CityLife

The Virgins - NY guitar kids not as clean cut as they sound

The Virgins

DESPITE their band moniker, The Virgins are anything but.

Indeed, their distinctive promotional T-shirts feature four male appendages swaddled in bondage chains is hardly the sort of attire you might expect the Jonas Brothers to sport opposite their silver rings.

“There’s a sexual element to our music, band and lives,” explains ringleader Donald Cumming (CityLife tip: don’t Google his surname + Virgins).

“But it gets really boring to look at half-naked girls selling rockwear. There’s something about it that’s too stupid, irritating and phoney, so I thought it would be cool to have a T-shirt that was sexual but with dudes.”

Guitar anthems

Aside from possessing the most misleading band name since The Thrills, The Virgins are the latest buzz band from Brookly... sorry, force of habit... they actually hail from Manhattan, and write effortlessly danceable, hook-heavy new wave guitar anthems that sound like The Strokes if they had been produced by Nile Rodgers.

Think: Julian Casablancas with Limahl’s haircut.

Having been a central figure in New York’s arty demi-monde since he was a coltish 16-year-old, it’s fair to say the quartet have a more unusual ‘how we got together’ story than the perennial ‘We met at the Brit School…’ 

Three years ago, Cumming collided with hip young cameraslinger Ryan McGinley – responsible for, among other things, the photography for Sigor Ros’s last album cover – at an Eighties night.

Father was gay

 “The first thing he said to me was, ‘Could I maybe take pictures of you and your girlfriend having sex?’, laughs Cumming. He makes a ‘mind blown’ sound.

“That was so far outside of my thing. But there was something about him that’s cool, you know. He seemed tough.

“I should mention that my father was gay and Ryan was the first person I felt I could tell about it.”

Aspiring to be a filmmaker, and figuring the pay packet would be greater than his various ad hoc rent-covering jobs of washing dishes or serving coffee, Cumming jetted off on one of McGinley’s notorious naked photographic group excursions in the great American wilderness, where he was introduced to seraphic-faced guitarist Wade.

Gynaecologist joke

“It was basically just us and 10 other people naked in Mexico for about 10 days,” he recalls.

Returning home, they would later bump into each other (which you might envisage would resemble that old joke about the gynaecologist who remarks “I never forget a face”).

Then roping in acquaintance Nick on bass and later drummer Erik Ratensperger, they decided to form a group, recording demos that they would coerce their DJ friends into playing.

“That’s why there’s a dance influence to the songs,” notes Cumming.

Really loud

“We couldn’t play the songs in nightclubs if they weren’t danceable and we couldn’t get a sense of whether or not we liked them unless we could hear them really, really loud.

“And since we couldn’t play our instruments at the time so weren’t gigging, we had no choice but to play them in nightclubs and make them dancey.”

Bluffing their way into a deal with Atlantic (“we had to pretend we were a lot further down the line than we were to get the cash”), they haven’t looked back.

With their ragged lo-fi EP The Virgins making waves in 2007, Cumming set his gang a new challenge: to construct a glossy, radio-friendly pop record.

Mapplethorpe paramour

“Pulling in Dave Katz and Sam Hollander – the duo responsible for buffing up Gym Class Heroes’ sound – The Virgins have succeeded in producing a self-titled debut that is interesting enough to find fans in the likes of model Agyness Deyn, Patti Smith and one-time Robert Mapplethorpe paramour, artist Jack Walls.

He even appears in the video to the single, Private Affair. “He’s like the patron saint of this band.”

Yet the band remain mainstream enough for a colossal five songs to soundtrack one episode of Gossip Girl.

While they may not represent the dawn of the absolute new, there’s an enviable songcraft at work in likes of first single, the assuredly funky Rich Girls, a track that has its roots in Cumming’s experience of being broke surrounded by millionaires in his West Village school.

Pulitzer prize

His liquor store-owning father, an alcoholic who died at 42, announced he was homosexual when Donald was in high school, leaving him to go and live with his mother and aunt in Queens.

“I went to a school where the kid next to me, his father would be some Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the kid next to him would be from The Bronx,” says Cumming.

“It didn’t matter how much money you had, it was more could you hold your own?

“Like how brutally sarcastic could you be?

“So the poorest kid in the world could be best friends with the richest.”

Hearts of a nation

So, The Virgins, then. By this time next year (cue the ominous Kiss of Death klaxon!), expect them to have conquered the dancefloors, charts and hearts of a nation.

And possibly even convinced a Jonas Brother to don one of their perv-tastic tops.

The single, Teen Lovers (Atlantic) is released on February 23. The single, Rich Girls, follows on April 5. The Virgins album is out on April 13.The band play the Ruby Lounge on April 16.