Not Exactly Sugar and Spice

The members of Fluffy are tough and glamorous, and they cuss like truck drivers. Today, they’ve all chosen ensembles of leopard-print and undertaker-black dresses, fishnet stockings and elaborate platform boots that would be equally at home on a rock stage or in a dominatrix’s dungeon.

Instead, the four women have been out on Hollywood Boulevard, demonstrating their dedication to their look by posing for photographs in the kind of 90-degree heat they’ve rarely experienced back home in London.

With the session completed, they’re now clashing with the pastel delicacy of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s dining room as they kill time before heading to the Whisky, where they’ll share that evening’s bill with New York punk band D Generation.

The co-headlining tour is the latest volley in Fluffy’s Brit-girl invasion, which has paid off in a rising U.S. profile for the band.

Fluffy--the first group signed by the Enclave, the new label founded by hotshot Geffen talent scout Tom Zutaut--released a live EP (recorded at New York’s fabled CBGB’s) last summer, and followed it in September with its debut album, “Black Eye.” Rave reviews rolled in, and Fluffy finished No. 3 in the best new artist category in Rolling Stone’s year-end critics poll.

With all that U.S. momentum, things must be really breaking big for Fluffy back home, right? Don’t bet on it.

“At first we got a lot of press in England,” says bassist Helen Storer, 21. “We were the big, new, hyped-up thing. They were trying to make us out to be Brit-pop--like Oasis and Blur and all that kind of [expletive].

“They desperately wanted us to be an all-girl Brit-pop band, which is about a million miles away from what we’re doing. When they realized that, we got a big backlash in the press. Now we’ve been banished from England.”

Guitarist Bridget Jones, 24, thinks that part of the band’s success lies in American audiences’ willingness to hear women play angry rock: “In England, they’re a little funny about women in bands unless you’re singing happy love songs.”

Happy love songs are not exactly Fluffy’s forte. In an age of new-wave tomboys (Elastica) and saucy pop lasses (Spice Girls), this is a whole different breed of British band, a blend of caterwauling punk and trash-can glamour.

Their look is New York Dolls, and their music is classic old-school punk: the Sex Pistols revamped with a woman’s perspective. Imagine Johnny Rotten railing against cruel husbands and boasting about vibrators.

In fact, it was Rotten who comforted singer Amanda Rootes when she was slammed by a colleague.

“This British band girl had slagged me off, saying, ‘Amanda can’t sing,’ ” recalls Rootes, 24, who turned to “Uncle Johnny” for solace. “Rotten just said, ‘Look, I’ve made a whole career off of it!’ ”

Fluffy’s career began in London fetish and rock clubs, where Storer, Jones, Rootes and drummer Angie Adams were linked by a love for music sounding ready to self-destruct.

“Just really raw and trashy and sexy,” says Rootes, who was raised in quarters above her parents’ pub. (“Brought up around booze and music,” she says.)

In 1994, Adams, now 21, and Rootes were schoolmates in fashion college when they spontaneously banged out a song and decided to start a band. Storer, then a university student, and Austrian-born Jones were quickly recruited, and soon the group was flying to New York to perform.

“It was a complete roller-coaster ride, from having just started a band and making a racket in the living room to just completely taking off,” Rootes says. “We were getting press and flying in airplanes to America. It was just really surreal.”

At the start, the four didn’t even know how to play very well, but that didn’t get in the way.

Says Storer: “That’s what this kind of music’s about, . . . having the guts to be really cocky.”

As much as they try to buck convention, the members of Fluffy still find themselves lumped together with just about any female outfit, from such relatively hard-core units as L7, the Lunachicks and Bikini Kill to super-sweet pop queens the Spice Girls.

Journalists have tried to make Fluffy out to be a fierce political powerhouse, but Rootes, who writes the lyrics, says she is only expressing personal feelings and experiences, like her childhood memory of her father abusing her mother.

“Obviously I write from the point of view of a woman in the ‘90s,” she says. “That doesn’t mean that we’re all staunch dyke feminists or something. We’re just the masses, you know.”

It’s a good point, because much of Fluffy’s allure is its street-tough exterior and its aversion to using metaphors or irony to get its point across. That’s clear a few hours later at the Whisky, where the band delivers potent, high-combustion punk, from the ornery-sounding “I Wanna Be Your Lush” to the mantra-like “Black Eye,” with its repeated line, “You will never see me cry.”

Singer Rootes, wearing a silky, champagne-colored gown and sporting a headful of frosty white ringlets, decides to pick on a male audience member who has yelled something at her. Looking like a cross between Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Temple and Courtney Love, she lisps seductively into the microphone: “Now, Mr. Pineapple Shirt, I’m going to kick your [expletive] off.”

When she is told afterward that the man looked furious, her reply is as old-school punk as you can get these days. “Oh. Good. He was my victim.”