“Nearly 30 million plays on Spotify!” When fake bands reach their peak in real life, from Spinal Tap to Flaming Dildos | music

TThey sold out venues on both sides of the Atlantic. Their first ever concert opened for a former member of Arcade Fire. Their 2024 album has been hailed as one of the lost classics of 1970s rock. Their two breakout tracks, Bright and Masquerade, have racked up 700,000 streams on Spotify. In fact, by the numbers, they are putting on one of the most exciting rock performances in recent years. However it doesn’t really exist. They don’t even have a name.

The band is actually the unnamed five-piece that appeared in Stereophonic, a hugely successful, Tony Award-winning drama currently playing in London’s West End. Written by David Adjmi, with music by former Arcade Fire member Will Butler, Stereophonic received five stars from The Guardian, which praised its “moments of creative transcendence, including a late-night epiphany so thrilling that the sound waves will excite your internal organs”.

Success in the music industry is often framed as a triumph of individual artistry and extreme sweat. However, a large number of bands invented for novels, television shows, and movies have ended up producing real songs and even real hits. Spinal Tap, born from the 1984 mockumentary, has had a Top 40 single — and a concert hit, thanks to the latter’s sequel, which keeps the absurdity number at 11. The Commitments, the group from Roddy Doyle’s 1987 novel, have enjoyed the kind of success and longevity that many flesh-and-blood acts would kill for, starting with a chart-topping album (film soundtrack) to international tours.

Most recently, Daisy Jones and the Six’s debut album, Aurora, was reviewed in Pitchforkw when it was released as the soundtrack to Amazon’s TV adaptation of the 2019 novel by Taylor Jenkins Reed. Meanwhile, KPop anime film Demon Hunters, about rival teams, became the most-watched film on the platform ever.

Daisy Jones, The Six, and the unnamed Stereophonic band are often likened to Fleetwood Mac for their 1970s settings, transatlantic line-ups, and romantic turmoil. Ken Caillat, producer of the Fleetwood Mac album Rumors, sued the makers of Stereophonic over its similarity to his memoir, and settled out of court.

Rather than any one act, Adjmi says he was drawn to rock’s near-mythical mythology (the seed was Led Zeppelin’s Babe I’m Gonna Leave You) and the band members’ behind-the-scenes relationships. “I was very interested in this bleeding between the personal and the public, the professional and the romantic,” he says.

In addition to Fleetwood Mac, Adjmi looked to the Mamas and Papas, Arcade Fire, and the Metallica-in-therapy documentary Some Kind of Monster. He also drew on his experience in the theater industry: within a production, as with an ensemble, egos have to be managed “in service of this bigger thing.” For this reason, Adjmi resisted the “tired tropes” of rock star rebellion and hell-raising. “To be successful, you can’t,” he says only To throw the piano out the window.’ His research showed that cocaine was treated in 1970s gangs as something akin to coffee: ‘just another way to get up.’ Hence the one-kilogram bag casually dipped into his play.

Set exclusively in a recording studio, Stereophonic is in some ways an “office drama,” Adjmi says. The band came to life not in their music, but in the pauses between takes, “eating Chinese food and chatting over crunchy noodles.” As for non-musicians, enacting the recording process requires a steep learning curve: “I’ve watched every VH1 documentary,” he says. Soon topics emerged that were mostly about keeping the music flowing while keeping the musicians in check. This overarching tension in the play between banality and alchemy inspired artistic creativity. Butler was commissioned to deliver the music and lyrics. One early synopsis read: “You’ll hear something transcendent — and then someone will stop it for no good reason.”

Butler tried to write from the characters’ point of view, reflecting not the iconic songs of the era, but the songs they grew up with. “For example, Holly heard this reggae song she really liked at Eric Clapton’s house when he was just a piece of shit. Then they saw Sylvester opening for David Bowie in 1975 in San Francisco.” Butler even went ahead, imagining the band as a formative influence of Michael Stipe, and their seminal album looping in Cobain’s family home.

He points out that it was not enough for the songs to be good and consistent with the times, but they also had to serve the play, enhance the drama, and justify the focus on this particular band. “The whole play,” he says, “they talk, talk, talk. Then they play the music and you go, ‘Oh, that makes sense — that’s why they’re here.’” Those musical moments have to be very realistic.

For novelists, the challenge is different: to convincingly portray a group that perhaps no one will ever hear. Roddy Doyle was attracted to the idea of ​​writing about the band as “an excuse to get a group of people together”. He also considered a soccer team, but rejected it as too difficult. The Booker Prize-winner Doyle is not a musician and has never been part of a band. What made Commitments successful was his choice of perspective. The novel follows Jimmy Rabbit, a stubborn outsider who “knows his music” and is hired to manage the band. “By letting him just be a fan, I was on my way,” Doyle says.

It took Doyle, a 27-year-old teacher in Dublin, just six months to write the novel – and one month to come up with the band’s name. “I liked the mock seriousness. You weren’t 100 miles away from bands like The Temptations.” He had been listening to soul compilation tapes, which gave him the idea to “superimpose this black American shape on Dublin”.

The Soul lineup also gave him more characters — and thus more tension. Veteran trumpeter Joey “The Lips” Fagan was chosen from Rico Rodriguez and Saxa of the Beat specials, while their look was chosen from mismatched formal wear for comedic contrast. “There’s something completely ridiculous about the ape suit.”

