Andrew Garfield has a secret band called The Shangles, the Oscar-nominated actor revealed in a new interview, and the group performs covers of songs from the 1976 musical film Bugsy Malone.
The revelation arrived in an interview, as reported by E! News, and it landed with the left-field charm fans have come to expect from the actor.
Nobody had a Bugsy Malone covers band on their list of what Garfield does with his spare time.
What Andrew Garfield said about his secret band
Garfield kept the details thin but the pitch clear, and he made no attempt to dress the project up as anything grander than what it is. Asked about his life outside filming, he laid it out plainly, giving the band its first proper piece of publicity in the process.
“I do have a band, we do Bugsy Malone covers. Look out for The Shangles. Look out for a group of middle-aged guys doing Bugsy Malone covers.”
The choice of material is the funniest part. Bugsy Malone, released in 1976 and directed by Alan Parker, is a gangster musical performed entirely by children, with Jodie Foster and Scott Baio among the young cast, and its songs were dubbed by adult singers.
Garfield is not a stranger to a musical number either. He earned his second Academy Award nomination for playing composer Jonathan Larson in Tick, Tick… Boom!, a role that required him to sing throughout, and he had already picked up his first for Hacksaw Ridge.
What the Andrew Garfield secret band is planning next
There is more coming, apparently, though Garfield refused to say what. He teased that the group has something lined up and then shut the door on any follow-up questions, citing the superstition that every performer eventually falls back on when a deal is not yet signed.
“We have some plans. We have some big plans, but I can’t really say it until it’s official, I don’t want to jinx it.”
Ambition is not the point, though. Garfield made sure to shrink the whole thing back down to size before anyone started drafting festival line-ups in their heads, describing the band in the least commercial terms available to him.
“It’s more of a passion project.”
The middle-aged framing is doing plenty of work here as well. Garfield is 43, an age at which most people are not forming tribute acts to a children’s gangster musical, and that gap between his day job and his side project is a decent part of why the reveal travelled.
What that means for anyone hoping to catch The Shangles live is still unclear, since Garfield has not named a venue, a date or a single bandmate. Until those big plans stop being a jinx risk, the band exists mostly as a very good anecdote.
