"There was talk of it at one point," says the snazzy frontman. "Somebody said, 'Hugo Boss wants you to play this party,' and they said, 'We'll set you up with a suit,' and we wanted to do it, then I didn't hear back from them."

But that might change by the time the Eugene, Oregon septet finishes its world tour in March. The group is fashioning a following for its swing music among ska lovers, punks, rockers, skatepunks and suits, and now that The Gap is producing swing commercials, perhaps Hugo Boss might want to capitalize on the growing swing market.

The appeal to the young people who have been skanking, moshing and swinging to the Cherry Poppin' Daddies on the recent Warped Tour, might lie in the group's gritty lyrics: "Drunk Daddy" leads off with the line, "Momma married a big asshole" and the latest single, "Brown Derby Jumps" talks of "A three-year trip on the dragon until the clinic had to get me clean." That ups the cool factor.

Although Perry drops names likes Count Basie, Louis Prima, Fletcher Henderson as influences, he explains that Cherry Poppin' Daddies has never drawn directly on the swing era because "I try consciously to create a contemporary hybrid. It's very important for people to realize it isn't swing music," Perry insists.

"We actually have one cover on Zoot Suit Riot but it's a bizarre cover, 'Come Back To Me,' which is from a musical, but I don't know which one. Other than that, we try and fuse the energy of punk rock and the lyricism of, say, the mod movement or the Specials, some kind of slice of life realism, and then the feel of swing. But we don't take chord progressions or licks and rip them off. We try to make it new, ideally.

"I'm really anti covers," he adds, "and the reason I am is the scene will implode at some point. It will be a parody of the '50s and '40s and '30s, if people continue to do stuff like that. I think we should write our own chapter."

And that's what Cherry Poppin' Daddies is doing.

Zoot Suit Riot is mainly a compilation of the swing material from the group's three independent albums (plus four new tracks), which then sold an estimated 75,000 copies combined. The albums, Perry describes, as "arty-farty", in that they wanted to make albums that were "listening experiences", not reflections of their live set.

"We basically made The White Album three times," he laughs. "So each track would vary from the other tracks greatly, so we go from a swing song to a heavy metal song to almost a jarring effect, but the lyrics would all tie in. That was what was interesting to us because we didn't think we were ever gonna be a going concern as a band because we played swing music."

How wrong they were. When Mojo Records got wind of the dancing storm these dapper swingsters were creating in the LA clubs, they wanted to sign the band.

"We went in and said, 'There's a glass ceiling with our own label (Space Age Bachelor Pad); we can't get records anywhere, so we talked to them and said, 'We either have to get signed and get our records out there or we have to break up because there's too many of us and what we want to do is too vast. So we decided to go for the deal and we didn't ask for an enormous amount of money because we tour so much."

Cherry Poppin' Daddies will head to Europe for six weeks as part of Warped, then return to the U.S. on its own headlining tour. Then, they'll swing over to Australia, Japan and South America, before recording an all-new studio album, the first for Mojo.

"We have 15 songs already recorded, but I want to do some more screwing around," says Perry, who self-produced the indie tracks on Zoot Suit Riot. "I'd like to work with somebody. I enjoy producing but I'd like another voice in there. I'd like David Khane to produce some of it. I really like his stuff a lot. He did Fishbone and Sublime. He really has a track record of stuff that I like. I'm going to talk to him fairly soon."