When the Spice Girls took Wannabe to the top of the charts in 1996, they were singing the theme tune for 100 boy bands, girl groups and boy-girl groups to follow. Now, the wannabes are in the charts too, strutting their formulaic stuff on Top of the Pops, Live & Kicking and CD:UK. At the top of the heap sit Billie, B*Witched, 5ive, 911 and the granddaddies of them all, Boyzone; waiting in the wings are new Irish boybands Mytown and Westside. Most newcomers stick rigidly to the standard schedule for pop fame, following a blueprint laid out by management teams and record-company marketing departments.
The master plan goes something like this: audition a gaggle of young wannabes, pare it down to four or five, get in the stylists and the choreographers, cover an old MOR ballad by the Bee Gees or Dr Hook, then sit back and let the cash flow in. Dove, however, are about to break the golden rule of girl power; they will buck the boyband trend, and throw the manufacturer's manual out the window. Two guys and a girl from Dublin, Dove are doing it for themselves where other young stars are being mollycoddled all the way to No 1. A multi-racial group with origins as far afield as Singapore, Africa and the Caribbean, Dove look and sound different to most of the anodyne acts which clog the Irish airwaves. Their current single, a hip-hop cover of Crowded House's Don't Dream It's Over, makes The Carter Twins sound like undertakers at a wedding, Boyzone sound like creaky old codgers, and Chill sound frigid. A fresh, vibrant re-working of the New Zealand band's 1987 hit, Don't Dream sounds sexy, streetwise and soulful - a flagrant violation of Rule 27: Mandatory Blandness.
Dove are fun in real life too - none of your usual PR spiel which reads "we prefer a nice night in" or "I'm so busy, I don't have time for relationships, but I'd like to meet a nice girl some day and settle down". A more apt soundbite would be: "We want to have lots of fun, lots of sex and make lots of money". Hazel Kaneswaran hails from Blanchardstown; her mother is Irish and her father is from Singapore. Nigerian-born Don Ade lived for a while in England before settling in Dublin with his Irish relatives. The group's founder, Graham Cruz, claims Portuguese parentage - his dad comes from Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa. All three are just 21, and exude the confidence and lack of self-consciousness of young people who are in control of their destinies. There's no Svengali figure hovering in the background - Dove are managed by Irishman Dermot McEvoy, and their music is produced by local knob-twiddlers Chris O'Brien and Graham Murphy. If anybody is in charge, it's Cruz, the group's songwriter, choreographer and self-appointed spokesperson. Cruz founded Dove after working as a choreographer and stylist for such young hopefuls as B*Witched, O.T.T. and The Carter Twins. It hadn't taken him long to realise he could probably do just as good a job as many of his charges, so he set about finding some like-minded young people to form a pop group. He met Hazel through her sister, model Gail Kaneswaran, and bumped into Don at an MTV party. No auditions, no full-page ads in newspapers, no panel of music industry bigwigs. Just three people with disparate backgrounds and a shared love of r & b music. Cruz still holds down the day job - next week he'll be grooming a group of teenage girls on young persons' TV programme, Echo. Kaneswaran also keeps her day job at Thermo King, and has to ask for time off to do frivolous things such as interviews with The Irish Times.
"I love Lauryn Hill," she says in her rich Dub accent. "I grew up with my mam and dad listening to a lot of Motown stuff - mainly r & b singers like Lionel Richie and Diana Ross. I'd often sit down and listen to all the diddeyaye stuff, but r & b would be the main thing we'd all be listening to. I wanted to be Whitney Houston when I was younger - I'd go into talent competitions every year and it was always with a Whitney Houston song.
`When I was growing up, my dad was probably the only black person living in Corduff. He used to wear this Irish cap, and over the space of 20 years living there, he gradually took on the Irish accent. People would see this big, black guy and then get a shock when he came out with this real Dub accent."
Cruz's childhood in Artane was also soundtracked by exotic sounds. "The kind of stuff my mam was listening to - George McCrae, Millie Jackson, Ohio Players - was really raw and funky. My dad listened to Latin and Salsa music, a lot of it sung in Creole. It was a nice mix of influences. "When you look at B*Witched and The Corrs, taking elements of Irish music and putting it into pop music, the whole idea with Dove was, we started off spelling it D-U-B-H which is black in Irish, 'cos we find it quite important to stress that we're Irish, but we don't want to jump around like leprechauns. We want to show the world that we're Irish, but also that we're different, and that Ireland is cosmopolitan. We want to use Irish influences in our songs, but there's also Donald's Nigerian background, Hazel's Singaporean background and my Portuguese background." Ade is the only member of Dove who wasn't raised in Ireland, although his granddad studied in Trinity College in the 1950s, and his grandmother was from Crumlin. "It was a good experience having a whole different family here in Ireland, because growing up in Nigeria I was just used to seeing other black faces. It was good coming over here and seeing all my white relatives. "
While Ade traced his roots back to Dublin, Hazel felt she had to travel to Singapore to learn more about her father's culture. "My dad died four years ago, and I always said that if I got the money I'd go over and visit the rest of his family in Singapore. We were about a year into the band when my granny got really sick, so I said that's it, packed up, got some money and went over to Singapore to see her. I brought my boyfriend at the time. The culture over there is so different to here. I can have a boyfriend here, but in Singapore it would more often be an arranged marriage."
"Because we're all darkskinned and come from Ireland, there are issues raised by that," says Cruz. "But we're not championing the cause for black rights. We're not trying to change the world or anything like that, but we do have things to say in our songs.
"We're not trying to be nice and we're not trying to be hard, we're just being us. We don't want to hide anything. We're real people, and this is just what we do for a living. I find that people warm to you more if you're not being false. We don't talk about limos or any of that pop stuff. The limo won't be there in the morning to bring Hazel to Thermo King - it'll be the 39 bus."
Maybe because they're black, or maybe because they resemble a young Irish version of The Fugees, journalists seem to expect Dove to be the spokespeople for refugees in Ireland. Cruz, however, believes this is just a sneaky way of passing the buck and letting somebody else shoulder the white Irishman's burden. "It's another form of inverse racism - you know, because you're dark you must understand the plight of the refugees. "We've made all our most embarrassing mistakes already," jokes Cruz. "You should have seen our first television appearance - it was almost as bad as Boyzone's first one. When we finally get to go on Top of the Pops, we know we won't suck."
Before they can do TOTP, however, Dove must seek a UK record deal, but they have no intention of abandoning their Irish-based management and production team. "You don't need UK-based management," says Cruz. "There's this attitude in Irish pop where you get the band together, get a deal, move to the UK and use British people because foreign is better. Which really does annoy me. All our singles have been produced by Chris and Graham, who are two Irish lads; we've been talking to people who wanted us to go over and record some stuff with other people, but we like working with Chris and Graham. If we sign an album deal, Chris and Graham will be producing it.
"I remember hearing an interview with Phil Lynott, where he said he'd like to see the day when a pop act can come out of Ireland, and be completely Irish-made. We're not completely Irish, because we're of foreign extraction, but we are still Irish, the three of us. Our producers are Irish, our photographers are Irish, everything is based in Ireland, and there's no reason why it can't be. I'm not knocking bands like Boyzone, The Corrs and B*Witched for using British people, I just disagree with the attitude that if it's British, then it has to be better."
Says Ade: "It sounds crazy, three little black kids standing up and saying we're proud to be Irish, we want to be based in Ireland and we want to work in Ireland, but that's the way we feel."