ONE OF the first skills journalists learn, whatever their field, is how to make ludicrously inflated claims. You know the sort of thing – Home Farm are a better soccer team than A.C. Milan, all Conservative MPs are monogamous heterosexuals and given the choice, 90% of women aged 18 and over would rather snog Derek Wilton out of Coronation Street than Mel Gibson.

That Magnapop have the potential to become as big as Nirvana might sound like another but in this case, there really is a hefty dollop of substance to the hype. It doesn’t matter that nobody’s hailed them as the future of rock ’n’ roll or that they’re signed to a not-particularly-hip foreign label, Magnapop have the songs, the attitude and, it has to be said, the right friends to go anywhere – it has to be said – they want to.

“We’ve never tried to exploit it,” agrees chief ’popster Linda Hopper somewhat reluctantly, “but, yeah, we’ve been lucky in having friends that have been able to give us help when we’ve needed it. I was at college with Michael Stipe, so that’s how come he came to produce our first demo.

“Things like that happen by accident – I didn’t meet him for the first time and think, ‘hey, this guy’s going to be a star, let’s stick with him’. I kinda guessed that Michael wouldn’t settle for a 9 to 5 but there are too many ‘ifs’, ‘buts’ and ‘maybes’ in life to predict how far a person’s going to go.

“Hey,” she adds, “it could have worked the other way and you’d be here asking Michael Stipe how he got to know Magnapop!”

Although Linda is dutifully prepared to discuss the REM-connection, it’s obvious she’d rather be discussing herbaceous borders, pig farming or anything else that has diddly squat to do with their Georgia neighbours.

“I can see both sides of the deal. You guys are trying to dig stuff up that’s going to sell magazines and we have to answer the same question for the nine hundredth time. Actually, where Michael’s concerned, there isn’t much to tell. Magnapop got together in 1990 and after our first Athens show, which would have been the following year, Michael asked whether we’d like to go into the studio with him and work on a few songs. He was taking a break from REM to produce four or five different bands from the area and as virtually everyone else was ignoring us at that point, we jumped at the opportunity.”

Legend now has it that Stipe made – and here you’ll have to forgive us for slipping in a technical term – a right pig’s ear of the resulting demo. The band’s press release speaks of him “neutering” their sound and making them “wimp out when they should have rocked.” Fair comment or the product of an over-zealous P.R. person?

“A bit of both,” laughs Linda good-naturedly. “Michael set everything up and paid for it and we just went into the studio for a week and enjoyed ourselves. We didn’t have a set idea of what we wanted, so if he said, ‘hey, this’ll sound good’, we went along with him. It was fun but it soon became obvious that it wasn’t an accurate representation of what we were about. It was more Michael’s fantasy interpretation of our songs and while that was fine for the first record, which was a bootleg type of thing we sold at gigs, it wouldn’t have worked on our debut album proper.”

As Linda said earlier, it’s nigh on impossible to map out career paths and Magnapop’s took a totally unexpected turn when they were spotted at the New Music Seminar by two Dutch journalists who managed to arrange for them to go over and gig in Rotterdam. This in turn lead to the band being picked up by Belgian independent Play It Again Sam who up till then had specialised in releasing records by strange European types with synth fetishes.

“It sounds like a line out of Spinal Tap,” she chuckles again, “but we really are quite big in Belgium and Holland. We told this a while ago to Mudhoney and they said, ‘so what, we’re huge in Rhode Island!’. But you know, Play It Again Sam showed an interest at a time when we were lucky if we got to play to 50 people in the States and I’ll always be grateful to them for that.”

As a wise and rich man once told me, it doesn’t matter whether you’re being paid in American dollars or Indian rupees, you’re still making money and with the Benelux’s direct link to the vast German market, there’s probably never been a better time to be world famous in Brussels or The Hague.

For the next couple of months, though, Magnapop are setting their sights on the UK and with the help of another of their friends-in-high-places, could be on the verge of a major breakthrough.

“We met Bob Mould at a festival we played in Rotterdam. He was there doing his acoustic thing, we hit it off and when it came to lining up a support act for the next Sugar tour, he gave us a call.

This was towards the end of 1992 and at around the same time, we’d begun to realise that the guy who was producing our Hot Boxing album, Dick Nicely, was pulling in a different direction to the one we wanted to go in. Bob heard about this and we got the word, through a mutual friend, that all we had to do was ask him and he’d take over. That’s what happened and we’re delighted with the results. It was like having a fifth member of the band – Bob’s on precisely the same wavelength as us and at times it was freaky just how similar our ideas were.”

Released next week, there are moments on Hot Boxing where Magnapop stray perhaps just a little too close to Sugar’s patented brand of melodic white noise but there’s no mistaking the pedigree of tracks like ‘Leo’ and current single ‘Slowly, Slowly’ which establish Linda as the songwriting equal of Bob Mould, Michael Stipe or any other tunesmith you’d care to mention.

“With Bob being involved, the Sugar comparisons are inevitable,” she admits, “but, you know, we can live with that. What I hope, though, is that people will start looking beyond who our friends are and realise we’re an okay band in our own right.”

Whatever else, if Linda Hopper insists on peddling understatements like that, she’s never going to make a journalist!