound as full as a six-piece band. Their cascading natural harmonics, and the casually complicated balance of their voices, build a wall of song.
They might be marketed as vigorously as a new line of Diet Coke but, in a musical sense, they're real. "There's no enhancements or pitch shifting, or any of these things you can do on a technical level to make people sing in tune," says Klippel. "They go against the grain of a lot of pop culture, where you've got to have huge tits and be seriously glamorous."
Engine Room paid for the girls to travel through the US and Europe in 2004, writing songs with composers such as Billy Steinberg, who co-wrote Like a Virgin for Madonna, and Max Martin, author of the Britney Spears hit Baby One More Time.
At the end of the year, the Origliassos had 50 songs and a name, taken from the bug-eyed brunette in Archie comics. They hawked their new material around American boardrooms - playing, as usual, live and unplugged. Klippel sold their recording contract to Sire, a division of Warner Music, and signed over their international management to Sonenberg.
Internationally, however, things have not gone to plan. Although the Veronicas are signed to Warner Music in the US, rather than its Australian operation, and although they were primed for international success, and although their first single, 4ever, rose to No 2 in the local charts, it only reached 91 in the US.
Warner Music Australia's CEO, Ed St John, says this is partly his fault. He says he knew from the start the band would be huge in Australia. "The danger for us was that they'd work America first, and we wouldn't get access to them for six or nine months."
He promised the parent company the Veronicas could sell 300,000 records in Australia if they let him break the band immediately. "Before the record was even out," he says, "we got them to come to Australia and do a round of all the radio stations and journalists, to make those people feel that these were local girls. I wanted Australian radio to think of them as their little mates, not just some foreign band that blows in and out.
"They have been back seven times in the last 12 months. And they're back again for the ARIA awards [they're nominated for highest-selling album, best pop release and best breakthrough album]. And we've sold 280,000 copies, and we're narrowing in on our 300,000th record.
"Basically, the plan worked brilliantly," says St John. "But we hogged the girls' time, so they kind of put off launching the project in other countries. They've struggled a bit to break the band in America, and they're only now getting some traction in Europe."
At their Australian gigs, hundreds of girls turn up dressed from their bangles to their boots like the Origliassos.
"It's like a Veronicas-fest," says Klippel.
"I've never quite experienced anything like that," says Sonenberg, who managed Meat Loaf during his Bat Out of Hell period, when the big guy was selling almost as many millions of T-shirts as records. "In terms of merchandise, the dollar figures they have generated in their recent tours of Australia are twice the figures of any act that I've ever had."
On average, the members of the audience were spending $10 a head on Veronicas gear.
But only in Australia. To justify Warner's investment, the girls have to conquer the world. In the not-very-Zen business of pop, the first step to conquest is compromise.
"I think they would have preferred to have an entire album of their own songs," says St John. "When they went into the Hollywood hit machine, there was a bit of pressure to have a couple of other people's songs on the record. When you put in that sort of money, with American labels in particular - how can I put this politely? - it's not about letting the artists express their inner feelings, it's about making sure you've got a f...ing hit record."
As Engine Room introduced them to songwriters who would help revise their sound, perhaps knock off some of the rockier edges and introduce a smiley pop-dance sensibility, the girls wrote song after song about having power in relationships.
"We were going through wanting to take control of our careers and our lives," says Jess, "and that came out a lot in the music. We looked at the 50 songs we wrote at the end of the writing trip, and a good 70 to 80 per cent of them are about 'Don't try to change me, this is our life and we're taking control of it'.
"It took a little bit of people pushing us over and taking advantage of us for us to realise," says Jess. "Of course, you respect everyone's opinion, but we respected everyone else's opinions a little too much over our own. We were led very much on the first record. The songs were very much us, but things like videos, photos, the way we were seen by the public, was a little out of our control."
"You can get so caught up with the business side," says Lisa, "and it can be a little bit disheartening, because the business side of the music industry sucks. Actually, I hate it. I wish it wasn't about that."
