The most interesting pieces of pop music trivia that you know (that are 100% false)

1621. Morrissey is really seriously ill

1622. Sinead O'Connor first shaved her head prior to a casting call by the producers of the fifth film in the Star Trek franchise to replace Persis Khambatta as Ilia. O'Connor won the role and was featured prominently in the film and in all subsequent Star Trek films based around the cast of the original series. O'Connor left the music industry after her popular character was spun off into her own series.

1623. The so-called "demon" make-up that Gene Simmons dons is actually his real face. The other guys in Kiss all wear make-up to help buoy his crippling low self-esteem.

1624. The Scott Walker featured on the upcoming SunnO))) collaboration is not *that* Scott Walker, and is in fact a financial adviser from Swindon who shares the same name.

Phillip Phillips' real name is Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip LaDon Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillip Phillips, which he shortened to Phillip Phillips so people wouldn't forget his name.

that was 1625.

1626. Soundgarden's Chris Cornell dated TV mainstay Oprah Winfrey briefly in the spring of 1993 after meeting her backstage at an awards show. The relationship was reportedly tempestuous, but the straw that broke the camel's back came when Cornell sang her an acapella version of a new song he was workshopping. The song, which eventually became the #1 smash "Black Hole Sun," was later released on their hit album "Superunknown."

"The moment I heard those strangled vocals," Winfrey allegedly told a close confidant, "I knew that he couldn't be the One. He was talking about 'snakes of disgrace' or something... It was weird and I just had to leave."

1627. Olivia Newton-John originally wrote "Hopelessly Devoted To You" as the official AmWay theme song during her brief association with the company. After her messy departure, she hastily remade the song into the Charmin toilet tissue jingle we recognize today.

1628. Blurred Lines was originally written as a jingle for the American Optometric Association, as an encouragement to people to check their prescription. Thicke's manager heard the jingle when collected a new pair of sunglasses, and realised that with some slight lyrical changes, it could be a summer breakout hit, and paid the jinglewriters $200 for use of the song.

Many of the lyrics for Haddaway's "What Is Love" were lifted from a collection of letters written by Immanuel Kant to his favourite mistress. However, the "baby don't hurt me" line was Haddaway's personal creation, which he insisted on leaving in the song despite protests from his record company.

^^ 1629

1630. I read that the lyrics actually date to the year 1629.

1631. Jimmy Osmond murdered thirteen fans at a 1973 Hong Kong concert when the then 10-year-old Osmond wildly fired a .45 from the stage. Osmond fled the country immediately thereafter and was never formally charged with the murders. His infamous 1993 comeback album, I Killed Thirteen People, went triple platinum in the US (but only double platinum in Hong Kong).

1632. Beck Hansen is estranged from his birth family as a result of his choice of career. Beck was born into the Hansen crabfishing dynasty, starts of the Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch, the younger brother of Sig, Edgar and Norman, who work aboard the Northwestern. It was expected he would join the crew as a deckhand, but after one trip – during which the Northwestern tradition of forcing greenhorns to bite the head off a raw herring caused a violent allergic reaction that laid him up for the whole voyage – Beck fled Alaska for LA to become a singer. His family disowned him, with Sig telling his younger brother: "You're a loser, baby. And I'm going to kill you."

1633. Lil' Kim recently set a new world record in the men's marathon, clocking in at 2:02:57. Her attempt at doing so incognito, under the alter ego of "Dennis Kimetto" from Kenya, failed due to the transparency of the pseudonym: she used her middle name Denise for the forename, while "Kimetto" is obviously just a masculinized Italian translation of "Lil' Kim".

1634. Jonathan Richman disowned his son Adam partway through the first series of Man Versus Food, not because of the obscenity of the show's premise, but because Adam refused to feature the Richman family fish restaurant – specialty: the CLT, or cod, lettuce and tomato sandwich – in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

1635. Once it was clear that their music career was on the wane, Matthew and Gunnar Nelson opted to become surgically reconjoined.

1636. Bobby Vee has been mentioned in more than 300 Grammy acceptance speeches, making him the most thanked person in Grammy history. Bobby Bare poked fun at this phenomenon in his Shel Silverstein-penned country hit "God, Mom, and Bobby Vee". Vee is reportedly "baffled and amazed" by the massive outpouring of gratitude from musicians he has never met.

1637. The Beach Boys still receive over a hundred letter per year from fans who would like them to know the names of their favorite vegetables. the most popular responses are "potato" (27%), "corn" (21%), "carrot" (17%) "marijuana haha" (11%), and "PHIL SPECTOR IS WATCHING YOU SLEEP" (6%). Brian Wilson submitted the results to the FDA in 2004, but they dismissed the data as "trivial and unscientific".

1621. Morrissey is really seriously ill

― ultros ultros-ghali, Wednesday, 30 July 2014 20:01 (6 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oops.

you killed him!

1638. On March 15, 2011, unbeknownst to even the members thereof, the band Life Without Buildings accidentally reunited at the open mic night of a pub in Giffnock. Will Bradley absentmindedly drummed his fingers on a table two away from the booth wherein Sue Tompkins recited a draft of poetry for a friend's advice, while Chris Evans had fried bass with chips at the bar and Robert Johnson -- who now wears a fake mustache to keep paparazzi at bay -- performed a scorching rendition of "All Along the Watchtower" onstage. When asked of this historic moment in a rare interview in 2014, Evans replied "I think I remember the fish."

