Rory O'Keefe, the small but perfectly-cheekboned singer with Dublin band The Ultra Montanes, stares down into his cafe latte and ponders the question for a few seconds. Then he lifts his dyed blonde head, smiles and gives his answer: "New York, 1965." The question was this: If you could be whisked back to any place and time in pop history, which one would you pick? O'Keefe chooses the birth of The Velvet Underground as his magic pop moment, not surprising when you realise that The Ultra Montanes treasure the same trash aesthetics which Andy Warhol and his ilk celebrated in music and art. "The Factory was up and running at its original locale," the 27-year-old singer reminisces, as though he'd been born then, "and people hadn't started wearing silly clothes yet. Pre-psychedelic New York would be perfect."
O'Keefe doesn't stop there though. "Then I'd take a holiday and go and live in Paris in the late 1960s." Paris? Why Paris, I wonder, unable to recall any seminal pop moment from the French capital circa 1969, bar the release of Je T'Aime. To hang out with Serge Gainsbourg, perhaps? "No, I'd riot," says O'Keefe. "I'd get indulgent round the Latin Quarter and have my brief political thing. Because when everybody else was wearing flowers they were all wearing motorbike helmets and bandanas round their mouths." For O'Keefe, fashion is a political statement, and he wears his glam-punk gear like a gaudy manifesto, a flag of rebellion against Dublin's lumpen leather-jacket rock tyranny. Unlike their Oasis-guzzling rivals on the capital's live scene, The Ultra Montanes are a quiet riot of style and attitude, and their leader is the Thin White Droog, an alien pop tart who can assimilate elements of Bowie, Iggy Pop, Blondie and Bryan Ferry in one androgynous package. You'd never catch O'Keefe landing his tardis anywhere near Manchester. We continue the time travel game, and find ourselves in Berlin during the early 1970s, then back in New York during the late 1970s, "because that's when it was really cool". Strangely, Rory would give London during the punk explosion a wide berth. "I'd wait and catch The Sex Pistols in Texas and watch them getting battered by cowboys. I love the Pistols, but back then I'd have thought, they're just the f***ing New York Dolls with a different haircut."
Our last stop is Tangiers in the 1980s, where, bloated and blotto on prescription drugs, we'd hang out with William Burroughs. Then it's back to the real world, the south Dublin suburb of Shankill to be precise, where O'Keefe formed his first band at the tender age of 16. Middle-class suburbs, reckons O'Keefe, are where all the great rock 'n' roll bands are spawned, and no-one, not even U2, can hide their middle-class origins behind the nearest handy tower block.
"No musicians ever grew up in the hood," claims O'Keefe. "All musicians grew up in the suburbs and then moved to the hood. All bands, no matter where they grew up, are all middle-class, because if you choose to do something as indulgent and pseudo-intellectual as being in a band, no matter whether you're Oasis or Patti Smith, or whether you're Boyzone, you're middle-class. That's the whole process of being in a band - if you're doing it for the right reasons, it's a romanticism, a complete ideological, romantic belief in what being in a rock 'n' roll band is all about. It's about desperately trying to escape mediocrity. I know it's an awful cliche, but it's the reality of most people's lives."
For more deep thoughts on this shallow subject, refer to Suburbs, the closing track on The Ultra Montanes' debut album, which gives voice to the primal desire to break out of the suburbs: All you wanted was for them to remember your name/ All you wanted was to leave the suburbs in flames. But, I argue, doesn't middle-class mean something more these days? Isn't it less about blandness and more about designer labels, dinner-parties and clever lifestyle choices? "Ah, that would be the Celtic Tigress," laughs O'Keefe. "But I still believe that the fundamentals are exactly the same. That people want one-and-a-half cars, two-and-a-half kids, a reasonably comfortable house with a moderate mortgage, and a job that they're secure in. And I'm not knocking that at all, I think it's a totally healthy aspiration. I don't think that most people want the bay trees outside the front door, and their feng shui living-rooms, and their espresso machines. Most people aren't interested in that. They're interested in making it home in time for their soap operas every night. All the rest is just window-dressing."
