The Drums on Athletics, Their New Video

 

“It was an homage to vintage athleticism, incorporating frustration and failure that the song talks about,” says Jonathan Pierce, lead singer of the camp buddies-cum-retro cultish icons the Drums, who got out of the gate with good-times ditty “Let’s Go Surfing.” The band’s second single is “I Felt Stupid,” four minutes of Pierce’s sunny, stuttering proclamations of love. Released last week, the black-and-white video for that song shows the boys trying their hands at various track-and-field events, with varying success. It’s a set of images that plays up the band’s androgynous New Wave-by-way-of-Weimar appeal. The directors, Chris Moukarbel and Valerie Veatch, brought the idea to the band, says Pierce, “Normally we would make a lot of changes, and we tend to be very controlling… but they hit the nail on the head and we loved their ideas.” He lists James Dean, Tab Hunter, and Marlon Brando as protoypes for the band’s simple image.

Not all was as sporting as it looks in the video, recalls Pierce, “While the video looks like a warm summer day, we met in a park in Brooklyn on a very cold day, and it really was 30 degrees. We were wearing shorts and tank tops.” Of course, they still came out winners: “I think the concept is very bold and thats what excited us the most. We believed in what we were doing and our happy with the results. “