Introducing... York electro pop duo Boomerang, who are spinning back to deliver on a promise made 17 years ago.

Antony Dunn, 31, from Fossgate, York, is an award-winning poet, marketing officer for Riding Lights Theatre Company and tutor for the Poetry School; Simon Frost, 31, from Poppleton, was once in the York band Citrus and now runs Bright Five, a new media business in the Fishergate Centre. Together they are Boomerang, and their album has taken even longer to arrive than the new Kate Bush record (when Kate, when?). Charles Hutchinson hears why.

What's the significance of the album title, Seventeen Years, Antony?

"We started writing together 17 years ago and always said we were going to make records, and we finally have. We'd started discussing it in a maths lesson at St Peter's School, when we would have been 14.

"We both sang in the school choir, and Simon had learnt instruments from a young age and I was learning piano and French horn. That's rock'n'roll! Jethro Tull had a French horn!"

How did the songwriting partnership evolve, Simon?

"Antony had a mastery of words, so he started writing lyrics, and they'd be slid on to my desk in the maths lesson, usually one sheet a week though sometimes he would turn up with five sets of lyrics just to be annoying.

"I had a small 'studio', well, some equipment in my bedroom, a couple of keyboards and an old four-track recording system, and I'd write music and annoy my parents. Then at the next maths lesson, if all had gone well, I'd pass Antony a tape with music to his lyrics and he'd pass me more lyrics."

How many songs did you stack up and have any stood the test to emerge finally on Seventeen Years, Antony?

"In the end we had 40 or 50 songs, some finished, some not, and we have to say no, there aren't any on the album. Technically they were curios and lyrically they fell foul of teenage angst.

"There was one brilliant one where I'd just pierced my ear and I'd got into trouble with the teachers for wearing an ear ring, and my response was to write Shakespeare Had An Ear Ring. That was a lyrical low point."

What brought the initial song-writing partnership to an end, Simon?

"I went off to York Sixth Form College, Antony stayed at St Peter's and then went to Oxford, while I was in a band called Citrus. That was my university of rock'n'roll. Citrus eked out a living for a few years, selling out Leeds Irish Centre and appearing on Yorkshire Television. I don't believe in spiritual things but if you time it, it's almost exactly 15 minutes that we were on air, so I'm done for! We assumed that was our 15 minutes of fame and lost interest."

How did you and Simon come to pick up the threads of your songwriting youth in your thirties, Antony?

"It was an accident! We just bumped into each other with some mutual friends in the Red Lion beer garden. We met up again, and I brought along some lyrics! The song (Skeleton Key) didn't make it on to the album but nevertheless it was our first song for 13 years."

Was it like riding a bike after a long gap, Simon?

"There was always a feeling of finishing something that we'd started all those years ago."

So much so that the spectre of a-ha, Nik Kershaw, Tears For Fears and other Eighties' luminaries loom large over your new songs. Admit it, Simon?!

"Given that we started writing in that period there were some Eighties demons to get out. I still had some old equipment and I've since trawled e-bay to buy all the equipment I dreamed of having as a kid."

It's not a pastiche, is it, Antony?

"You can hear a poppy nod to the Eighties, but we do listen to more music from today than the Eighties, so the album's not some retro joke.

"Lyrically, I used to be very concerned with broken hearts and convoluted rhymes, fairly standard teenage stuff. Now they tend to be about other things than broken hearts, like Anna At The Locust Bar, which came from a dream Simon had about the girl at his local BP garage."

When will you be playing in York, Simon?

"We didn't want to just turn up in pubs with a couple of keyboards, so we're planning quite a major spectacle, an audio visual show with video pieces to accompany the music. We're not going to announce the location yet but it will be in the centre of York, hopefully in May."

Boomerang's Seventeen Years is available from Track Records, York, at £10 and through the website www.boomerangmusic.co.uk at £11, including postage and packaging.

Updated: 16:10 Thursday, January 20, 2005