The big band swing of the 1930s and '40s is back with a passionate new twist courtesy of groups like the Cherry Poppin' Daddies.

"It's like the Renaissance," top Daddy Steve Perry explained from a pay phone in an unidentified mainland airport yesterday.

The Daddies bring the hot neo-swing music of their major label debut album, "Zoot Suit Riot," to Honolulu for a concert Saturday at Richardson Field with No Doubt, the Vandals and Madness.

"Stupid people are going to say 'What a pretentious ass, he's equating swing music with the Renaissance,' which is not what I'm doing, but the Renaissance was people rediscovering classical literature that had been laying dormant during the whole middle ages and taking it further.

"Some people don't like music to evolve, and some people may feel that updating something like swing is kind of a sacrilege but we're one of the bands that rediscovers this great music and we're taking it forward."

Perry founded the Cherry Poppin' Daddies in 1989. He discovered swing years before that.

"Eugene (Oregon) was a real melting pot. I'd go to this one coffee house and the juke box would have Black Flag, Harry James, Alice Cooper -- just super-dooper eclectic.

"I'd be hanging out with these pre-hippie original literary arty-farty interesting beatnik types. They were the ones who played this real interesting 'race music' for me, early rhythm & blues, introduced me to big band ..."

The band's name was a last-minute choice.

"I had a friend who collected old 'race records' and put them on tape for me, and there was a line in one of those songs, 'I'll be your cherry poppin' daddy.' We needed a name before our first show and everything we thought of was really stupid.

"Coming out of punk rock with band names like Butt Hole Surfers, and not thinking that we were going to have more than two or three shows, we called ourselves Cherry Poppin' Daddies.

"Right off the bat people got offended and it became our Holden Caulfield red hunting hat -- a badge of honor. We didn't mean it sexually, it was more about the loosen-up attitude of the old songs."

The Daddies became part of the fledgling "swing-core" scene on the West Coast. As third-wave ska bands revived pop interest in "horn bands" the Daddies turned up on bills with Skankin' Pickle, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Fishbone and other brass bands.

Perry has fielded criticism for the lyric imagery of his compositions and sees it as a type of fallout from the era of the self-absorbed singer/songwriter of the 1960s.

"It's that whole individualistic, navel gazing 'This is me' kind of thing (and) the grunge thing is very very personal too. I'm not sure that (critics) understand what I'm saying, but I think they think that anybody who sings is saying something about themselves. That's not my bag."