Mythbusters

There used to be so many good stories about musicians - Status Quo and the kangaroo, Mama Cass and the ham sandwich, everyone and the horse. Now PR, YouTube and clean living have almost killed the rock myth. Brian Boydlooks at the truths, the falsehoods and the shining beacon of hope that is Pete Doherty

COMEDIAN Paul Merton has an interesting take on the internet. In the past, the sort of jokes, rumour, gossip and half-truths that are now peddled on a daily basis on the net, used to be literally transported around countries - starting out in urban centres and spreading like a fan - by long-distance lorry drivers. For Merton at least, the beauty of the lorry-driver model of communication, as opposed to the net, is that at least there was some quality control at work.

Modern folklore, in the shape of the urban legend, thrives like bacteria on the ubiquitous vector that is the net. Whereas in the past these distorted or sensationalised tales were disseminated in an almost rite-of-passage manner, now they flow incontinently on the electronic medium.

Cultural anthropologists have long been fascinated by the function of urban legends. When decoded, a good deal of these stories have a cautionary moral tale at their core (don't hitch-hike by yourself late at night etc) while others help us to adjust to change (all those urban legends about "new" phenomena such as cash-points, mobile phones etc).

The urban legends that surround rock'n'roll are a type unto themselves and really only came into their own during the 1970s when the megagroups began turning it up to 11: flying in their own private plane, playing to hundreds of thousands of people at one gig, having drug dealers on the payroll and underage groupies on tap.

When Led Zeppelin, The Who and The Rolling Stones were boys behaving badly, it was at a time when drugs were something "other" and exotic - not like now when you can score in the queue for the 46A (to use a completely random example). Pre-Aids, everyone swung a bit more and driving a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool had yet to become clichéd behaviour.

The majority of rock's urban legends come from this time and without the speed of communication we have now, it would take months to hear the full shock-and-horror story, by which time the initial story had been embellished out of all control. From Mars bars to mud sharks, we could only listen open-mouthed to these tales from a twilight zone.

This was a time when people actually believed Paul McCartney had died in a car crash and been replaced in The Beatles by a look-alike called William Sheppard. Aside from Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil, this was probably rock's first great urban legend.

The majority of the true/false stories included here come from that era for the simple reason that the rock legend is now in a moribund state. The main reasons for this are - in no order of importance - the distinct possibility that truly bad behaviour may end up on YouTube within minutes; the commonplace trade-off deals between PR companies and the print/broadcast media ("bury that story and we'll give you another one instead"), the simple fact that even the most libertine rock band can't risk any form of criminal record because it means never being allowed into rock music's most lucrative territory - the US (unless you are actually a Libertine - in which case it's a bit too late for that). They're also the risk of scuppering lucrative endorsement deals if you're caught in delicto with a pair of 14-year-old Norwegian twins (as one big star once was, but the story was killed by his "people") or if no amount of laser surgery will get rid of those tell-tale track marks on your arm.

Hence today's desperate fascination with the drug-hoovering, tabloid-magnet that is Pete Doherty. For many, he has provided rock with a last chance to acquire bad-boy credentials and it is entirely fitting that the only myth to gain currency in the past few years features the Babyshambles singer.

The story is that the man we know as Pete Doherty is in fact a holiday-camp Buddy Holly impersonator called Trevor McDermott who was created by those well-known media pranksters the KLF in order to expose "the frailties of our celebrity-obsessed culture".

According to the KLF: "Our plan involved proving three theories we have about current society. The first is that in the so-called 'alternative' scene, everybody is too scared of missing The Next Big Thing to worry about anything else. To prove this, some session musicians were provided to compose the rest of the 'band', The Libertines, and rumours of explosive gigs were leaked to the media.

"The gigs in question never actually took place, but we didn't have to worry about that. Soon the buzz around The Libertines was so frenetic that journalists were falling over themselves to claim to have been at the front of every single fictional gig.

"We feel that our culture has become an enormous soap opera. We don't care what a person thinks, or creates, or contributes. We just care about what they do in their normal lives. Especially when it's something they shouldn't be doing."

Remember this one because it may be the last rock urban legend you will hear. These stories don't stand a chance in an era when Radiohead are so disturbed to find that their support act have trashed their dressing room, that they go in and clean it up themselves; an era when an appearance on Jonathan Ross carries more weight than a John Peel session used to; an era when the NME is merely the indie equivalent of OK! magazine; and an era when Robbie Williams enters rehab to bravely battle his horrific addiction to . . . coffee.

Further reading: Status Quo And The Kangaroo by Jon Holmes (a jauntily written collection of rock's best and worst urban legends) published by Michael Joseph, £12.99

Fact: incredible but true stories

Dress me kangaroo up

(late 1970s)

On tour in Australia, Status Quo's tour bus hit a kangaroo. There's really only one thing to do when you have just knocked over and killed a kangaroo if you're Status Quo. You prop the kangaroo up, dress him in the Quo uniform of denims, white shirt and leather waistcoat and take a photograph.

All went according to plan until the photographer took the picture and the non-dead, merely concussed kangaroo woke up. Taking a look at the Quo posse, the kangaroo did what any marsupial (indeed, any human) would do in the circumstances and legged it into the outback. Status Quo stood around for a while laughing at their little prank, tickled that somewhere in the outback was a kangaroo dressed like them. The laughter swiftly subsided when they realised that the keys of the tour bus, which they were now locked out of, were in the pocket of the denim jeans they had put on the kangaroo. A poetic victory if there was one.

When Bob met Van

(mid 1970s)

Bob Dylan and Van Morrison have always enjoyed a rather strained relationship - it seems neither quite knows what to make of the other. For a while in the 1970s they shared the same accountant, who had the perfectly whizzo idea of inviting these two music legends out for dinner together. Surely the tales would be flowing and many words of wisdom would pass.

