Make that a banana smoothie, special order from the kitchen. You can do that when you're a pop star or just a polite young man from Australia.

Savage Garden's Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones are sitting in the lobby bar of a downtown Toronto hotel, on their first promotional tour behind their multi-platinum self-titled debut album.

The waiter apologizes. They don’t have banana smoothies. "Got milk? Got bananas? Got ice cream?" asks Hayes, rattling off the recipe. Yes, yes, yes. The delicious looking concoction arrives minutes later.

The '80s Euro-pop influenced duo --- both in their early 20s --- are enjoying pop stardom and they haven’t even toured North America yet. A stylish high tech video for their first single," I Want You," made them immediate babe magnets.

Stellar follow-up --- the driving " To The Moon & Back" and latest single, a gorgeous ballad called "Truly Madly Deeply" --- helped propel sales beyond triple platinum in Canada.

Savage Garden's first Australian tour was a huge sell-out and the guys confess that they could get used to this Life. "I don’t even have to pack up my keyboards or guitar," marvels Jones. "I just walk off the stage and somebody else does it. Its great."

"Or play three or four chords and have someone go crazy because they recognize the song and its your song," adds Hayes. "It’s the best feeling. I get withdrawal symptoms from that. I always want to play."

Hayes and Jones met five years ago in Brisbane, when Jones placed an ad in the newspaper Looking for a singer to complete his five-piece band. "Even on the phone, Darren had a very calm, cool, collected way about him and he was very humble in his approach to the whole thing," remembers Jones.

Hayes had a good reason to be humble. He had zip experience. He had sung in school musicals, but never in a band. "I didn’t even know how to put up a mic stand," he confesses. "All I could do was sing, and as it turns out, that’s all I needed to do."

For the audition, Hayes chose a do-wop piece from the stage production of "Little shop of horrors". "I sang in the wrong key, my voice split half way through it," says Hayes. " But when I walked out of that room, I knew my life was gonna change forever."

For the next two years, the pair was part of a band but had not yet formed a song-writing partnership. "Daniel was a keyboard player and his brother wrote the material. It was like singing covers every night. I remember just feeling dead. I didn’t even like these songs," Hayes reveals.

It wasn’t until the two co-wrote a song together before the bands demise that they decided to pair up. "The first song we wrote is on this record," says Hayes of the funky pop track," A Thousand Words".

The pair originally started recording this smash album for Rough Cut Productions. It took eight months to complete. "It took a month and a half before we realized that we were still working on the first song," explains Jones.

The result --- a highly polished, layered pop album that includes the pumping "Tears of Pearls" and darker "Carry on Dancing" --- earned Savage Garden a deal with Columbia records. "We were signed as a songwriting duo, just say like, then Eurythmics, where the rest of the band are hired guns," says Jones. "The last time anything like that was marketed was in the 80s.

"At the time, the whole scene, talking about Custard, was just like that, guitar trios or four pieces. There was no club we could play this music at. And it probably wasn’t very cool, but we're fans of groove not rock 'n' roll," says Hayes, just as the members of Montreal rock trio, The Rock Party, who are staying at the same hotel, come downstairs to get a bite to eat.

Introductions are made all round.

"What’s going on tonight?" asks Jeff Martin, who is told of the Custard show. Savage Garden however, will be on a plane.

"All these Australians," says Martin, whose band is about to go there on tour.

"We'll leave you guys soon, don’t worry," jokes Jones. "Spray some fly spray and we'll get out of your hair."

The kitchen is closed. The Tea Party head off in search of a restaurant, obviously wanting something more substantial than a banana smoothie.

"The Tea Party!" Jones enthuses. "Our rhythm section are gonna die. They would just die."

Click here to return to Crystal Minds and Magenta Feelings