They are difficult to miss, the Good Charlotte twins. The 24-year-olds--Joel and Benji Madden--shuffle through a London hotel lobby in three-quarter length shorts, bandannas and lurid tattoos that explode all across their bodies. They look toxic. If their mother were nearby, she'd tell them to stand up straight. But she isn't, so they slouch in studied perfection.

Joel collapses into his chair first, all handshakes and smiles, but Benji can't quite lose the frown. His mouth is curled up intio a citric sneer that suggests he's just sucked on a lemon, and his body language speaks volumes: arms crossed, left leg over right, steadfastly avoiding eye contact. Something clearly is bugging him, but he won't say what. He deigns to smile only when Blender alerts him to the sdmonishing stares he's receiving from the hotel's decidedly sophisticated clintele.

"Well, that's good" he says, brightening . As he talks his teeth clack on his three lip rings. "I'm here to piss people off. I love walking into places like this and freaking everybody out."

Life, he says, has always been this way for him. "Back in school, you start off wanting to blend in, make friends and get invited to all the right parties. But that never really happended to me, and you know what ? I got over it. I'm comfortable with who I am now and my tattoos are a big part of that. I'm my entire identity."

He holds up his hands, both covered in permanent ink. "Look at my knuckles," he says. "Every time I shake someone's hand or pay a bill, people see the tattoos and react. I'm glad. Being this way sperarates me from everbody else." He reclines, visibly thawing "And if people don't like it?" Up comes the middle finger.

Good Charlotte, a boisterious punk quartet from Maryland, are part of a growing trend in Amercian music. They're the flip side to the sort of kids who dominated music a few years ago, those well-behaved school-playleads and class presidents who considered the prom to be--well, gosh--another high point in an already blessed life. Alongside fellow tattoo enthusiasts Blink 182 and Sum 41 (and forfathers the Offspring and Green Day), they're the classroom geeks and square pegs who, shrewdly, subsequendtly decided to turn their social parish status to their benifit. Alienation made them rich and famous. Girls who once ridiculed them in school are now desprate form their company.

"That's funny," Benji says. "I go to clubs these days, and every girl in the joint wants to talk to me and laughs at my jokes whether they're funny or not." While he admits to finding gorgeous girls attractive, he does try to keep his libido in check. Instead of sleeping with them, he makes fun of them. "They deserve it."

Good Charlotte--vocalist Joel and guitarist Benji, plus guitarist Billy Martin and bassist Paul Thomas (along with touring drummer Chris Wilson)--first came out together in 1996 out of a collective love for Rancid and Nirvana. Four years later, they released their self-titled debut album which slowly clawed 80,000 copies sold. The band was jubilant (80,000, after all, is a whole lot of people), but their record company, Epic, was less so. The label thought Good Charlotte had the potential to tap into the zeitgeist more forcefully, and for their career to go properly supernova. It instructed them to tour endlessly.

"We've always been very aware that this could end tomorrow," says Joel, the more sensible of the two. "You know bandscome and go these days so quickly. So any amount of money we made along the say, we've put aside, we've invested. You never know do you?"

Hindsight has shown they didn't need to be so prudent. Late las year they released The Young and The Hopeless, 45 minutes of brisk mall-punk chaos, it's melodic exclamation poins offset by some very bleak lyricial tales. Propelled by the joyous "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"--and given a considerable boost by MTV, which gave the twins their own show, All Things Rock, to host--it has powered past the 1 million sales mark in just four months.

"We've made it, and it's still sinking in to be honest," Benji says. "A big surprise. I don't know--I guess I always expected everybody to hate us." He shrugs, and the flame-red tattoo on his neck creeps torward his ear. "But my philosophy is this: The more people talk about us, the better we must be doing. And right now, people are talking about us a whole lot."

Strip the band's second album of it's music and concentrate solely on the lyrics, and you'll find an avalanche of dysfunction that could fill an entire season of Jerry Springer before Oprah came along to mop up the tears. It goes something like this: the Madden twins were terrible students ("High School felt more to me like a jail cell in a penitentiary" - "The Anthem"), and never had much luck with girls ("Girls don't like boys/They like cars and money" - "Girls and Boys"). Their early life was dictated by religion--Mom was a strict Christian--and, according to the twins, their father cheated on her repeatedly. On the album's most meditive track "Emotionless," Joel sings "It's been a long hard road without you by my side/Why weren't you there all the nights that we cried/You broke my mother's heart, you broke your children for life/It's not okay but we're all right."

If, using the galaxy as a scale, happiness is Mercury, the Madden boys curently reside somewhere beyond Neptune.

"By the time we turned 15, 16 we were getting into full blown fights with him," Joel says of their father. "He would go off with some other woman for a couple of months, then come back as if nothing had happened. We were like 'Fuck you, you can't just come walking back.' So we tried to beat him up. We were pretty pissed--we were terrified as well, but pretty pissed. One time he upset my mom real bad, so we took a baseball bat to his truck." Their father walked out for good a year later. They haven't seen him since.

However some benefit has come out of all this. Joel insists that, as a direct consequence of their one-parent-family status, they became independent and strong "You survive that kind of childhood--hittng rock bottom, having nothing, having no money--and you can survive anything," he says. Both took Saturday jobs to help pay the bills, and they did everthing they could to ensure that their sister, Sarah, 18 months their junior, didn't suffer too much from the split. Family life continued, occasionaly resembling a kind of normalcy. If their mother was strict--very strict--she was only trying to protect them, convinced that rock music would ultamatly lead them astray. She banned everything other than Christian music in their house, and when a Beastie Boys poster found it's way onto Joel and Benji's bedroom wall, she quickly ripped it down.

"She wanted us to be more religious than we turned out, I guess," Benji says with a sheepish smile. "We do have a lot of faith in God, and I attribute everything we have to him, but there's no way either of us could do with going to church on a regular basis. We are not your typical Christians by any means at all, but I do try to do good by people. That's my religious effort."

He gazes out of the window in momentary contemplation, pulling his lip by one of the rings until it snaps back into place, saliva flying.

Five hours later, Good Charlotte are assembled on the cramped stage of London's Mean Fiddler in front of 500 Avril Lavignes and their sk8er bois, tearing through a hyperactive 75-minute set with boundless energy. They are dressed exclusively in black, and while their music bear considerable resemblance to that of their pop-punk peers, they refrain from burping or farting into their microphones and don't encourage any girls to show their boobies, a proud Blink 182 tradition. Nevertheless, rumors persist that they're quite happy to share Sum 41's European groupies.

"Don't look at me," Joel says innocently after the show. "I don't go there. But Benji does. Benji is definitly far more out-of-contol than me."

Benji, still breathless from exertions of the performance, nods eagerly. "Everything I do, I tend to do to the very maximum. Drink, drugs and girls. I tend to get excessive." How excessive, excatly? "Um..." He pauses and his finger pulls at his lip ring again. "Let's just say things go pretty bad, but I pulled myself back from the edge eventually. I don't drink anymore, and I don't do drugs."

Which leaves just the girls.

"Well, we do have fun on the road from time to time, but not like before. Take tonight, for example. We're both hungry, and I'm in the mood for some Indian food. All four of us will go find a resturant, and then it's straight back to the hotel, to bad." He leans in close, as if to share a secret.

"You know what's the worst thing anybody could say about us? The biggest put-down? That we're rock stars." He makes a face. "Urgh."