Listen to O'Keefe wax lyrical on Irish social mores, and you'd almost believe he really was an alien sent down to observe our species and report back to his home planet.
"The way we write our music and our lyrics is quite voyeuristic. It's almost like a diary based on the experiences we've watched going on around us. If we were to sit in our flats all the time, the style of the music would be totally different. We need to be out there every night of the week, making sure that if something happens we'll be there to report it."
Hence you're likely to spot The Ultra Montanes at fashion shows, art openings and other social events around town, where the beautiful people shine and the ligging is easy. You'll also find them in the darker recesses of RiRa or the Da Club, either performing onstage in front of a small but clued-in crowd, or huddling with other trashy types in a cloud of Marlboro smoke. OK, it's not exactly Andy Warhol at the 54 Club, but it's close.
We're joined by the Ultra Montanes' guitarist Ray Boyle, whose easygoing demeanour belies his buzzsaw riff technique. He might be the Mick Ronson to O'Keefe's Bowie, but Rory doesn't see it that way. "We're more like Richard and Karen Carpenter."
The other two Montanes are drummer Connolly Heron and bassist Pat Thorpe. The band have been together a tad longer than is respectable for wannabe popsters in search of 15 minutes of fame, but the name has been around for almost a millennium. The original Ultramontanes, O'Keefe told me one night in Lillie's Bordello, were an 11th-century ecclesiastical movement which favoured the centralisation of Papal authority. The things people talk about in nightclubs. But there's no underlying religious reason for choosing the name - O'Keefe just thought it sounded cool. Early sightings of the Montanes Mk II were at various tiny venues around Dublin, usually as the support act, or playing at parties organised by their funky friends. Since then the band have gigged and ligged exhaustively, released such wired-up singles as Any- way, Late and Weird Turn Pro, and established a beach-head on the London scene. The new single, Ageing Starlet, is a short-circuit of punk guitars, glam narcissism and pure rock 'n' roll energy, and the debut album on Lakota Records wastes no space on guitar solos or noodly codas; all 10 songs are sharp, effervescent bursts of stripped-down pop. Don't be fooled by the sleazy surface, though - it's not all sex and drugs and screwed-up cats with screwed-down hairdos.
"That would be much too easy," says O'Keefe. "Nobody's that simplistic a character. I don't endorse this idea of encouraging the f***ed-up, the teenager who reads William Burroughs and decides that, unless I do 30 hits of acid a night and get a smack habit by the time I'm 20, then I'm not an interesting person." That's rubbish, he says, "and it's dangerous, and a lot of people do encourage it. I think we're more about isolating your demons, walking into the room with a flashlight, grabbing them by the scruff of the neck and going, I know you exist, but I'm in charge, so f*** off over there while I get on with my life. We're saying to people, go on, get up, get the f*** away from the television, come on out. I know you're paranoid and you get panic attacks but it's fine. It's about romance and adventure. Any band that denies that, whether you're Patti Smith or Noel Gallagher, if you're doing it for the right reasons, you're thriving on that sense of passion - a little bit of risk, but also with the support of your gang. It's a very communal thing: individually, we'd probably just float around, but as a group of four people, we have a strength."
It's not the sham strength of laddism, either, which keeps The Ultra Montanes together. For O'Keefe and his merry misfits, it's not about ego-tripping, testosterone and acting like rock 'n' roll animals - it's about glamour, self-worth and not denying your feminine side. It's about facing your fears and wiping them out with a swish of the mascara brush. There's no room in the Montanes' world for hype, imaginary six-album deals or earnestly trying to play the tortured Thom Yorke. And there's no truck with the Celtic Tiger either: O'Keefe is adamant the band won't use their Irishness as insulation against the outside world.
"Our thing was not to be an Irish band, but to be kind of "a-national", as much at home in New York or Paris or London as we are in Dublin, but without denying who we are or where we're from. There are certain international truths about being young human beings in what is a really accelerated society. And there's a lot of really scary stuff out there. And either you cover yourself in cotton wool and make yourself safe around it, or you build a different sort of armour and you go out and immerse yourself in it. And come through the next morning, wake up and go, I survived that, there were no scars and that was easy."