^actual lol

1639. Hank Williams, Jr. began sporting his trademark beard, sunglasses, and cowboy hat in order to obscure the extensive facial injuries he received when Waylon Jennings threw a drawer full of kitchen knives at his head. During his recovery, Williams wrote the song "Waylon, I Apologize, And Your Pork Chops Were Splendid", which later became the theme for Monday Night Football.

1640. The stage name "Lorde" is a sly reference to the Royal New Zealand Air Force's Long Range Air Defense (LORAD) program. Ella Yelich-O'Connor is apparently unaware of her function as a recruiter/propagandist/mind control agent for the New Zealand armed forces.

1641. Quincy Jones sold his soul to the devil and partakes in diabolical, ritualistic sex. That's why he looks so young.

1642. Bruno Mars is actually two different people duct-taped together.

1643. If you run the Carter Family's 'Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow' through a spectrogram, you get a ghost:

http://i.imgur.com/CWrULmo.jpg

spectogram analysis did not exist when the song was recorded in 1927, and nobody knows how the Carters encoded this hidden message without the aid of computer technology.

1644. The song "Allentown" was written by Billy Joel as parody of Bruce Springsteen. Joel accused Springsteen of mimicking him with Springsteen's smash hit "Hungry Heart."

1645. XTC Bassist Colin Moulding shares a small cul-de-sac in rural England with Iron Maiden crazy-man Bruce Dickinson. They once had a minor land dispute but have since resolved it.

1646. Arthur Lee has been covered more times than any other American artist with the exception of Elvis Presley.

1647. Mama Cass's remains were accidentally baked into a shepherd's pie.

1648. To this day, even after fifteen years together, none of the members of Broken Social Scene know the names of anyone else in the band. To deal with this problem, the band uses a complex system of personalized coloured stickers and hand signals in order to give instructions to one another.

1649. Techno legend Juan Atkins' real name is Billy Corgan.

1650. Jimmy Page loves seeing his autograph on Ebay and encourages fans to bring guitars for him to sign.

1651. Chunky A had a stint as a late night talk show host which he cut short when he had the opportunity to replace Russell Hitchcock in a revamped Air Supply.

1652. Deee-Lite were the winners of the third season of "Amazing Race Japan".

1653. Natalie Prass started her career as the keyboardist for the Fugees. Her real name is Natalie Sanchez but decided to change her name after a brief affair with Pras Michel. They are still good friends.

1654. Credits to Beyonce's "Countdown" list an unknown co-producer under the Lamb moniker. Richard D James confessed in a soundcloud comment that its's a alias he frequently uses when producing R&B and pop singles.

1655. John Lennon wrote an answer song to David Bowie's "John, I'm Only Dancing". However, "David, It's Still Annoying" was considered subpar by everyone involved, and to date its only appearance on record is as a bonus track on the first Japanese CD reissue of Mind Games from 1987.

1656. Bob Dylan is the oldest rock star to have personally registered his own vine account. It primarily features clips of him telling his grandkids to have a good day.

1657. In 2011, David Bowie wrote a list of his five favorite Christian Bale performances but has been unable to find a "proper home" for it in the media. In 2014, he replaced Newsies with American Hustle.

1658. Rick Dees was convinced by his manager to record "Disco Duck" as the radio friendly b-side to "Disco Fuck" (the eponymous theme song from his debut as a porn actor). Surprisingly, both songs received equivalent levels of airplay.

1659. Tim McGraw was amused to discover his current physical similarity to Weiland recently, and is currently fond of writhing shirtless in front of wife Faith Hill and singing bits of "Interstate Love Song" and "Vasoline" before giggling "You married Weiland!"

1660. Def Leppard named their third album Pyromania (following Rick Savage's 1982 arrest) to commemorate the fact that all of the band's members had been convicted of arson.

1661. Brian Jones' nickname for Charlie Watts was "Chuckie". Charlie walked out of the film Child's Play due to the sentimental association, but told his friends he just thought it was a stupid movie. The truth was revealed to a potential biography ghostwriter in 2003.

1662. The Residents added Extreme's Gary Cherone and a rotation of members from the Little River Band and Urban Dance Squad to their ranks before they changed disguises and renamed themselves Slipknot.

1663. Rob and Fab of Milli Vanilli sang backup on a series of minor German electropop hits in the mid-eighties. After one too many takes (and beers), the duo stormed out of the studio in the middle of a session. The incident gave them a reputation of being difficult to work with and as a result, most top German producers of the time refused to work with them ever again. Frank Farian later dubbed them Milli Vanilli because the name "sounded like an Italo-disco outfit". This clever naming slight-of-hand achieved its desired result -- their true identity was never discovered by the people running the top German recording studios of the time. Entering the studio to sing on the records risked blowing their cover, so the band's management had no choice but to hire singers while Rob and Fab learned to lip sync along to their own records in Frank Farian's living room, lest they all risk being boycotted by the unforgiving music industry of the day. While their debut album was being recorded in their absence, Fab Morvan dedicated himself fully to his favourite hobby -- chess -- and by late 1988 was ranked as one of the top 50 chess players under the age of 30 in Bavaria.

1664. Ringo Starr's real name is Ringo Goldblatt.

1665. Both of Mr Mister's big hits – Kyrie and Broken Wings – were written as protests by singer Richard Page (real name Marinos Ouzounidis) after he was excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox church. Page had travelled to Istanbul to picket the Patriarchate of Constantinople, after he was banned from resetting the words of Greek hymns to REO Speedwagon and Styx melodies to play in his local church. When priests tried to remonstrate with him, he struck them, causing his excommunication. In 2009 Page set up his own church, and now – at last – he is able to play his MOR hymns to a loyal flock.