Didn't they do Welles!

Never mind shit eating, Jason Pebworth has a grin on his face that could consume a whole sewage-farm. You’d be chuffed too if, after seven years of slogging round the Los Angeles toilet circuit, your band had scored a surprise UK number one.

Orson were seriously thinking of calling a halt to their rock ‘n’ roll activities last summer when, courtesy of a DIY album, they bagged a slot at Tony Wilson’s In The City showcase festival in Manchester.
“The invitation to do In The City came shortly after I’d rented 24 Hour Party People on video, so I took it as an omen that we had to go,” Pebworth reveals. “We only met Tony Wilson briefly at somebody else’s gig, but he fully lived up to expectations. The music industry needs more mavericks like him.”
The quintet’s sharp-suits and funky, off-kilter pop was lapped up by the numerous A&R personnages who’d come to Manchester looking for the next Scissor Sisters. After a fierce bidding war, Orson signed on the dotted line with Mercury and found themselves opening for Duran Duran on their UK enormodome tour. How did they get on with Fatty Le Bon & Co.
“I wish I could tell you they were assholes, but we were treated really well by them and their crew. My abiding memory of that tour, though, is one of terror! We had a hardcore following that came to our gigs in LA, but it was hundreds rather than the ten, fifteen thousand they get. I was so freaked one night at Earl’s Court that I got vertigo looking at the crowd - the arena was spinning and I thought I was going to fall over. Now I’m just a complete whore on stage!”
As you’ll find out in July when Jase and his merry men return to Ireland for Oxegen.
“Being a dumb American who doesn’t travel much, I needed a translator when we played our own shows in Dublin and Glasgow,” he laughs. “I’ve tuned my ear in better since, so hopefully I’ll be able to do more than just smile politely when people talk to me.”
Orson received a crash course in British culture when they guested on Sky Sports’ Soccer A.M.
“Another part of being a dumb American is I never realised how closely allied football and music are in the UK. They have a thing on the show where if you don’t have a team they pick one for you, so we ended up with Rotherham United, otherwise known as The Millers.”
The group’s devotion to the cause is such that they’ve agreed to play a fundraising show for the League One strugglers this summer.
“It started as a bit of a joke, but now every Saturday at 4.45pm I’m tuned to the radio to see how they’ve done – which tends to be badly,” he sighs. “The thing we missed out on this time, but will hopefully get to do in 2010 is a USA World Cup song.”
Oh to be so confident of qualifying for a major tournament! Was Pebworth a sports jock at school?
"No, I settled for having the best hair, which being from somewhere as conservative as Dallas made you a moving target on campus. People here take walking around with foot high Mohawks for granted, but in Texas that sort of thing gets you beaten up.”
Having confessed to nicking from “every human being that ever wrote a song”, Pebworth goes on to list The Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, Jeff Buckley, Nirvana, Radiohead, Flaming Lips, Beck, Arcade Fire, Bjork, ELO and Led Zeppelin as his tour bus essentials. Less socially acceptable is a penchant for the works of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber.
“Journalists here always wince when I say this, but I love musicals and played Judas Iscariot in a Broadway version of Jesus Christ Superstar,” he admits with nary a hint of guilt. “I’m as passionate about that and The Phantom Of The Opera as I am, say, We Are Scientists who were fantastic recently when we saw them.”
Naming themselves after sherry-endorsing director Orson Welles rather than Mork’s extraterrestrial master, the Californians auditioned over 40 vocalists before settling on Pebworth whose autobiographical style of writing supplied them with their number one. Judging by lines like “Let’s go to a rave and behave like we’re trippin’’, it sounds like he has an interesting social life.
"'No Tomorrow’ is about when I first moved to LA,” he explains. “I was seeing this girl and she’d just quit drinking. I told her we could go to a rave – that’s what they were still called then – and not get fucked up. But all of her friends were there, totally wasted. We drank a lot of Red Bull and saw how silly everyone looked. And then we realised there was nothing between us. The next morning it was over, hence the title. It also comes from the idea that men, in general, hate dancing. We don’t go to clubs to show off our moves, we go there to look at beautiful women!”
The problem being?
“None whatsoever. It’s the primary reason for us being on this planet and I embrace it fully!”