The Virgins spent 10 months of 2008 on the road, and as they embark on their first North American headlining tour, it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down any time soon.
Born and bred in Lower Manhattan, the band’s sound is a relentlessly catchy blend of new wave and disco with roots planted between CBGB’s and Studio 54.
“It’s the music that was around when we were kids,” says guitarist Wade Oates over the phone from a stop in Minnesota. “We liked the whole white-rock disco thing that people were doing in the late 70s. Bands like The Kinks and The Rolling Stones would just try and fail at doing disco, which we thought was cool. But we also took a lot of influence from what Nile Rodgers was doing in the 80s with the band Chic.”
The Virgins were conceived on a photo shoot in Mexico when uber-hip New York photographer Ryan McGinley introduced Oates to frontman Donald Cumming. The pair got to talking about their various musical projects, and the band was born.
But Oates insists that modeling was never his dream. “That’s the one and only time I’ve ever done that, and if anything it’s just cemented the fact that I hate getting my photo taken.”
Oates, Cumming, and bassist Nick Zarin-Ackerman played together for a year without a drummer before Atlantic Records caught wind of their performances at downtown Manhattan parties and quickly signed them. They immediately held exhaustive auditions to find a drummer, finally settling upon Erik Ratensperger.
From there they marched into the studio, enlisting celebrated hit-maker Sam Hollander (Gym Class Heroes, Boys Like Girls) to transform the bedroom demos of their first EP into the glossy, radio-friendly pop of their self-titled full-length.
“Everyone had been telling us to do the gritty, downtown rock thing, and we thought, that’s been done so many times, especially over the last ten years. Let’s go with the radio guy. Let’s not go with the guy who records everything lo-fi. Whoever is the biggest guy [out there], let’s go with that guy.”
“He brought a lot to the table. There was a lot of butting heads—it’s harder to work with a guy who has his own vision. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but in a totally positive way.”
Once the band had found their signature sound, their creativity began to take off.
“We kind of flourished in the studio,” says Oates. “‘Teen Lovers’ was written on the spot. The song was done in 22 hours. Donald and Nick had this idea of doing a Latin thing—it started as a Gloria Estefan song, but it totally didn’t end up that way.”
Instead, with its breezy yacht-rock vibe and a sweeping chorus hook, “Teen Lovers” turned out to be one of the album’s most irresistible tracks.
With their debut album complete, the boys got a massive boost in exposure from an unlikely source—the CW’s glamourously vapid teen drama Gossip Girl. In a twist of fate, the band and the soap opera turned out to be a perfect combination.
Tunes like “Rich Girls” and “She’s Expensive” document casual romances with vain heiresses, and the album’s subject matter fits Gossip Girl so well, it’s almost as if The Virgins had been specifically commissioned for Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf.
“It was really random,” says Oates. “When someone first told us about it, we thought it was the Gilmore Girls, so we were kind of weirded out. Once someone explained it to us, we thought, ‘Oh, that’s awesome and stupid and the right kind of weird. It’s a show about young kids that are rich and take drugs—sign me up!’”
“I remember the Twilight-looking kid (the brooding Chuck Bass) was listening to ‘Rich Girls’ while he was really bummed out. That was the most random thing I’ve ever seen. But they had him listening to it on his iPod, [portraying that] this character likes this band, which I thought was pretty cool.”
But life has funny way of mirroring art, and Oates confides that he too has experience with a debutante from the Upper East Side.
“I dated a girl that lived on 105th and 5th when I used to live on 13th and 5th. I used to ride my bike all the way up to her house. I was so tired that I used to fall asleep every day and she broke up with me.”
Does Oates imagine the band will call Lower Manhattan home forever?
“We’re gonna move to Nice and wear straw hats. That’s the plan, but not until we’re well into our 60s.”
The Virgins play the El Mocambo (464 Spadina) tonight with Lissy Trullie and Anya Marina. Tickets are $12.50 at Ticketmaster and Rotate This.
