They're savage!

Aussie pop duo comes to town and steals hearts of our teen girls

 Sitting in the back of a van that is travelling hyperspeed towards the airport, Darren Hayes looks very calm and collected for a man who has to catch a plane in about 20 minutes.

Savage Garden's suave singer and lyricist has just walked offstage after performing to 200 screaming, generally female fans at an invite-only event at Quincy's.

Daniel Jones, the duo's instrumentalist, sits in front, quietly taking in Calgary's rush-hour sights.

The Australian pop darlings have been in the city for less than 24 hours, but yet they've endured a hectic schedule of shaking hands, signing autographs, having pictures taken with fans, hugging fans, interviews, hugging interviewers, performances ... oh yeah, and a tiny triple-platinum record presentation, too.

Among their duties, Hayes and Jones conducted an interview and played a few songs in Power 107's studios, before an audience of Power 107 listeners and Calgary Sun readers.

Now, they're being whisked away to do the same thing in Los Angeles.

Looking at the band's frazzled manager, one wonders just how fun this rock 'n' roll lifestyle really is.

"You start to change the rules a bit," says the 25-year-old Hayes, who found himself at the top of the pop heap earlier this year with the almost annoyingly hummable, '80s-inspired synth anthem, I Want You, and its follow-up To the Moon and Back.

"At first, you do anything that anyone tells you to do and then you think: 'Hang on, I can be happy here. I can call the shots.' There's certain things you can do to make yourself happy and make things happen the way you want them to."

Savage Garden -- whose self-titled debut CD has sold more in Canada than any other country, besides the one Down Under -- formed in 1993 after Jones, 24, and Hayes had tired of the band they had been playing in since they met two years earlier.

Jones, adding his two cents, says it was their personalities and love for music that clicked at first and their mutually intense ambition that has kept them going.

"I guess we have similar interests in what we want to achieve in music," he says.

"Also, the initial buzz we get from working with each other and coming up with new songs. It's the best feeling, it really is, when you write a song until 2 a.m.... You don't want to go to bed because you want to stay up all night and listen to it."

Hayes agrees: "We're both very ambitious people. We just thought there must be a way to write the music we want to hear."

The Brisbane duo's lush Europop sound has been called refreshing in wake of the post-rock, post-techno, post-grunge and basically post-anything that has saturated North American airwaves lately.

"Six years ago, this kind of music wasn't cool," recalls Hayes.

"It was all grunge, but we never made a compromise. We were told by record labels, 'Sorry, but this isn't what we're looking for.' It just wasn't cool ... Well, I have to clarify -- we always thought we were cool, but no one else did.

"I've heard mumblings from different sources (in Australia) that suggest that we're manufactured and calculated. But really, it's the band that was never supposed to happen. So success is satisfying."