"I've started to feel a little bit of pressure now," says Jess, "because the record's done so well in Australia and maybe not so well in some other places. We will promote anywhere. We'll do as many shows as they want. So if it fails somewhere, I don't feel like we've done it. It's more poor promotion on their part or poor marketing. I feel like in certain places they've marketed us completely wrong."
The people behind them repeatedly stress the Veronicas' credibility and integrity, but they do not always respect it.
"Over the past eight months, I've taught myself to do more screaming in the shows," says Jess, "influenced by the more hard-core music I was listening to. As soon as I started, management and the record company tried to shut it down. They said, 'You're gonna wreck your voice and, not only that, you're gonna scare your pop fans away. It's not pop music.' We taped live sessions for America Online, and I did screaming through all the songs, and they edited most of it out.
"I said, 'How could you edit it out? If I'm the artist, and I creatively want to do that, I can f...ing do that.' But live, they couldn't do shit - and live, the kids loved it. Then all of a sudden, the management said, 'Keep doing it, Jess. Just don't wreck your voice.'"
In Germany, the girls were asked to shoot an electronic press kit. "They said, 'We were thinking for one of the scenes when you're singing your song 4ever, you could maybe be in a bikini lying by a pool,' " says Jess. "Lisa and I looked at each other and went, 'Are you kidding?' We were like, 'Get out of the room before we punch you in the head.' "
Again and again, it comes up that the girls see the Veronicas as a band. It is not just Jess and Lisa, it's the two boys on guitar and the drummer and bassist back in the US. They're a rock group, not a pop act, even if they get children as young as four watching their gigs from their fathers' shoulders.
"We sit around a lot, talking about what the audience will be for a new act, imagining the target demographic," says Ed St John. "The best acts almost create their own audience where none existed. It flies in the face of all demographic science, because they carve a new niche out of the swirling mass of atoms that is the population.
"The niche that the Veronicas carved was a sort of pre-teen rock chick that was just old enough to have a bit of attitude but not old enough that they're into Foo Fighters and Wolfmother. Probably between six and 14.
"The girls are rock chicks. There's a healthy amount of rebellion in their act. And this is not manufactured, it's just the way they are. They're nice girls, but they've got rock'n'roll attitude. And I think that really appeals to a girl who's just coming out of being a child and is entering 'those difficult teenage years'.
"I'd broken two successful records in this market: one was Natalie Imbruglia, the other was Avril Lavigne. They were my models for this project: pop with a rock attitude, and great-looking girls."
In Zurich, everyone wants to know what it feels like to be compared with Lavigne. They girls say they are flattered, but that they're a band.
"Do you think this is the difference between you and Avril?" asks Gertsch.
"I guess the fact that there's two of us pretty much sets us apart from Avril," says Lisa. "We're twins from Australia. We're not one Canadian girl."
The clockwork journalists all ask what the future holds. The girls talk about a fashion label, a make-up brand and movie roles. Then, as happens sometimes, Jess says whatever comes into her head.
"We love eating food," she says. "We'd love to open a restaurant. Quite frankly, I'd love to have my own chocolate.
That'd be pretty cool."
"I reckon it could be, like, a chocolate with bits of strawberry in it," says Lisa.
"Yeah, but let's not design it right now," says Jess.
Although they fight like sisters, the twins can sometimes seem telepathic.
"I saw them in the back of the car once," says Klippel, "and one of them was thinking something, then they looked at each other and they both went, 'Mmmm ... nah.' It seemed to me that one was picking up on a thought in the other's head."
"We probably tricked him," says Lisa, "but we're very aware of each other. I know Jess well enough to know what she's thinking, but it's not some crazy, spooky thing where I can hear her voice in my head.
"When Jess is not there, I feel like I'm missing a part of myself," says Lisa.
"I usually become a completely different person, not as confident. There'd be times when Jess was sick and I would refuse to go to school. I didn't really want to do anything unless she was there with me. But Jess grew out of that more quickly than I did. She wanted to be independent, whereas I was quite comfortable and happy with being twins.
