Joy Zipper: It's a yin-yang thing

Joy Zipper are a couple in love singing about passion and psychedelic memories. Sounds romantic? It is, discovers Kevin Harley

Ask Tabitha Tindale and Vinny Cafiso, the boy-girl duo of Joy Zipper, how they met and it soon becomes apparent that 31 October is a special date for them. "He was playing guitar in a Long Island band, at a battle-of-the-bands contest," says Tindale. "My friend dragged me down, and I was like, 'I don't want to see some cheesy Long Island band', y'know? But they were good, and I noticed him and I thought, 'Hmm, OK, this isn't so bad ... ' And then we met and today's our anniversary." "Yep," Cafiso says. "Hallowe'en."

It is perfect, really, that love should strike them on the night when the dead are abroad and children wear daft costumes: Joy Zipper (named after Tindale's remarried mother - no lewdery intended) are all about two contrasting halves of a whole - trick and treat, light and shade. Tindale is the blonde, gregarious, quick-talking Wasp to Cafiso's quietly laid-back Italian-American. It'd be corny to say they complete each other, but they do complete each other's sentences, at least.

Their music is also a thing of dynamic contrasts and pleasing tensions. Part heat-haze New York and part sunstruck Cali-pop, its bright-eyed, boy-girl harmonies glide over a wash of woozy guitars to hypnotic effect, with lyrics that range from "I love you more than a thousand Christmases" to songs about Alzheimers, stagnation and the curve balls of co-dependency.

They were a couple before they were a band. Initially, Tindale managed Cafiso's band for a while. When his band split up, she talked him into going soloand making four-track recordings, so that he could sing as well as play guitar. "He'd say to me, 'Could you try singing this?' " Tindale says. "I'd be like, 'OK!' He kind of roped me in."

It isn't hard to notch up their reference points (Beach Boys via the Velvets, Dandy Warhols, Galaxie 500 and My Bloody Valentine), but it's the can't-fake-it dynamic that comes from being together for 10 years that helps distinguish Joy Zipper. It stood them in good stead this year, too, because 2003 hasn't been great for them. After a début album of eight-track demos in 1999, their second album, American Whip, garnered them much gushing press. Sadly, though, Whip was shelved on the eve of its February 2003 release when their label, the Belfast DJ David Holmes's 13 Amp, lost its distribution deal with Ministry of Sound after the dance titan axed some of its joint ventures.

But they're not a band to be knocked back. Instead, they bashed out a mini-album called The Stereo and God in 10 days, as an interim measure before Whip finally comes out in February (13 Amp having inked a deal with Mercury). It's sharp and spiky-sweet where Whip is languorous and a little luxurious, shows why Cafiso and Tindale were getting such excitable press early this year. "It felt good just to do an album and not worry about every note," Cafiso says. "We wanted to go in and just be like, right, go, do it in a week."

By contrast, American Whip (no lewdery there, either - the title comes from an ice-cream van) was an involved process, recorded in New York and Glasgow, and mixed in London. Its cast of contributors was estimable, too, with Scottish producer Tony Doogan helping out on strings, sometime Beck/REM collaborator Joey Waronker on drums, Holmes producing, and My Bloody Valentine mainman-cum-sonic perfectionist Kevin Shields producing one song and sitting in on the sessions.

But they were there to help out, not shape. It wasn't even Shields' fabled perfectionism that made Whip a slow burner. "We have definite ideas about our songs," Cafiso nods, "so we don't need someone to tell us what to do with them. We just need help technologically. Kevin came round when we were mixing the album, and he was great at keeping our standard up. He works like we would at home, where I'd do a version of a song 10 or 15 times. He'd say, 'Don't listen to what anybody says, don't listen to the label ...' "

"He even said, 'Don't listen to me'," Tindale adds. "It's a confidence people like him have, that they don't feel a need to put a stamp on it."

The album's druggy sheen, too, isn't a case of the MBV leader lacing Whip with something psychedelic. Songs such as "Drugs" (sole lyric: "Getting me into - drugs! Turning me on to - drugs!") and the Zipper's hymn to hallucinogenics, "Dosed and Became Invisible", echo Cafiso's dabblings and extend the duo's own romantic ideas about creativity. "I was trying LSD and mushrooms when I was 18," he says, "and it helped the music. It opens up your mind; everything you've thought gets wiped away and you have to think up new ways of doing stuff." "It's not that we actually do lots of drugs," Tindale chips in. "It's just about the idea of there being something supernatural outside of yourself that can open you up."

Tindale's thoughts on whether or not Whip will make its release date this time are no less romantic. "You know what? I don't worry about that kind of stuff. We've finished it, so we're happy. That's the reward for us - it's done and we like it. People still make jokes about 'Oh, it's not going to come out' and stuff, but I have a lot of faith.

"Anyway, the promos have been selling on eBay for the last year," she laughs. "And I don't even know where they're coming from, because I don't have any left." It's a self-contained world that Joy Zipper inhabits, but while it works so well, the word will get out somehow.

'The Stereo and God' is out now, 'American Whip' will be released in February 2004, both on 13 Amp/Mercury