WHAT better way to ruin your reputation as a musician than by launching a dreadful side project? Here are some of the worst.
Fat Les
At the height of Blur’s success in 1998, bassist Alex James took a break to form the band Fat Les with fellow Groucho Club wankers Keith Allen and Damien Hirst. Together they created the unofficial World Cup bellow-along ‘Vindaloo’, which was about as much fun as being pissed on by a drunk football fan, but somehow reached number 2 in the charts.
Velvet Revolver
Apparently a ‘supergroup’ made up of Guns N’ Roses minus Axl and some blokes from Stone Temple Pilots and Wasted Youth, but they may as well not have bothered. Velvet Revolver didn’t make anything nearly as good as their previous bands did, and largely seemed to be a way for Slash to keep publicly displaying his collection of top hats.
The Frog Chorus
When John Lennon dismissed ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ as ‘more of Paul’s granny music shit’ he couldn’t have imagined how much worse things were going to get. Luckily for him – depending on how you look at it – he was spared hearing ‘We All Stand Together’, McCartney’s terminally twee song from Rupert and The Frog Song. It’s a song so sickeningly cloying it makes ‘Spies Like Us’ sound like Led Zeppelin.
Tin Machine
Why would a global superstar decide he wanted to be a nondescript part of a slightly rubbish band again? It would be like Adele joining Atomic Kitten. Maybe he was discombobulated after giving up the industrial quantities of cocaine he was used to taking but, whatever the reason, Tin Machine was the least loved of his reinventions, and for good reason.
The Cross
The biggest impression Queen’s Roger Taylor made on the public was when he appeared as a disturbingly attractive schoolgirl in the video for ‘I Want To Break Free’, which was wrong on many levels. So it’s no wonder that the band he fronted as singer and guitarist went virtually unnoticed. Probably for the best though, as the songs are shit.
