Siriusly, Potter rocks!
With his packed schedule of quidditch practice, potions homework, and battles with pesky Death Eaters, Harry Potter probably doesn't have time to start a band. But he does have fans who will do that for him, in particular brothers Paul DeGeorge, 26, and Joe DeGeorge, 18, who don Brit schoolboy duds and rock out—mainly at libraries and bookstores—as the group Harry and the Potters.
Both brothers appear on stage as Harry, and they sing original tunes—with titles like "My Teacher Is a Werewolf" and "The Wrath of Hermione"—from the boy wizard's perspective. "Harry is very independent with a DIY [do-it-yourself] mentality," Paul explains. "He's very punk rock."
In the three years since the DeGeorges founded the group as a joke in their backyard in Norwood, Mass., they've recorded two albums and secured a considerable fan base, which came out in force at a recent show at the Donnell Library in New York City. Hours before the performance, the library started filling with groupies like 17-year-old Katherine Weiss, who was wearing a homemade T-shirt announcing "Voldemort can't stop the rock."
"I'm always playing [their songs] on my computer at school," she gushes, noting that her favorite tune is a ditty called "Sticking It to Dolores."
Weiss, not so surprisingly, is equally enthusiastic about the books, which the DeGeorges say is common among their audience members.
"Our fans are very smart. They read a lot. They're kind of geeky," Paul says. And they'd certainly have to know the books to follow the lyrics. Without having read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, it might be difficult to parse the true brilliance of lines like, "Maybe you shouldn't have brought up Cedric Diggory because I'd rather not talk about your dead ex-boyfriends over coffee." As Joe jokes, "We try to take the themes from the books and amplify them."
If only Hogwarts had a campus radio station.
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