Gay's "Another Green Stitch" is a 70s Collage Dream

Toronto's Gay write pop music that seems to come from another wold. It's a place we all know, where most of us have gone only through movies and old YouTube clips. It exists in the high schools of John Hughs' movies, and the sets of 1970s late-night talk shows—a place that's warm, glittery, and kitschy, but also a little bit dark and scary.

The video for their new song, "Another Green Stitch," captures that world perfectly. After a kid gets pegged by a baseball, he enters a dream that includes purple skies, stars, and images of Burt Reynolds and The Ultimate Warrior, all while Gay move across the screen doing choreographed dance moves. A collaborative project between the band, director Aaron Kopff, and editor Phil Hawkes, it's a rare and awesome moment of time-transcending cultural collage. We talked recently with Gay member Tom Avis about the video's production, the band's love for U.S. minor league baseball, and the Pythagorean diet.

Noisey: How did you come up with the idea for the video? Did it go through any other phases before you came to the final concept?
Gay: Originally we were talking to our friend, Seth Mendelson, who directed the video for the Digits song "Say Goodbye," and he had the idea of doing a thing like the scene in Boogie Nights, when they got to the drug dealer's house. We would be going to the drug dealer's house, and our friend Norman Wong, the photographer, was going to be the drug dealer character. He and Cam were going to do some kind of drug, and then Cam was just going to start dancing for him, and we were going to put together some kind of psychedelic weirdness for it.

We spoke to the director, Aaron, but he wasn't hugely into it. He basically said, "Let's just do a lot of green screen stuff, it'll be cool," and then he and Phil edited it together. I've never met Phil, I've just heard about him, but the impression I've been given of him is that he's this reclusive editing genius. He added the beginning, it was entirely his idea, but I love it to death. The weird baseball introduction, and a lot of the stuff, like the image of The Ultimate Warrior and Burt Reynolds and stuff, is entirely the product of Phil's weirdness.

You use a lot of 70s and 80s imagery in the video's collages. How did that come together?
That was something we talked about a lot with Aaron. We really wanted that aesthetic of the 70s British variety shows, where they had musical performances, and they did a lot of collage-y and weird pixelated video effects. And it was done in the era of VHS tapes so it was all a lot cheaper looking. We really liked the overlay and shot with that in mind, doing these things inspired by 60s psychedelic energy, but the cheesy value of seeing, like, Gary Glitter on Top of the Pops.

I sent Aaron a collection of videos that looked like that. I also sent him that video of The Ultimate Warrior where he gets cursed by Papa Shango and he starts bleeding form his hair line. I also sent him some Busby Berkeley videos, like those ones with big synchronized dance teams. The other guys sent him images too, along with images that suited what we had going on. The thing with Burt Reynonds and stuff is at least partially the product of Neil's moustache, right?

Are you guys into baseball at all?
We're all kind of into it, yeah. On our last US tour we went to all these minor league baseball games. Cam is actually pretty athletic, and Neil is in that Trinity Bellwoods league. When I played when I was young, all my memories of it were of getting hit in the head with baseballs. The only times I've ever been knocked out in my life were at around 11 years old, getting hit in the head in little league. It's something that we all enjoy the aesthetic of a lot, but none of us are super good at it.

Wait, you went to a bunch of US minor league baseball games? What was that like?
Yeah, last Spring, we toured down the east coast and back up to midwest. Every opportunity we had to see some minor league baseball, we took. We saw the West Virginia Power in Charleston, West Virginia, and they played in a huge ball field. They have a guy with a toaster who throws toast in the air whenever the team scores, and he and his drunk buddies yell "you're toast!" while the away team is batting.

We did that, and we went to a couple other ones. Cam was doing this weird thing too where, for some weird reason, he was doing what's known as the Pythagorean diet. It's when people only eat certain kinds of food because it's what Pythagoras ate, and what was available to him, and the idea is they can see the world the way Pythagoras did. Cam could only eat like, suckling pig, and he couldn't have beer, but he could have certain kinds of wine. He was actually going around the park trying to find wine, and they all thought it was funny, and actually found him four bottles of airport wine.

"Another Green Stitch" is the first single from Gay's recent cassette, To The Choir. Order it here.

Greg Bouchard is a writer living in Toronto. He's on Twitter.