I’m interviewing Johnny Keefe, drummer from the boy band Boys Like Girls, who is an hour away from boarding a plane to Canada from Sydney, Australia. (“At least I think that’s what city we’re in,” he says, unconvincingly.)

I ask him if his publicist has informed him about the nature of my column, since I often find that, despite my best efforts, many publicists neglect to tell their artists I’m looking for a road story and not the typical “who-what-when-where-why” interview. Sure enough, it’s happened again. “I know nothing about it,” Keefe grumbles. “Our tour manager’s a complete retard—and you can print that. He never tells us anything!” (Including what city they’re in, apparently.)

It occurs to me there might be a story here. I can picture the headline—“Mentally Challenged Babysitter Leads Boy Band Astray”—but alas, I can’t get Keefe to spill any further details. Instead he tells me of a Myspace message he received only hours before, from a 15-year-old girl: “She wants to cut my skin off and wear it as her birthday suit on her birthday.”

“Wow!” I say. “She must... really like you?” 

“It was a little weird,” says Keefe. “I looked at her MySpace page, and she had a lot of pictures of me, and she had said she was going to kill my fiancée, though I don’t have a fiancée.”

“Watch out for any girls with X-acto knives!” I say.

“Yeah, because that would not be cool.”

Unfortunately, this column is not about potential road stories; I need a story that’s actually happened. I decide to probe deeper. “Has anything remarkable happened to your band?” I prompt.

“Um... Bryan [Donahue, the band’s bassist] has fallen off the stage a couple of times. We’ll just be playing and all of a sudden—where’s Bryan? And he’ll just have fallen off.... It’s really weird.”

“How does that happen?”

“I don’t know. He just falls off. It’s really... weird.”

Oh, dear. Neither Keefe’s stories nor his adjectives are quite doing it for me.

“Where does your band name come from?” I ask, dismally resorting to the last refuge of the hack music journalist.

“Oh!” Keefe suddenly interjects. “This one time, we were driving in, like, Idaho, and it was really icy and snowy. It was my turn, and it was really late, and I’d been driving forever because I could only drive so fast. But then it started clearing up, so I started going about 75, and everything’s going along smooth for about 20 minutes, and then suddenly the road hadn’t been plowed, it just stopped, there was like a rip where the street was and then all of a sudden there was, like, snow and ice. I didn’t hit the brake, I just let off the gas, and we started to slide. We had, like, a 16-foot trailer behind us and it started to swerve, and we started to swerve, and then we went sideways down the highway. Eventually we managed to come to a stop, but we ended up in the ditch and had to get pulled out. I thought I was going to die.

“We ended up putting a video of it on MySpace, because we’d taped this whole thing happening, and on camera we’re like, ‘How did this happen?’ and we put a banana peel out there.”

I laugh. “And how does this relate to your band name?” 

“Oh. It doesn’t relate at all.”

Bloody hell. “Right. Okay. Well, I was waiting for some part in the middle of this near crash where one of you would yell out, ‘Did you know that boys like girls?’ or something like that. But it never came up.”

“No. But if you want to add that in there, that’d be funny!” 

And that, dear readers, is how it all happened: a trailer full of geographically challenged boys slipped on a banana peel on a deserted snowy highway in Idaho, and thus Boys Like Girls was born. You read it first in SEE.

And, for the record, I plan to avoid interviewing boy bands from now on. 

Boys Like Girls play Rexall Place with Avril Lavigne on March 12.