"I'd been crapping on for months about how I wanted to write a song that would be played everywhere -- and when it happened it was absolutely a nightmare," recalls Boo songwriter/guitarist Martin Carr. "Every shop and every taxi and every pub you went into! I was uncomfortable with it, because it was so popular, and we figured after all we'd done this was the song we'd be known for."

Wake Up! (Columbia), the Boo Radleys' fourth album, may be resigned to such a fate. The Boos have long played goofily fuzzy indie pop, layering guitars over speedy melodies and chiming harmonies, tossing in the odd bit of psychedelia to weirden things up here and there. But the band, whose line-up comprises Carr, singer Sice, bassist/keyboardist Tim Brown, and drummer Rob Cieka, have never made an album quite this, well, cheery before. "I wanted to write a more straightforward, uplifting record," says Carr on the phone from his home outside Liverpool. "I'm usually a lot more untidy. And it was harder to make than our other albums; we were in the studio and we were having to tie our hands down so we wouldn't put loads of trash on top of the tracks."

What emerged from this restraint was a gloriously happy-go-lucky set of 12 songs, clear, and clean, from the jangly, Herman's Hermits-like "Reaching Out from Here" to the dynamic, slightly deranged psychedelia of "Joel," which is reminiscent in parts of the Beatles' "In My Life." "It's Lulu" comes off as a natural sequel to the title track, a full-out horn assault about an adolescent girl's angst, dressed up in cooing harmonies (cries Sice, "The ones who understand are the posters on the wall"). Even on the dreamier, slower tracks, the Boos retain their humorous, generously self-affirming sense of theme -- from "Fairfax Scene," a trippy dip into elusive self-doubt, to "Martin Doom It's Seven O'Clock," where Sice's high croon (à la Kirsty MacColl) battles with Martin to wake up -- "The world is waiting just for you" -- while Martin grumbles back, "I know, but not today."

"Sice can make his voice sound like anything," says Carr admiringly. The two have been friends since childhood, when they were neighbors in Liverpool. Although formed in 1990, the Boos had seen only modest acceptance at home and what Carr jokingly calls "resounding apathy" in America with their first albums -- the impossible-to-find Ichabod and I, 1992's Everything's Alright Forever, 1993's Giant Step's{?}.

And the sudden fanatical reception that their purely pop CD suddenly brought may have shaken Carr a bit. "We did know this album was going to do pretty well; maybe not go all the way to the top, but I think we were pretty confident. But who can tell? In the past we've released records we've really liked and the papers have gone mad for them and then no fucker bought it."

Certainly things today are better than at their Pensacola show a few years ago. "We literally played there to no people," says Carr. "And we were really good. Brilliant. The best show nobody saw."

-- Randee Dawn Cohen