American hoopla

The Datsuns are in the United States promoting their fourth album Headstunts — the first time the band has been in the country since touring with the Pixies in 2004. When The Datsuns blasted out of their tiny antipodean town of Cambridge, they weren’t prepared for the world’s reaction writes the San Francisco Examiner’s Tom Lanham. “We went from literally playing in people’s basements to all this hoopla,” says bandleader Dolf DeBorst, 30, who soon found himself on NME covers as poster boy for rock’s new Strokes/White Stripes revolution. “We were kind of naive to all these things that went around the periphery of making music. But thanks to all the press and publicity we got in the beginning, people thought we were much bigger than we were, because we never really sold a lot of records,” he says. So they decided to experiment with their sophomore effort, and recruited Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones to produce “Outta Sight, Outta Mind.” The title proved prophetic. The group plays the main stage at Belgium’s Rock Wauberg Festival on July 25.