They’ve had urine, meat and even a wheelchair thrown at them. And now Daphne and Celeste are back – with a new single, You and I Alone. Tim Jonze meets pop’s bravest duo

Reading festival, 2000, and on the main stage one of the most punk-rock performances in living memory is taking place. But it’s not Rage Against the Machine, or Slipknot, or any of the other supposedly “punk” acts on the bill. It’s the pop duo Daphne and Celeste, two teenage girls who have somehow gate-crashed the festival bill in order to sing chipmunk pop songs called Ooh Stick You and U.G.L.Y. to a field of disgruntled metalheads.

Faced with a barrage of bottles of urine, and various other hurled items (shoes, clothing, even a bag of meat), the girls don’t just refuse to leave the stage, but positively revel in the madness. “You guys are such a good crowd,” Celeste Cruz says mockingly between songs. “I’m loving the signs,” adds Daphne (real name Karen DiConcetto), cheerily. “‘Die!’ Yes, I will!”

It was the high point of a short-lived pop career, whose other highlights included scoring three top 20 UK hits and winding up luminaries on the indie-rock scene in a series of cheeky interviews with NME and Melody Maker (Placebo’s Brian Molko threw a spectacular hissy fit because they mocked his thinning hair). But such fun couldn’t last forever. As Cruz puts it: “We got this crazy gig, and all this crazy stuff happened – and then one day it was all over.”

Well, it was all over. In one of the most unlikely pop comebacks imaginable, Daphne and Celeste are set to return with a new single, You and I Alone. To make things even more unlikely, it’s been written and produced by Ben Jacobs (AKA experimental pop auteur Max Tundra) and it’s fantastic: an icy synthpop number that incorporates skittish beats and lyrical references to David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest and Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, while retaining the playfulness of the duo’s original hits. It comes with a fun video, referencing the fact it was all put together via sound files across the Atlantic – Jacobs only met the duo last week, despite recording the song four years ago – and is set to be released on limited-edition yellow vinyl.

“It felt like the grownup version of Daphne and Celeste,” says DiConcetto. “A cooler sound, but also a shout out to our past.” DiConcetto and Cruz had talked about one day making music together again – somewhat improbably, their friendship has only got stronger over the decade and a half since they were first paired together on the grounds that “we looked like anime characters” – but it wasn’t until Jacobs got in touch that they felt the moment was right.

Jacobs had retained a fascination with the duo ever since seeing the video to U.G.L.Y and wondering who these two sparky girls were, having so much fun while sounding completely out of step with the musical trends of the time. In 2011, as his own tastes became more open to mainstream pop, he decided to contact the pair via Twitter and offer his services to produce their comeback. With typical enthusiasm, Daphne and Celeste replied: “That sounds rad.”

It’s safe to say that You and I Alone doesn’t have much in common sonically with Daphne and Celeste’s previous work. As Jacobs says, there’s “quite a lot going on in it”. This includes the sampling of an ex-girlfriend’s footsteps, as well as a creaky gate in Wales, as percussion noises. “I thought, if I was going to bring them back all these years on, it had to be different to what they did before,” says Jacobs, for whom this is also a comeback given that it’s the first music he has released in seven years. He adds: “It would have been easier to pick someone really respected like Charlotte Gainsbourg … but this was more of a challenge, taking a band people were chucking bottles of piss at.”

Maybe the real question is not why Jacobs wanted to resurrect Daphne and Celeste but why they were willing to be resurrected. They might have put a brave face on things, but being a target for mass booing and urine-filled missiles must have been a bruising experience. “Honestly?” says Cruz. “Our biggest fear at the time was that we would get on the stage and no one would come. We thought everyone would protest and go off and see bands they actually liked.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Karen DiConcetto and Celeste Cruz. Photograph: Ben Jacobs

DiConcetto found the whole thing surreal: “Backstage, Slipknot and Rage Against the Machine were coming up to us and telling us how hardcore we were – how they wouldn’t have stayed out there. It was definitely the best thing we did, our crowning achievement.”

“I’ve gotten messages from people saying it was the most fun they’d ever had a a festival,” adds Cruz. After a bit of discussion, the duo agree there was “something beautiful” about the way so many people came together, united in their hatred of the band.

“Although maybe we’d feel differently if we’d got hit,” laughs Cruz.

“Your mum did get hit!” DiConcetto reminds her.

“Oh yeah. Because, of course, we invited our families along, not thinking at all how it would be for them! When we came off, my sister was crying!”

“Celeste’s mum was amazing, though. She was such a momma bear, going crazy, screaming at the audience.”

“I guess she acted in the way a mom would react at a festival where their daughter is getting bottled on stage.”

It wasn’t just bottles the girls were dodging. As DiConcetto points out, at Reading, someone threw a wheelchair at them. “It took, like, three people to get it up there,” says Cruz.

Hang on, doesn’t that mean someone spent the festival without their wheelchair? “That’s what we thought!” says DiConcetto. “Someone lost their mobility because they hated us so much!”

It was hilarious how many people in pop were taking themselves so seriously

Even without the bottling, being in a teen pop act can be enough to damage someone’s sanity. Yet Daphne and Celeste are a shining example of how to handle it all without losing your mind – the key being not to take things too seriously. “We knew we were a manufactured pop group,” says Cruz with a laugh. “We knew we weren’t going to win a Grammy. And we thought it was hilarious how many people we met in pop were taking themselves so seriously, even though they were making the same kind of music. We were like, ‘You guys know this isn’t serious, right?’”

“Our days were so weird,” says DiConcetto. “They would start in the morning with maybe a TV show, then we’d do a performance in a mall, then we’d go to, maybe, an Asda and sign autographs on our supermarket tour, then we’d do a Butlins and then we’d end at, like, a drag show.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest New Daphne and Celeste collaborator Ben Jacobs, AKA Max Tundra. Photograph: Jack Barnes

She credits the pair’s enduring friendship to the uniqe oddness of this schedule: “Nobody else, not even my family, understands that experience apart from Celeste,” she laughs. “We really did the WEIRDEST things together in the name of pop music.”

Cruz starts to laugh, and explains how she once told DiConcetto about a dream she had in which the pair of them were on safari, surrounded by wild animals. “And Karen said to me, ‘girl, that’s not a dream, we did that!’ It was in Wales or Scotland or somewhere. They had us hanging off the back of a truck with tigers and lions around.”

Unsurprisingly, it took a year or two for the pair to decompress once it was all over. The fact that nobody in the US really knew about them – Daphne and Celeste was largely a UK- and New Zealand-based phenomenon – probably helped them get on with their lives. DiConcetto has since been screenwriting for seven years, and is currently working on the TV show Recovery Road, which she co-created with Bert V Royal for the ABC Family channel in the US. Cruz acted for a while, worked with a shaman in Central America, and is currently focusing on various music projects in Brooklyn.

Their comeback is just a bit of fun for now, although they both hint that they’d like to return to the live scene at some point. And if a barrage of bottles and an airborne wheelchair hasn’t put them off, you suspect nothing will.

• You and I Alone is available on iTunes. For more information on Daphne and Celeste, visit their website.