{Ted Leo and the Pharmacists play at the Vera Project on Wednesday, September 8 with Past Lives, $13, all ages.}
This video for Ted Leo’s new single “Bottled in Cork” has been making its way across the various circles I run in on the internet. It’s pretty clever, parodying Green Day taking their American Idiot album to Broadway. It was directed by the comedy writer Tom Scharpling, who told Pitchfork:
It’s $125 to get into the punk musical, first of all. I will admit that for some reason I bought like a seventh-row seat. That’s on me. I could’ve probably gotten in for $75. But still, it’s on Broadway, and it’s punk, and you get handed a thing in crazy punk lettering– as if you’re getting handed fliers at a rock show– saying, “No photos! No video! No cell phones!” It’s like, “Hey, this is all edgy! This whole thing’s punk and outrageous! This is not Les Mis across the street, guys! But seriously, don’t film it with your cell phone. It’s our intellectual property.” It’s a funny experience. We had the idea for the video, and then I went and saw it, and it was like, “OK, we have to do this.”
The whole video is quite funny, with Paul F. Tompkins insisting on taking Leo’s music to the stage, Julie Klausner (who wrote a hilarious memoir called I Don’t Care About Your Band) as a choreographer and John Hodgman as a theater critic. Anyway, it’s well-worth the five minutes it takes to watch the video.
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