THIS month Wheatus will be singing in Bridgwater on May 31, so we caught up with Brendan B Brown (the original Teenage Dirtbag) to learn all about the song that made Wheatus’ name back in 2000.
Brendan said: “When I was about 8 or 9, I was obsessed with Angus Young and ACDC. I used to beg my Australian friend to bring back new records that hadn’t yet been released here. By the age of ten, I had a serious ACDC collection.”
After college, Brendan got a job as soon as he could and brought the Village Voice every Wednesday. Each week he would answer all the guitarist ads, so for a while, his life consisted of working and auditioning.
In 1995, Brendan began messing around with the riff to Teenage Dirtbag.
He explained: “I was sat in my apartment in Queens, playing the riff and thinking about Cindy Lauper and how she would write a metal song.
“I wrote the first verse and chorus in a day and was stuck with just this for six months. While commuting to my job, which was about 45 minutes in New York traffic, I used to put on the tape of the music and sing along different lyrics – trying to find the right ones.
“I wanted it the first half to feel like a hip-hop song and the second half to feel like a Paul Simon meets metal track. It took a long time to but swing into the drum beat but we managed to get a record deal in 1999 and finished the album in March 2000.”
Since then, the record took off and the song still remains popular nearly twenty years later. To celebrate the band are releasing a new version of the original album in 2020, with twenty songs – to celebrate twenty years since Teenage Dirtbag.
Brendan added: “I went rifling back through old archives and found 10 or 12 songs that sounded right but didn’t make it to the album so we are releasing a new version of the old album.”
If you want to see Wheatus on tour, they are coming to Bridgwater Palace Nightclub on May 31.
And don’t worry, you are bound to hear your favourite Wheatus song.
As Brendan said: “I will never be sick of playing Teenage Dirtbag. It has always been a song I need to keep an eye on and practice to make sure I can still do it.”
To book tickets please visit www.seetickets.com/tour/wheatus
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