'Daddy Don't Disco' is the most exciting album to burst out of South Africa this year. Unsurprisingly the four guys responsible are a bunch of livewires themselves, befitting their name: The Dirty Skirts. We recently spoke to frontman Jeremy de Tolly about forming the band at a braai, making mistakes in front of the world, and what it means to be "indie".

You met Dirty Skirts guitarist David at a braai. That's not exactly the most rock 'n roll start.

In South Africa that's so rock 'n roll. Where should I have met him?

You could have met him at a club?

Ja, well in South Africa to meet someone at a braai is pretty normal. Look, he was completely out of hand and very entertaining.

So what did you talk about?

I don't really remember but all I can say is initially we were both musicians not really doing anything but wanting to make some decent music so we decided to jam and that was that.

What did you two have in common that you decided to give this a go?

Not a hell of a lot, really. We didn’t know each other at all — we shared some friends but that's about all we had in common. But I'd seen him at parties and he seemed to be quite good at that: partying. That's really how it all began — we just seemed to get on really well and I found him all very amusing and he suffered my presence. So we had a good time.

Did you have a master plan when you started playing together?

Really it started as pure exploration — we wanted to make music first and foremost but very quickly, within months, we just set up a gig to try it out and the rest is history, really.

You've said that the ethos of the band was to be unafraid, to 'put it out there' and make mistakes in front of the world, instead of endless crafting behind closed doors. Are there any mistakes now embarrassed by?

There are certainly some times where we think: 'Geez, that's not good' but I'd much rather have done that. It's funny — what's great about the Dirty Skirts is that we've got a sense of humour about what we do because you kind of have to. There are enough critics out there who'll tell you that you're pretty useless. So you might as well learn to get on with that and focus on having fun making music.

Is music generally lacking a sense of humour?

No I don't think so. I love all kinds of music. Robert Smith and the Cure made an entire career out of being miserable and I love them for that. And Morrissey isn’t funny but he's bloody clever. So I think it's whatever anybody wants to hear. I don’t really think we’re all that funny — a lot of other bands are much funnier. We’re a little ironic maybe and it’s more an expression of who we are and doing what we love.

You as a band spent your first four years unsigned and unmanaged. Why did you make the change to get a manager and a deal with SonyBMG? [The band have subsequently ended their relationship with the record company - Editor]

It hasn't really changed. They don't tell us what to do. We've just gone into a partnership with them. We're strong-willed as it is, and they're quite strong-willed but there doesn't seem to be a problem. And we're just working together — we've now got someone to work with and it's great. We're not geniuses at selling CDs to South African retail. They are. Thank god they are.

But have you had to make any compromises?

We’ve sacrificed some independence but it’s for the sake of the bigger picture. You can be completely independent, in your own bedroom, producing music and nobody will hear it. And you just feel like the free-est person on the planet but actually you're nobody.

What does the whole "independent" label mean to you?

I don’t think "indie" really means anything to us anymore. Independent usually means 'not signed' which is not the case — we're now signed to a major. And it's not as if bands like the Kings of Leon are indie, they're a major.

Quite frankly, we wanted to leave all that labelling stuff behind and make our own music and find a space that was as much our own as possible. That's definitely what we were going for with 'Daddy Don’t Disco' to sound completely unlike any other band so nobody would be able to say what it sounds like. So we tried to dig as deep into ourselves as we could and tried experimenting with a couple of things to see what came up.

It's definitely got a bigger, slicker sound thanks to Theo Crous' production which adds a lot. But do you think it took anything away?

The personality and the style of the producer is always present on any album. Just ask Coldplay. But we're very happy with the effect that Theo had on us as a band. That said, we're a band of complete experimenters — we have no idea what we're going to sound like on our next album, but it's pretty much guaranteed to be different to where we've been before. We reserve the right to keep playing around and trying stuff and enjoying ourselves for the rest of our musical career.

So did you just go into the studio and experiment to see what came up?

We wrote at high speed from the beginning of the year and we went in and recorded. And the producer has their effect, the timing has its effect, what we’re listening to, what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling, all that has an effect. So you end up producing a once-off that will never be made again. And you just throw your whole creativity and your enthusiasm at it, something comes out that will work.

Next time, we’ll be feeling different about things, trying new things and something new will come out.

You seem to have a similar approach to gigs — no two shows are the same.

They do differ a lot — there's quite a lot of jamming that goes on and it’s quite loose but we like things to be like that.

That said, do you think the local music scene is too small for the band?

It’s just small. It is what it is. There are people listening to rock music but it is a small market, difficult to make much money to survive as a band. But you can. But definitely, going overseas is an important step for us. We want to begin our assault on those pesky colonialists, reverse the trend and sell them something for a change.