Addicted to Bad Ideas

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The World Inferno Friendship Society in the N.Y. TIMES today:
Addicted to Peter Lorre
N.Y. TIMES by BEN SISARIO

EXCERPT: Jack Terricloth’s aims are more ambitious. As leader of the World/Inferno Friendship Society, a Brooklyn band that mixes Weimar-style cabaret and roisterous ska-punk, he is the driving force behind “Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s 20th Century,” a self-described punk songspiel that is part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, including a performance at Webster Hall in the East Village on Friday.
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“Addicted to Bad Ideas” has quickly raised the group’s profile, however, adding highbrow arts institutions to its usually unglamorous* tour itinerary of bars and clubs. In the fall the show opened the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University in New Jersey, and in May it will have a short run at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C.

If the idea of a raucous rock band performing a semiclassical song cycle in a proscenium theater sounds somewhat incongruous, that is exactly the kind of challenge that World/Inferno Friendship Society has been cultivating for more than a decade. The group’s eight current players — membership has been somewhat fluid — play saxophones and accordion in addition to guitar and drums, and dress in suits and gowns. Jack Terricloth sings in a smarmy slur and maintains a constant devilish smirk. “We are a punk-rock band, and we play punk-rock shows, but our music couldn’t be more different,” he said. “Kids see us and think: ‘Guys in suits and makeup at a hardcore show? Come on.’ But we always have them by the third song, and then we’re something they have to accept about the punk rock scene and about the world. We’ve now entered into the great dialogue that is our culture, which is what any artist should do. I was going to say ‘any good artist,’ but any bad artist too.”

You can check them out here: Tattoos Fade (live video) or World Inferno Friendship Society
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* Unglamorous?