‘Tween the Rock and Pop Place

They’re called tweener bands.

These are the outfits that are somewhere ‘tween pop and rock ‘n’ roll--and usually more pop than rock ‘n’ roll.

Lately, the charts have been crawling with them--including Europe, Cutting Crew and White Lion. They score with Top 10 singles, sell a million albums, command legions of swooning female fans and look terrific on MTV.

But what they don’t have, according to most critics, is talent. Tweener band-bashing is a great sport among critics, who contend these guys are no more than a bunch of pretty faces. One critic cracked that they’re ‘tween bad and very bad.

The most recent tweener band to emerge is England’s Escape Club, which recently had a No. 1 pop single with “Wild, Wild West” from its debut Atlantic album of the same name.

Despite what critics say, “Wild, Wild West” really is a solid radio song, with amusing lyrics, a frivolous tone and an intoxicating beat. Other songs on the album, currently sitting in the 20s on the Billboard magazine pop chart, use that same jaunty style.

The Escape Club’s lead singer, Trevor Steel, 28, is good-looking, charming, intelligent and, of course, quite bullish on his band. “We’re doing something a little different,” explained Steel, in town recently for the band’s first local engagements. “It’s rock ‘n’ roll with some offbeat twists. The record’s good but you should hear us live.”

Not quite. The recent L.A. club shows revealed a band that seemed a bit rusty (these were its first shows in two years). One critic went so far as to say that the Escape Club has a long way to go before even qualifying as a garage band. The Escape Club may not be a budding U2 or Guns N’ Roses in the exhilarating live-act department, but it’s certainly not the dregs of rock ‘n’ roll either.

Steel, the band’s lyricist, has been singing since he took over as interim vocalist in a previous band. “I wasn’t a good singer when I started,” he said. “I don’t sing that well but my favorite singers--like Lou Reed--don’t sing well either. It’s offbeat singing that’s not perfect but it’s interesting and it has character. I hate singing in tune all the time. It’s boring.”

Five years ago, Steel and three other Londoners--guitarist John Holliday, bassist Johnnie Christo and drummer Milan Zekavica--organized Escape Club, which established itself as a popular English club band. An independent single attracted the attention of EMI Records, which signed the band and released its first album, “White Fields.”

“The production of the record wasn’t very good,” Steel admitted, which partly accounted for its failure. But the band members didn’t feel its managers and the record label were much help in promoting the album, so they hired new management and signed with a new label--Atlantic Records.

Though “Wild, Wild West,” both single and album, clicked in America, the band is quite bitter about the fact that it has been ignored by English pop stations. “We have the No. 1 record in the United States--the world’s biggest market--and we can’t get played on the major stations in our own country,” Steel grumbled. “We get played on some small regional stations over there, but not the big ones that really matter.”

It’s nothing personal against the band. Those stations just don’t play rock ‘n’ roll.

“All they play is junk, that formula dance music,” Steel griped. “It all sounds the same--all 120 beats per minute, all produced the same way. All you hear in England is that Kylie Minogue, who’s terrible. (The dance-music production team) Stock, Aitken and Waterman monopolize British radio with their junk. We can’t get played.”

It seems that the English are mad about pop, heavy metal, dance music and soul but are indifferent to rock. “The rock clubs are dying,” Steel said. “There’s really no place for bands to play. If we were getting started now we might quit out of frustration.”

Actually, frustration has been gnawing away at this band for a while. If this album hadn’t made it, the Escape Club, whose members are in their late 20s, might have quit the business.

“We’ve been struggling for five years,” Steel said. “I didn’t want to be in my 30s trying to get my first hit. We knew with rock music we couldn’t make it in England, so we had to get with a company that would release an album in the United States, where radio plays rock music. If the American public had heard this record, which we thought was our best shot, and didn’t like it, then it was time to give up.

“What has happened so far has been beyond our wildest dreams. We would have been encouraged if the single had made the Top 100. We celebrated with champagne when it got to No. 98. We thought No. 1 was out of the question.”

There was some confusion when the “Wild, Wild West” single came out because it has the same title as a song by rapper Kool Moe Dee, which was released first.

“There was some thought about not releasing ‘Wild, Wild West’ as the first single,” Steel said. “But we decided to go ahead with the release. We felt our song was different enough that there wouldn’t be a problem.”

Changing the title of the Escape Club single was a possible solution. Steel, however, insisted: “We never thought about doing that. That was too big a sacrifice.”

According to Steel, their single was the first one recorded. “We made it a long time before it came out,” Steel said. “We were going through contract hassles with EMI so we had to wait a long time before we put it out.”

Steel suggested foul play on the part of Jive Records. “It was very suspicious. We gave a tape of ‘Wild, Wild West’ to someone at Jive Records and a few months later, their record comes out with our title. Under those circumstances, wouldn’t you think something funny happened? Maybe they thought it was OK to lift the title because ours might never come out.”

Contacted in Jive’s New York office, a spokesman declined to comment on the charge.

What does Steel think of the other “Wild, Wild West”?

“I can’t say because I’ve never heard it,” he replied. “I really don’t want to hear it. I prefer to forget it ever existed.”