GOT a guitar but crap at it? Once sang in a band until you were replaced without even being told until you arrived at rehearsal? You still could have made it in these:
Status Quo
Three chords you could learn in a morning, one-line lyrics more repetitive than a football chant, repeat for next song with changes so minor only a musicologist could spot it. You’d have had to wear ridiculous double denim and have shit hair, but it’s a small price for inexplicable fame and fortune and opening Live Aid.
The Sex Pistols
The seminal leaders of punk lasted one album, kicked out the one member with talent and scored their best win with a record deal that didn’t last long enough for them to release music. If you looked right, swore right and liked a fight you’d have gone down in rock history.
Chumbawumba
Post-punk pissheads who preferred politics to music, bounced around the gig circuit for years and eventually scored a single hit, the Agadoo of alcoholism. The pugilistic ‘I get knocked down/ But I get up again/ You’re never gonna keep me down’ was inaccurate for a band who scored a single lucky punch before being laid out cold on the canvas of musical ineptitude.
The White Stripes
A former married couple pretending to be brother and sister, where he does all the work and she’s not very good at playing drums? Surely a novelty act? Perhaps their core appeal lay in inspiring a generation of equally bollocks groups who never got past playing in a mate’s mum’s garage. Now blissfully obsolete.
The Fall
Being a decent musician in The Fall got you sacked. Mark E Smith can’t be surrealistically ranting over expert playing, it showed him up. Hitting a few strings roughly in time with the rhythm section would buy you a career and your photo in the NME until you were abandoned at a crossroads in North Dakota for ‘liking Bowie’.
Anything remotely related to avant-garde jazz
Theoretically you have to be a virtuoso on your instrument to play it as badly as the exponents of experimental jazz. But there is a point where playing out of time and out of tune while following a leader out of his mind on speedballs is indistinguishable from being shit. It could have been your pathway to a long, if painful, musical career.
