Eighties is enough

Throw Me The Statue’s Scott Reitherman
on his innocent influences

BRAT PACK: Throw Me The Statue

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

“I just love the feeling you get from those movies,” says Throw Me The Statue’s singer and head honcho Scott Reitherman. It may seem like Reitherman could be taking it to the mountain for Cassavetes or Bergman, but he’s offering up props to the man behind the lens of such Brat Pack classics as Pretty In Pink and The Breakfast Club, the late John Hughes. “Watching a John Hughes film just gives you that same feeling of a really good pop song that will make you dance in your room alone. That one scene in Ferris Buelller’s Day Off where he’s making that faux-hawk in the shower, singing into his hand as if it’s a microphone and dancing around—that scene just became this visual statement for something in my life.”

If it sounds like Reitherman is just another ironic hipster chortling into his thrift-store kitten-sweater sleeve when mentioning the awkward ’80s, nothing could be further from the truth. On Throw Me The Statue’s sophomore record Creaturesque, Reitherman has pushed the neon-coloured jazzercise wear aside, and carefully mined the decade for its innocence, naiveté and uncanny ability to deliver a simple and compelling pop song.

“I think it would be silly to deny the influence that early-’80s pop has had on me. The first records I bought when I was six or seven were New Kids on the Block, Paula Abdul, Bobby Brown and the Beastie Boys, and those records definitely shaped a sort of pleasurable feeling inside my brain. I think the music we listen to when we’re 5 or 6 years old stays with us for life.”

Even with Reitherman’s ’80s flotsam dragging around like toilet paper stuck to his Chuck Taylors, it would be the late ’90s that would prove to be his biggest influence, with The Microphones’ Phil Elvrum providing the shining path. “I heard a Microphones record and that was a real epiphany for me, because it made me want to try and do something musically that was really personal and affecting. It was pretty much at that point I wanted to live my life as a musician.”

THROW ME THE STATUE CD LAUNCH
WITH THE BRUNETTES AND
ARCHIPELAGOS ON MONDAY, AUG. 31
AT IL MOTORE, 8:30 P.M., $10/$12.