"I wondered, 'Why does she want to be so different from me?' But she was just discovering who she was.
I was hurt that she wanted space from me - because I don't mind being around her so much - but now I realise, that's just Jess. If she's around anyone too long, it's just, like, 'Go away.' It's forced me to grow up a bit too, and do my own thing."
When Jess turned 18, she began to physically distinguish herself from her sister with tattoos - seven different designs on her arms, stomach, calf and thigh. She has changed her skin so thoroughly it is hard to call the twins "identical" any more. Lisa had her nose pierced first, but Jess started to wear rings in both her nostril and lip.
"I stretched my ears for a while, too," she says. "Now if I wear earrings, they droop."
Jess and a boyfriend had the word "love" tattooed on the inside of their wrists when she was about 18. "I've always felt that Jess needed that stuff more than I did, to be her own person," says Lisa, but she had the word "fate" written in the same copperplate in the same place on her arm when she split with American singer and TV host Ryan Cabrera earlier this year.
"It's so out of character for me to do something like that," says Lisa. "But me and my boyfriend had just broken up, and I was in this whacked state."
Both Jess and her mother, Colleen, wear tattoos of swallows, "because swallows always find their way home", says Jess.
The girls never meant to be based in the US, so far from home but, once they were signed to Warner, they had to remain in Los Angeles to record The Secret Life of the Veronicas. "I just thought it was moving over to make the album," says Jess. "I didn't think we'd be staying any longer. Then it was, 'Now, you've got to do press over here.' That's another two months. And we just never left."
Jess misses Brisbane viscerally, almost palpably. "Earlier this year, I was having serious conversations with the record company and our management about moving back," she says. "I was really angry, because I wanted to go back home, but I realised it was useless."
When the girls left Australia, Lisa was going out with a Brisbane singer she had met while the twins were doing musical theatre.
"He was my first love," she says. "He was a lot older than me, but it was a huge relationship for two years, then I went over to America, and it just eventually wasn't right any more. I wasn't going back any time soon."
In Los Angeles, Lisa met Cabrera, whose previous girlfriend was Ashlee Simpson.
"It was my first relationship in the public eye," says Lisa. "If we'd go out to a club, we'd get photographed. I'd read a story about him that would be made up, and that sucked. Ashlee Simpson was constantly talked about throughout our relationship."
What was the strangest story she read? "That me and Ashlee Simpson got into a big fight over him," she says.
The two met once, at the MTV Awards, but Lisa didn't hit her.
"Jess would be more the type to do that," she says.
"We've had everything written about us," says Jess, "Even in Girlfriend magazine, I've read that Lisa and I are playing the lesbian angle. I've read that I'm pregnant - there was a photo taken of me; maybe I had my period or something and I was bloated - and the next week it was that I'm anorexic. We were anorexic, lesbians and pregnant. All in the space of about a week."
"They always mix us up, too," says Lisa. "They put the wrong caption on the photo more often than not."
Then there are the endless interviews. "We've been asked outright if we've had any sexual relationships with any of our girlfriends," says Jess. "Apparently, that's quite a common question in Germany."
Over dinner at the Renaissance Hotel, the girls look back on their interviewers with bemused affection. They order avocado sushi, because they are on detox diets, then Jess and Lisa, who have spent the day sleeping on each other, singing together, laughing in harmony and finishing each other's sentences, suddenly split into good twin and evil twin.
It is a fearfully compelling sight.
They are both unhappy about a decision made by the record company, but Jess says Lisa did not do enough to stand up to the label. If they had both stayed solid, the twins could have had their way. Jess says Lisa is weak and does not care. Lisa says people always come to her because they are too scared to speak to Jess. Jess says they should be frightened to speak to Lisa, because she is so ugly.
"Your face would scare anyone," says Jess.
"We're identical twins," says her sister. "Moron."