This isn’t actually about April Fools, I wouldn’t participate in any of that nonsense. More of a coincidence that the other day I was reminiscing about some of the unsubstatiated tales I’d heard when I was a youngster about the crazy antics of these pop stars.
These days there are no inaccurate stories circulating about popstars – the internet has made this impossible. If you hear an unlikely story about a favourite star, eg that Dave Mustaine wasn’t really born in the US, you just have to check Wikipedia. If a story goes round that Justin Bieber set light to one of his own farts on stage you can check for footage on youtube. If it’s not on youtube it didn’t happen. Simple.
When I first started listening to pop music in 82-83 it was a different world. Instead of the internet we had the playground, a cesspit of lurid rumours about the pop world. We had no way of knowing if what we heard was true or not.
So do you remember any tall tales you heard about favourite artists back in the dark ages? Did you believe them or did they seem just too outlandish even then? (Marc Almond fans have Spill points deducted as a handicap).
Here’s some that I remember, mainly from my youth although some are more recent.
Gary Numan: Unavailable for comment
WARNING: Some of these stories are VERY UNPLEASANT INDEED. Whatever degenerate depths the rock & roll has sunk to, it can’t seem to compete with the imaginations of a bunch of teenagers trying to outdo each other.
WARNING # 2 – Some of the others are a bit rubbish, not the sort of thing you’d actually even bother to make up. All part of the fun though . But I’m sure you lot can come up with some better preposterous tales that you’ve heard.
THE CLASH – Back in 83 I was watching robot dancers Tik & Tok supporting Gary Numan along with some classmates, one of whom was a Clash fan a good couple of years before me. During one song Tik & Tok appeared wearing gas masks. Clash Fan immediately denounced this as a rip off of the Clash who apparently also came onstage wearing gas masks. Whether this was as some kind of “political” statement, protection against tear gas, or due to Mick Jones’ flatulence wasn’t clear
Prof Wyngate concludes : sounds like a good “military chic” look but I have never seen, read or heard anything of the gas masks since, so I doubt it happened. Its not as if we are short on info about things The Clash wore is it?
THE CLASH part 2 – Clash Fan once told me that “the last time the Clash played Leicester” the violence at the gig was so extreme that it involved people being force fed broken glass. A few months later he asked if I wanted to go and see The Clash – I declined.
Prof Wyngate concludes : Gig violence was rife at the time, particularly at punk gigs but I have never heard of anyone being force fed broken glass – not even at the most violent oi gig. Wild exaggeration.
SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES According to Clash Fan the Banshees had a song called I Screamer that was “banned”. Intrigued I asked the obvious question -“why?” “Because of the lyrics” replied Clash Fan helpfully.And what did “banned” mean. By Radio 1? Outlawed by the government and the mastertapes seized by armed police? Information was thin on the ground.
Prof Wyngate concludes : I suspect he meant Mad Eyed Screamer by Banshees side project The Creatures. It featured the line “your balls are freezing in the breeze” so perhaps it didn’t get played on daytime Radio 1.
DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS– Some classmates told me that when he was young Kevin Rowland was so poor he drank urine. He had revealed this in an interview. No doubt as a Dexys fan I was being smeared by association with this story – “see that dirty man drinking wee – that’s singer of your favourite band, that is”
Prof Wyngate concludes : Never heard this story since, it seems a bit “4 yorkshiremen” to me. I know Kevin Rowland was keen to point out he wasn’t middle class, but this is silly. Kids taking Dexys scruffy image a bit too seriously.
DEXYS Part 2 According to the same classmates, Rowland had sex with an “old woman” when he was a teenager, It would throw a new light on at least one track on Too-Rye-Ay.
Prof Wyngate concludes : No idea, but I suspect it may have been an older woman. At that age 30 was “old” as far as we were concerned.
SEX PISTOLS – According to Clash Fan, at one Pistols gig Johnny Rotten took a dump on stage and challenged “beat that”! A fan got on stage and ate it!
Prof Wyngate concludes : I’ve never heard this story since , about the Pistols anyway. I have heard it about Frank Zappa…and Lou Reed with Iggy as the “eater”. Possibly true but certainly not about the Pistols. Most likely an urban myth.
