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In 1999, when the Columbine school shooting happened, we were still recording, and that lyric made us all a little nervous. I thought it was interesting, too, that Brendan’s lyrics talked about the boyfriend bringing a gun to school. Teenage Dirtbag is a song about rejection, but then the good guy wins. You imagine it’s gonna be some crazy night where the stars align – or it’s going to be terribly tragic. As a teenager in the US, you think about the prom the whole time. It was story-based, almost like a folk song, and I liked the way it set the scene of this classic American high school. He played me Teenage Dirtbag on acoustic guitar and I knew immediately that it had the potential to reach a big audience. Philip A Jimenez, producer and multi-instrumentalistīrendan and I were two weirdos who found each other. When we play it, if the room is full, the crowd sing so loud we can’t hear ourselves. It’s this weaponised piece of pop culture. But every time it comes on the radio, I’m proud. As a production concept, that’s difficult. Like, hip-hop feet with rock’n’roll hands.
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And then, from the waist down, LL Cool J and Public Enemy. I have vivid memories of explaining to the producer, Phil, that I wanted Teenage Dirtbag to sound like Metallica, AC/DC, Paul Simon and James Taylor from the waist up. We went back to the drawing board many times.
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I wanted to irritate them by putting on a female voice. And I sang both the male and female parts because, when I was getting beat up, a lot of bullies were homophobic. The boyfriend character was based on a nameless conglomeration of the many douchebag bullies who wanted to show you their father’s gun. I mentioned Iron Maiden because The Number of the Beast was the most notorious example of “Satan rock” of the time. The girl in Teenage Dirtbag is wearing “ Keds and tube socks” because I was setting the narrative in the 80s. ‘A lot of bullies were homophobic, so I wanted to irritate them by putting on a female voice’ I was sort of watching out of the window. But I had ideas about what a social life was like. I was intensely lonely as a teenager – sometimes I would play guitar for 14 hours a day. I went to a boarding school where there were no girls, so there wasn’t even the opportunity for rejection. But back in the 80s, the traditional American high school experience and the prom date was already in the culture, with John Hughes movies such as The Breakfast Club, and maybe that helped me create the fantasy.