10 Most Devious Punk Rock Tricks And Hoaxes
5. The Gonads - It Was All A Fabrication
The Gonads were said to have formed in Charlton, London in 1977 and been a part of the early UK punk scene as well as a precursor to punk’s Oi! sub-genre. Self-releasing a debut single Stroke My Beachcomber Baby on their own Scrotum label in 1978, they disbanded soon after.
In reality, however, they were formed in 1981 by a writer named Garry Bushell, who at the time was championing the Oi! movement through his role writing for music magazine Sounds (he would later move on to writing for British tabloid The Sun) and their elaborate backstory was a mere fabrication created as a joke. However, as he found people swallowing the story, Bushell kept his tongue in his cheek and stuck with it, and even today, some are still unsure whether or not the background story he had created in the pages of Sounds had any truth to it or not.
The Stroke My Beachcomber Baby 7" single (which of course never actually existed) still occasionally appears on record collectors’ ‘want lists’ even to this day.