THE DRUMS

This breezy pop ditty is accompanied by the new fashion in videos – Pointless Running. As also seen in Editors’ ‘Papillon’ which contains major pointless running but photographed in a grainy Pour Homme kinda way which makes it ARTY. The Drums get their running jollys in lo-fi graininess.

Above we see running. Well, more of a campy ‘oooher Matron’ style jog. These boys in bands, the only time they run is when there’s a free bar. I suspect the camera operator was dangling a six pack on a fishing line to make them move faster than a casual angsty shuffle, which is the primary movement of cool boys in cool bands. Oh wait, there’s only two of them, where are the rest?

Nope, fuck the rest of the band, first we have to establish that this song contains the word SURFING. And just for the uneducated lumps of flesh out there, this will be spelt out in huge letters across the screen. S-U-R-F… er, got that, thickos in the audience? Didn’t Frankie do this with RELAX? Ugh, 80s. Whatever.

The boys stop for a stretch, which involves much hopping about and unco-ordinated limbering up, making it quite obvious that these guys were picked last for any team sports and this video is all about showing their PE teacher, who clearly had it in for these pussies and made them run around a soggy field in tiny shorts while the rest of the class played hockey and whacked the shit out of each others shins in hilarity, that they are now real Men. Oh, the rest of the band have also shown up. Lucky that.

Everyone’s really giving it 110%. This is evident from the pain on their sweet faces. Jeans are chafing, lip syncing is getting harder as gasping for air takes over; nothing is worth this kind of effort. Even guitarist Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the Devil, didn’t have it this hard. ‘Run,’ screams the director. ‘Run, you assholes! Imagine I am a number 1 chart position. Chase me Chase me! Wooo!’

The Drums aren’t that stooooopid. They know a No.1 is a lie. So they all stop working out and via the magic of handclaps, their instruments appear. You know the singer pulls that  pissed off pose when his mum tapes over all his carefully Sky-plus’d episodes of Gok Wan’s Fashion Fix.

There was a bit more of that SURFING stuff going on. I was bored, so I suspect you’d be ready to put your eyeballs on EasyJet to somewhere vile. So let’s jump forward. Singer took off his jumper. Cos yellow makes you look sallow, generally. Then they were invisibly whipped into running again. A couple members died in the making of this, that’s why they’re no longer in the frame. Or maybe they just went home for a nice Radox bath and a cuppa.

It’s taken 60 hours of night-time running for The Drums to work out that this is a stupid endeavour. ‘Was any of this sponsored for charity?’ asks singer.  No, son, you haven’t saved any children, pandas or even a small patch of rainforest. Singer, devastated, throws his head back and screams ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’ to the night sky. He slows to a standstill but the camera truck rumbles ever onwards, totally missing the  tragic look of futility on his face. Singer goes home to cry and read Kafka. The Drums’ second album is entirely made of weird existential mumblings to the sound of heavy footsteps.