An official's threat to ban the Teapacks' song "Push the Button" from the Eurovision competition has revived the quirky Israeli band's career.

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The Teapacks are enjoying a comeback — thanks to a Finnish official trying to ban the group's "Push the Button" from the Eurovision song competition.

Israel's entry to the contest, the song has been interpreted as a jab at Iran's hard-line president and his nuclear ambitions. And the controversy has made "Push the Button" ubiquitous on the local airwaves and pushed the number of viewers of the song on YouTube to about 60,000; it's also ended a career slump for the quirky, two-decade-old Israeli pop band the Teapacks.

The song — a tongue-in-cheek melange of styles including hip-hop, French chansons and klezmer, and sung in three languages (English, French and Hebrew) — refers to "some crazy rulers" who "hide and try to fool us with demonic technologic willingness to harm."

Shifting abruptly to heavy electric guitars, the chorus warns: "They're going to push the button/Push the button/ Push the bu- push the bu- push the button."

"I don't want to die," croons Kobi Oz, the band's lead singer. "I want to see the flowers bloom/ don't want to go kapoot-kaboom."

Israel selected the song as its entry for the Eurovision contest, a 50-year-old pan-European institution renowned less for serious music than for unbridled kitsch and terrible costumes but which is nonetheless a major TV event every year.

Israel won the contest twice in the 1970s, and then again in 1998 with a song by Dana International, the country's best-known transsexual.

This year's competition will be held in Helsinki, Finland, in May.

After hearing "Push the Button," Kjell Ekholm, one of the competition's Finnish organizers, said: "It's absolutely clear that this kind of message is not appropriate for the competition."

Never mind that the song appears to be a general meditation on the dangers of life in the nuclear age or that Finland's Eurovision entry in 1982, "Nuku Pommiin," was about the threat of nuclear war. (It came in last.)

Ekholm was concerned that the song was referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, and that this constituted a political statement not allowed in the competition. Ahmadinejad has suggested that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and Israel fears that his country's nuclear program might have that purpose in mind.

The members of Teapacks disregarded Ekholm's criticism in a recent interview. Oz said the song is about "living in the shadow of danger and laughing in the face of terror."

And who were the "crazy rulers" mentioned in the song?

"You can fill in the blank," Oz said. "There are several crazy leaders in the world, and there are a lot of terrorists in Russia, in Spain, in Israel and in the United States."

Oz hails from Sderot, the town in Israel now best known as a target for Palestinian rocket squads firing from the Gaza Strip. He formed Teapacks in 1988, and the band went on to dominate the Israeli pop charts throughout the 1990s with a blend of Eastern rhythms and Western pop, accompanied by Oz's offbeat lyrics.

The band's star has faded somewhat in recent years, so the Eurovision controversy has been a welcome boost.