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TORONTO -- Aqua singer Lene (LEE-na) Nystrom remembers exactly where she was when she heard she was dead.
"I was in bed in my apartment in Copenhagen, and the record company called me up and they were so nervous," the distinctly non-dead "Barbie girl" is saying Thursday in a Toronto hotel room.
"They thought maybe someone had put something in my drink or something, because they couldn't reach me for the first two hours. So they were so nervous because they thought I was in hospital."
The story, in case you haven't been on a school playground (or the electronic equivalent, the Internet) in the past month, had Nystrom fatally overdosing on heroin, a seemingly ludicrous proposition given the glowing, fresh-scrubbed 24 year old sharing a couch in front of me with bandmate Claus Norreen. (The other Aqua members are Soren Rasted and Rene ("Ken") Dif, Nystrom's former boyfriend.)
"That was someone in Copenhagen who made that one up and sent it out on the Internet," Nystrom patiently explains.
"Some people are bored and make these rumours up," she continues. "It's awful, because my mom, she lives in Norway, and she opened the paper one day and read that I'd died in a plane crash."
A plane crash?
"Yeah, I've died three times in the last month.
"There was a plane crash, a car crash, and a heroin overdose.
"The plane crash and car crash came from England. English newspapers are awful."
Though Nystrom believes the rumours are simply products of people with too much time on their hands, they also sprang, in part, out of a cancelled appearance two months ago in New York, where Nystrom was said to have collapsed from exhaustion.
Turns out that's only part of the story.
"It wasn't us cancelling it," Nystrom says. "It was the record company, Universal Denmark, because we were really worn out. We had spent three or four weeks in Asia and had been travelling already for a year. When we came to America, we weren't actually prepared for all the fuss around "Barbie Girl" with Mattel (the toy-makers, who launched a lawsuit over the band's "unauthorized use" of the Barbie name).
"We looked like a mess. We didn't talk about it, we were just trying to cope with it, and one day we couldn't. The record company just sent us back home."
So Nystrom did collapse from exhaustion?
No, she confesses. It was more like "a breakdown."
As for the lawsuit over Aqua's hit single/video, "Barbie Girl," the band says they try not to focus on it, since they're not the ones being sued. "They're suing MCA," says Nsytrom, who adds that the two sides have been told by the judge to come to an out-of-court settlement. "Someone told us it's rather cooled down."
Meanwhile, Aqua's debut album, "Aquarium", has now sold a remarkable 281,000 copies in Canada in just 12 weeks, according to SoundScan. (During the band's one-hour appearance on MuchMusic, Thursday afternoon, they were presented with "five-times platinum" awards, but those signify the number copies shipped to stores, not actual sales).
Not bad for an album that wasn't supposed to be see the light of day outside of Denmark.
"We weren't going to release it in America," says Nystrom.
Then, in July of this year, a radio station in Denmark called The Voice -- which, explains bandmate Norreen, "has relationships with a lot of stations in America" -- sent copies of the "Barbie Girl" single to 40 radio stations across the U.S.
"And they started playing it heavily," says Nystrom, still apparently surprised at the turn of events that has brought them here. "Suddenly it's the most requested song on many of the radio stations, and the record company in America started to work it."
Not bad for four people whose only previous release was a 190 beats-per-minute dance version of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider", recorded under the name Joyspeed.
Now their biggest problem is trying to live down the year's most ubiquitous music video.
"We're not trying to be like Barbie Girl," insists Nystrom. "In fact, that's a funny story. We went to the (video) set, and the stylist we were working with on that set, we hadn't met before. And there were like pink plastic dresses waiting there for me and long, blond wigs. And I was terrified. I called up the record company and said, 'Send a person down here because I don't want to do this. I don't WANT to look like Barbie.'
"Now, there are so many kids coming up to me saying, 'Why do you look so beautiful in the video and you look like shit on stage?' No, really. Small kids do it. They want you to enter on stage in a long, plastic dress. They are so cute."
"Barbie Girl," by the way, has a suitably kitschy genesis. "That came from (bandmember) Soren," says Nystrom. "He was at a kitsch exhibition, and they had all this plastic stuff and old kitschy plastic things, and he came to the studio saying, 'Life in plastic is fantastic'."