Chicks sit huddled on a two-seat couch in a nondescript Dublin venue. Guitarist / Vocalist Annie Tierney seems too tired to stand up. Bassist / Vocalist Isabel has spent the last week in bed with 'flu and it shows - she sits silently. Drummer Lucy Clarke, sporting a new haircut which the other girls 'gave her' the night before, gazes absentmindedly out the window. They look jaded and they've got one big problem: their Leaving Certificate is only 10 weeks away. A standard teenage issue really, but trying to accommodate the dichotomous lives of school and Chicks is clearly taking its toll. "How did we do in our mock exams?" asks chief hustler come spokesperson Annie rhetorically. "Mostly D's, E's and F's. Anyone get a C? No? It's very strange, being at school one minute and then doing this."

Chicks formed two years ago while transition-year students in Loreto. None of them had any musical ability, but Annie chose to play the guitar and Lucy and Isabel followed suit with the drums and bass. "I was a real square," remembers Annie, "but my brother gave me tape of Riot Grrrl bands like Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill and told me to form a band. When we started we weren't even sure who was in the band - that went on for about a year."

Last April they released their debut EP, Criminales, Coches, Pistolas y Chicas, on Supremo Records. A glorious melange of pop savvy and punk suss, what it lacked in polish it more than made up for in giddy wonder and rookie charm. Then one lucky break followed another: they toured with Ash and The Manic Street Preachers, recorded radio sessions for the BBC, appeared on some TV shows and, most importantly, had every major label on their case. Now they're about to release their second EP, Little Monkeys With Lots Of Money and the Steven Spielberg-founded empire DreamWorks seem set to get their signatures. Not bad for a group who have only played a handful of gigs and still have trouble getting into venues ("if you have a couple of old men with you it's ok though!" laughs Isabel). Oh, and be honest: it's more than you ever did while at school.

"Last summer was just, boom," sighs Annie. "The day we got our School holidays we met our first person from a record company. Then we did our first gig down the country, and on the last day of the holidays we played with the 'Manics. In between all that, the stuff that we never thought would happen happened."

While their excitement is palpable, the last 12 months have not fazed them: it's still their little game - albeit one with a bigger set of rules. Lucy makes a joke of it all, Isabel is too sleepy to even care and Annie's outlook is refreshingly prosaic. "People say so much has happened to us in a year, but none of it is concrete," she says. "It's not like we're selling loads of records and have made two albums. All that's happened is that some magazine like Melody Maker thinks we're cool - and they probably won't think we're cool next week. We haven't even signed anything yet! It seems like a lot of people don't know us but they already hate us."

As if to illustrate the point, two boys walk past and say 'Chicks Suck'. Why?

"Because we're always around and we can't play our guitars and they think we're too.. . I don't know! I don't think it's jealousy as much as the fact that they can't understand it. And in a way they're right: all they've heard is one record and seen these (pointing to all three of them) little munchkins running around." There's even a song about us, it's got the line 'Daddy's gonna buy me a fender'. We want the band who wrote it to support us. "It's good to get some reaction, though," adds Lucy dryly.

The trio's uncomplicated outlook, scatter-gun wit and live-in-the-now ethic ensure that you can't but like them. They're devoid of musospeak too. A typical question will take a circuitous route (eg from chocolate to Star Wars via a school trip to Germany) before you finally get an answer. Nor do they claim to have it all figured out. "Just because we're in a band people expect us to know every single record now," says Lucy. "We met Robbie Robertson (yes, the Robbie Robertson who works for DreamWorks) the other day and he was telling us about all these records we didn't know. We were sitting there afterwards going 'OK Robbie Robertson was in the Band and the Band played with Bob Dylan ..." "We really don't know the records to listen to," adds Annie, "we're just really lucky to know loads of people who do."

The next ten weeks, according to Annie, will see them record yet another EP, write more songs, attend more meetings - some in America - and of course worry about the Leaving Certificate. And then?

"We're free once we finish School so the aim is to do the album in late summer. We finish our exams on June 24, then we play Glastonbury on the 28th followed by the T In The Park and Reading festivals. Then we're going to go away for a month and get our stuff together, and then we're going to record the album which won't be out until 2000."

"Millennium!" wails Lucy at no-one in particular. Annie laughs and shrugs, "yeah, all this Millennium stuff, I really don't know what's going on. I didn't know anything about it until last week and then people told me everything was going to blow up." "We don't get out much," giggles Isabel, "but I guess you've figured that out already."

The future, whatever it brings, starts here.

Little Monkeys With Lots Of Money is out now on Supremo records.