SEX PISTOLS Part 2 – A recent one. According to a mate who has no interest in rock music, and certainly not punk, he was doing a computer course and found out that someone involved in the course used to be in the Pistols, but got kicked out because he was “banned by the Queen”. This made no sense – royal prerogative doesn’t extend to band line ups, surely? When I quizzed my mate the story was that he was kicked out of the Pistols by Malcolm McLaren because he had a criminal record.
Prof Wyngate concludes : If members were kicked out for criminal records they would probably be reduced to Glen Matlock busking. There was of course the tantalising prospect that my mate had come across founder Pistol Wally Nightingale, until someone pointed out to me that he had died in 1996. I’m pretty sure no other Pistol has got involved in IT education. Sorry, don’t believe a word of this.
THE STRANGLERS –In 1987 myself and a Stranglers fan mate were told by a fellow 6th former that Stranglers drummer Jet Black had died and was being replaced by Stewart Copeland… which sounded sort of plausible to me. But Stranglers Fan wasn’t having any of it. The Stranglers would never replace a member he said. If a member died or left they would just split up…
Prof Wyngate concludes : Clearly not true! But not for the reason given by Stranglers Fan.
GARY NUMAN – A mate once told me that one night, before he was famous, Gary Numan decided to go to his local chippy in a full spacesuit – where he had the piss taken out of him and went home very upset.
Prof Wyngate concludes : Your guess is as good as mine. But me and the mate in question were reduced to fits of laughter in the pub talking about it. What was he buying at the chip shop? NASA style food powder for astronauts? Or maybe it was space robots favourite food product , Smash? We were laughing so much we could hardly breathe. You had to be there really
TOM JONES / SISTERS OF MERCY Someone I knew insisted she had seen the man known as “the voice” on TV covering Heartland by the SISTERS OF MERCY. Now I know Tom Jones will cover almost anything and I can imagine him belting out Temple Of Love, but the AA-side Heartland? I like it, but surely to many it would just sound like a repetitive dirge, not suitable material for Jones.
Prof Wyngate concludes : I wanted it to be true, I searched the internet to no avail. But I think I’ve resolved this. Also on the Temple Of Love 12” is their cover of Gimme Shelter – and I recently stumbled across this
A few famous ones from back in the day – oldies around my age will know of them. Rod Stewart and his stomach, Jimmy Page and a fish, Mick and Bowie in the sack, and another well known one i can’t come up with right now. Oh, Richard Gere and a gerbil. One Rolling Stone reporter actually had the stones to ask Rod Stewart about it in an interview. He said it was total crap and i believe him (never really believed it anyway, i have no idea how that one started.
I’m pretty sure that the Led Zeppein fish story was true and Mick and Bowie although I heard in a wardrobe rather than a sack. I think there was an experimental phase where Bowie would try anything with anyone (according to the two most recent Bowie books I’ve read), so anything about him, I’ll take as true.
I heard it was Bowie and Jagger in the sack – then Bowie , Jagger and Lou Reed.
The really weird Bowie stuff is of course all the cocaine years obsessing about Nazis, wizards and the grail, but as far as I know this is all true.
I believe it all of Bowie, i am slightly skeptical about Mick. It’s probably true though.
Beth -
I think the Led Zep fish story was true too. May have read confirmation in Rolling Stone. I think the incident took place in Seattle.
Wyngate -
And with all of that weird Bowie coke phase, and the cleanup phase in Berlin, i have never heard any rumours about Bowie and Iggy.
Which leads me to a new theory – Jagger, Reed, Ronson etc were all just a smokescreen for Bowie and Iggy!
*ponders* true, I’ve never heard a whisper about Bowie and Iggy either, strange isn’t it? In the book “The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie And The 1970s”, by Peter Doggett, he revises almost everything about Bowie in the light of him being gay (or at least bi, I remain unconvinced that “Width of a Circle” is specifically about the joy of discovering anal sex), but even he doesn’t suggest that.
On a more local level, there was a girl at my school who loved the Mission, went to see them in St Austell, apparently got on the tour bus with them when they left and disappeared for a month. It was the late eighties and she was 16, so not too scurrilous, but rather shocking to us at the time.
That would probably seem more shocking now than it did then.
I suppose a lot of those bands in the mid-80s had followings that travelled around after them so maybe it was innocent…??
