Watch David Wain Play A Punk Cover Of The Smiths’ “This Charming Man” With Members Of Thursday, My Chemical Romance, & PUP
Did you know that David Wain plays drums? I didn’t know that. Wain was one of the cast members of The State, the great ’90s MTV sketch show, and he went on to a great directing career, making movies like Wet Hot American Summer, Role Models, and They Came Together. Wain is also a serious drummer who posts videos of himself singing and drumming different cover songs online online all the time. (Here he is, for instance, doing “Stayin’ Alive” and sounding like KK Slider.) Today, Wain joins a cast of punk heavyweights for a cover of the Smiths classic “This Charming Man.”
In recent weeks, Jordan Olds’ great video series Two Minutes To Late Night has been running its Hardcore Summer miniseries, saluting bands like Botch and Converge. In their latest video, though, they take a break from all that for an all-star take on “This Charming Man.” Geoff Rickly, from Thursday and the newly reactivated No Devotion, sings lead, with My Chemical Romance’s Frank Iero on guitar and PUP’s Nestor Chumak on bass. Jordan Olds joins in, and there’s also a running bit where Two Minutes To Late Night producer Drew Kaufman keeps trying to serve David Wain lunch while he’s playing drums. (Two Minutes To Late Night, it’s worth noting, paid tribute to Wet Hot American Summer last year with their version of Jefferson Starship’s “Jane.”)
“This Charming Man” sounds pretty weird as a punk song, especially with Rickly switching back and forth between singing and screaming, but it’s still a fun exercise. Everyone in this video dresses up nice, and I think the idea is that dressing up nice is charming. In the video, we see quick flashes of various different charming men: Roger Moore, Brad Pitt, Austin Powers, Paddington. Watch the Two Minutes To Late Night cover and the Smiths’ original “This Charming Man” video below.
Check out the Two Minutes To Late Night series here. I taped an episode of Two Minutes to Late Night‘s podcast Albummer pretty recently, so that’ll probably be up online soon unless they decided that my audio sounded too crappy.