At the dinner, the bemused accountant was mortified to find that neither musician would utter a single word. The silence was excruciating. After Dylan had left the table, Morrison turned to the accountant and spoke his first words of the evening: "I thought Bob was on pretty good form tonight, didn't you?"

"Leave it Omar, he's a raspberry"

(1982/83)

By rights, the above phrase should be the most famous rock'n'roll utterance ever. It isn't (yet) because not many people know the story behind it.

Actor Omar Sharif and punk icon Ian Dury were simultaneously in the same London casino. Dury was a fan of the Oscar-nominated Sharif and went over to tell him this, but did so just as Sharif was placing a bet during a particularly tense gambling moment. And if there's one thing you don't do to Omar Sharif it's to interrupt him when he's placing a bet during a particularly tense gambling moment.

One thing led to another and soon Sharif and Dury found themselves trading punches. Over rushed Dury's friend to break up the fight with the immortal words: "Leave it Omar, he's a raspberry."

It may help to know that "raspberry" is a contraction of "raspberry ripple" which is Cockney rhyming slang for "cripple".

And Santa's not real either, Liam

(2004)

Noel Gallagher took his brother Liam to see Spinal Tap play live in New York's Carnegie Hall. Liam was excited because he's a huge Tap fan. As it happened, the Spinal Tap actors had just released their folk-music parody A Mighty Wind, and that night decided to play the hapless folk band from the film.

"This band is shit, why are they supporting Spinal Tap?" asks Liam. As Noel Gallagher told the Guardian: "I turned to him and said "But those three are in Spinal Tap. You do know they are American actors? They're not even a real band. They're not even English. One of them is married to Jamie Lee Curtis." Liam just said "I'm not fucking having that" and walked off right up the middle of Carnegie Hall.

"He's never watched Spinal Tap since. He had seen the film and loved it and thought they were a real band."

Are you ready to rock?

(mid-1980s)

Kiss - them of the long tongues and Halloween make-up (and no, bassist Gene Simmons never had a cow's tongue grafted on to his tongue to make it look longer) were playing a gig in the US midwest. It was nearing the end of the show and the band were ready to pull a big song out to finish.

"Are you ready for a big song?" Gene Simmons asked the crowd, who roared back in the affirmative.

"What's the second song off the Destroyer album?" he shouted at them. "King of the Night Time World the crowd shouted back.

There was a pause. Simmons said "OK. What's the first song off the Destroyer album?" "Detroit Rock City," the crowd shouted back.

"You've been a great audience! This is our last song, Detroit Rock City. Goodnight!"

Fiction: too-good-to-be-true stories

Stevie Nicks found an imaginative new way of ingesting cocaine

This story has been around for far longer than Stevie Nicks and in the past has been attributed to any number of actors and musicians. Nevertheless, many still believe that it's true and that it refers to the Fleetwood Mac singer.

The legend goes that Nicks's cocaine use was so prodigious during the Mac's late-1970s heyday that her septum fell out. So instead she used to get a roadie to blow cocaine (through a straw) up her bottom. Nicks herself is well aware of the rumour, saying a few years ago: "Maybe this came about because a lot people know I have a hole in my nose, a hole you could fit a belt through. But the story is absurd."

Mama Cass choked to death while stuffing a ham sandwich into her mouth

The Mamas and Papas singer died in 1974 at the age of 32. The story first leaked was that the very large singer choked on her own vomit while eating a ham sandwich. The rumour gave some stupid people a bit of a chuckle, but it is totally without foundation.

The coroner's report found that Cass died of heart failure. In all probability this was brought about by her weight, but let's leave the ham sandwich out of it (as maybe she should have done during her lifetime). No evidence of food was found in her trachea.

Keith Richards has his blood changed regularly in order to stay alive

This is usually used as an explanation for why Richards is still standing despite his admitted colossal drug use.

First, it's only cheating Olympic athletes who go in for this type of extreme internal makeover. Second, if you really did have all your blood drained away and replaced with sparkling new stuff and you still looked as wrecked as Keith Richards, you'd probably ask for a refund. Third, Richards himself is the source of the story, explaining once that he was tired of asking questions about his health and drug use so he just made it up on the spot. As he did with the story that he snorted his father's ashes.

The Beatles had a toke in Buckingham Palace while waiting to receive their MBEs

The only reason this story ever started was because, even back in 1965, The Beatles were feeling a bit uneasy about having to meet prime ministers and act as some form of spokesmen for a generation when really all they wanted to do was to grow their hair long, bum around India and make "mind-bending music".

They fed this story to the press themselves in an attempt to undermine the idea of The Beatles joining the establishment by accepting MBEs from The Queen. Years later, John Lennon admitted that "we would have been far too scared to do it".

Countdown's Bob Holness played the saxophone on Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street

Whenever Rafferty's song comes on a pub jukebox, there will always be someone loudly announcing that the sax part was played by Bob Holness of "Can I have an 'S' please, Bob" fame. The story was dreamt up in a pub by journalist and DJ Stuart Maconie as an experiment to see how far an urban legend could travel.

Oddly enough, the myth has led to another myth (a sort of meta-myth, if you like) which is that whenever anyone mentions this story you point out that it is incorrect but that Bob Holness did in fact play the guitar break on Derek and the Dominoes' Layla. Watch their confused faces as they try to process this.

SEE ALSO . . .

Marianne Faithful and the confectionary incident

It didn't happen (mainly because Mick Jagger is far too stingy to waste a good Mars bar).

Any number of male (preferably but not necessarily gay) singers having their stomach pumped and the doctors finding a gallon of horse semen

Why is it always an exact gallon? What form of measuring device were they using as they went along?