Inspiration comes when one goes for a walk – i thought your dump story sounded familiar, and it finally came to me. It was Karen Finley, and her husband doing the honors. She was a performance artist working around NYC when i lived there. Not an urban myth, unfortunately, there have been eyewitness accounts, and here’s one straight from the horse’s mouth. There may be footage on youtube, but i’m somehow not inclined to look for it! They did perform in London (but maybe not that bit), back in the 80′s i think, so she may not have been unknown to musicians there.
http://www.subcutaneous.org/fbook.html
One story I’d always hoped wasn’t true! It sounds as if the story was circulating but more famous names were slotted in.
Good news for Webcore – there was apparently a similar rumor around about Zappa and Beefheart – blessedly debunked here. Along with the Rod Stewart rumor, but sadly Led Zep again ruled essentially true.
http://www.cracked.com/article_15121_the-7-most-gruesome-rock-n-roll-legends-and-whether-theyre-true.html
Can’t think of any similar stories at the moment, but if Wikipedia had existed in the early 1980s I’m reasonably sure that I would not have been so easily convinced that a couple of boys I knew at school had just formed a band called ‘Madness’ and were about to release their first proper record…
Do you mean that Madness were actually formed by boys from your school, or that it was it was a rumour? Does this mean Baggy Trousers was about your school?
Kasabian were formed at my school, but several years after I left.
It was a lie: they claimed to be Madness, and because I didn’t have a television and hadn’t yet discovered pop music properly, I for one believed them…
I doff my pork pie hat to your imaginative schoolmates.
Not so surprising when schoolkids come out with this sort of stuff but I always find it interesting when adults do it. A mate of mine was in a band a few years ago and used to cover a song by a cult punk band in their set. It was introduced by the drummer who said it wasn’t actually a cover – he’d been drummer in the band in question and had written the song.
They believed him until a gig when a member of the original band was in attendence. My mate’s bands singer dedicated the cover to him during their set and started explaining that their drummer had written it – at which point the drummer got into a visible panic, his web of deception exposed in public! Why do people do it?
there was some rather unsavory stuff about Nick Cave and Lydia Lunch when they were in the Immaculate Consumptives together and Nick and Blixa when Henry Rollins was hanging out with them, but more hinted at than details. Apart from the fact that they didn’t clean their teeth much, which I’m sure is true.
Marc Almond, in his autobiography, suggested that he was very upset by the rumour about him and that it took a long time for him not to be associated with it. I admit I did believe it at the time and was less enamored of him than I might have been otherwise.
Steven Tyler is quite frank about what he got up to in the 70s as is Marianne Faithfull, plenty of scandal there!
I heard the Marc Almond story in the 80s and didn’t believe it (not sure why – I believed most things). For some reason it didn’t ever occur to me at the time that he might genuinely be gay! I didn’t include it in my list because it was a well known urban myth (has apparently been spread aroud about Britney as well) whereas all my stories I’ve only ever heard once.
I’m a bit surprised he was that upset as he seemed to play the sleazy image up to the absoloute maximum (famously the Sex Dwarf video) so you might imagine he’d welcome it , perhaps it was a step too far with too much of a homophobic undercurrent for him.
I googled Marc Almond rumour as i didn’t know it on this side of the pond. If it’s the same one you’re talking about – lo and behold – it’s the same as the Rod Stewart rumor! And also attributed to many others too.
http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/rockstar.asp
Mentioning Nick Cave I remember a story about the Birthday Party playing a gig when one of the band got into a confrontation with an audience member at which point Cave blew as gasket and started kicking the faces of people at the front of the stage. Needless to say the Birthday Party were soon exiting stage left very quickly. Quite probably a true story. Kids, don’t do drugs (and clean your teeth)
John Lyden did bring a toilet on stage at a PIL gig, which he sat on to “sing” us a couple of songs. No pooing took place.
That I quite like – very arty, post-punk, and a bit rubbish. I look forward to seeing if he repeats this “stunt” when I see PIL in August.
The man does butter ads now. He’s probably slotted to perform for the jubilee too.
He mentioned butter when I saw PIL a couple of years ago – getting the digs in before anyone in the crowd did I guess.
I heard ,from a friend of a friend who knew someone that a certain big nosed bard from East London who shall remain nameless “bonked” a girl after a festival and , despite “right on” credentials, refused outright to wear a condom.
The very use of the word “bard” gives the secret away here.