In the first concert, Doyle puts readers in the crowd with Rabbit, skipping all those technical details about the instruments. As for the rest, he is free to imagine. “Trying to capture the bass sound, the guitar and the Dublin accent while singing the lyrics was a big part of the fun,” he says.

He wrote to those soul bars right into the night, putting his ear to the speaker to catch the words after turning down the volume because his neighbor complained. “It will be much easier now,” he says. “All I have to do is Google.” He sought to avoid the “seriousness” of music journalists, who dismissed his self-published account – until Elvis Costello endorsed it in the Irish music bible Hot Press. “If you want to know what it was like, read the Commitments,” he said.

One objection from critics was that Commitments achieved success too quickly. Doyle scoffs. “I just thought, what a damned Eggettes. Do you think the reader is going to hang around for 20 years until he gets good enough at playing the trumpet?”

The Commitments went on to have a “huge life” with a 1991 film and later a successful musical. Doyle co-wrote the film’s screenplay but sat out. “These are the people taking on the voices that have been in your head for years,” he remembers feeling afraid. At first they were “a little nervous,” he says, but once they relaxed, “it was a great experience.”

By contrast, “Flaming Dildos” can only be heard in the imagination of Jennifer Egan, and of readers of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Fools. Egan had been waiting for the opportunity to write about San Francisco punk in the late 1970s. As a teenager, she was “sort of an upholstered flower” on the scene, attending parties at the legendary boutique nightclub Mabuhay Gardens. “In terms of the environment, the atmosphere, the environment, it was just catnip,” she says. She was delighted when the band’s name popped into her head: “It’s laughably stupid, but it’s got a bit of a punch to it.”

Crime, Avengers and Germs – the most obscure bands Egan has ever seen play – are identified as local dildo idols. “The Mab” is their usual haunt. Egan’s memories of the expensive bar and the bathroom “splattered on the walls” added realism. I also drew from “bad videos” of these bands’ performances found online. Suitably “re-saturated” by the music of the time, Egan subsequently wrote What the Fuck? – “Best Song” by Dildos, which they rehearse in guitarist Scotty’s garage. “I had a ball,” she says happily. “The lyrics were very interesting: I think it makes sense as a punk rock song and is clearly sophomoric.” She even came up with a tune, but refused to sing it to me. “I think it’s the best on the page. That’s the God I ultimately worship.”

Brian Lee O’Malley, the Canadian behind the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series, also wrote the lyrics to a song that his hero plays with his garage band Sex Bob-omb. O’Malley, a musician himself, printed the guitar strings so readers could play them. It was all a hoax, he says, “to keep the book in people’s hands after they’ve read it. The song is pretty terrible if you actually play it.”

O’Malley was writing about his own experiences as an independent child in Toronto. “It was a world I knew well. I could approach it from every angle.” The Pilgrim’s Bass, a Rickenbacker 4003, was the model O’Malley had been lusting after in a store window, knowing he “could never afford it.” So there was “a bit of wish fulfillment” to it – but he also took inspiration from Harold Sakuichi’s manga series about a rock band. “The way he would draw them playing – you could feel the songs, even though you could never hear them.” When Sakuichi’s songs were recorded for an anime television series, O’Malley hated the results. “That’s not what they looked like in my mind.”

When it came to giving Sex Bob-Omb a real voice for Scott Pilgrim vs the World, the 2010 Edgar Wright film adaptation, O’Malley pointed to the loud, poppy songs of Ohio lo-fi band Times New Viking. The esteemed duo – producer Nigel Godrich and Beck (musician) – were tasked with making it a reality. “I felt like someone was going to go to great lengths to make my dreams come true,” O’Malley says. “And that was amazing — and a little surreal.” O’Malley can’t now tell the difference between the songs as he imagined them and those available for streaming. “We Are Sex Bob-Omb has like 30 million plays on Spotify,” he says in disbelief.

Butler says the holographic band became “real” to him once the cast was set. “It was like a TV show about starting a band,” says the musician, who took the actors into his studio to work on their songs, also giving them the experience of spending time in the kitchen while there was some stupid technical stuff to fix.

Their baptism by fire was the opening act for his new band, Will Butler + Sister Squares, at a party held for the release of their self-titled album. “All the girls hate it,” he laughs. “The boys were really into it.” He points out that Diana mentioned in the script that she played Madison Square Garden. “I wanted them to hear how loud the show was. To do it even in front of 200 people, you realize how terrible it feels in front of 10,000 people.”

Now the cast has performed many times that number on Broadway, while the original cast recording is available as an album. Adjmi is tickled by the “meta side” of his fictional band becoming reality. He says the success of stereophonic reflects a nostalgia for more authentic analogue pop. “There is a kind of naivety, or innocence, that I crave in the 1970s,” he says.

Scott Pilgrim – also adapted for television in 2023 – similarly broadcasts a time when joining garage bands was a teen ritual and local battles of bands were do-or-die. Music and culture have changed a lot since then, O’Malley says, “and maybe there’s a bit of a nostalgia dive.” He remains amazed at the long life of his comic book, which he started as “a silly publication for my friends.”

Meanwhile, Doyle is happy with the legacy of the commitments. “There are people who assume Mustang Sally is a traditional Irish song,” he says.