April Fools Day 2013 Wrap – Five Of The Best Music-Related ‘Gags’

So April Fools Day is done for another year (at least locally, and some jokes from the other side of the world are soon to be past their official used-by date too).

And naturally, a stack of journos forced to work over the holiday period couldn’t resist an attempt to catch their readers off guard by making up a fake story or two. We at Music Feeds decided not to partake in this, but I did suggest it to the boss late last night!

Musicians weren’t exempt from the April Fools circus, with the likes of Silverchair, Ed Sheeran, The White Stripes, Radiohead and David Bowie at the centre of gags that got our attention.

The Music Network decided to go with a story about Daniel Johns recording a new Silverchair album without his bandmates Ben Gillies and Chris Joannou, titled Four Seasons. While the story did have some elements of truth about it – Johns has been previously reported to be collaborating with Luke Steele and writing compositions based on the four seasons – the quotes of “Basically, the other two showed no real interest in being involved in this project in any capacity, and I’m not that surprised”, and “I’m not even sure I like it”, made it sound a little suss. Gillies also confirmed via his Twitter that the story was a fake, tweeting #aprilfool this afternoon.

Elsewhere, The 405 added Ed Sheeran to the list of collaborators for Daft Punk‘s new album, Random Access Memories. The story seemed straightforward enough, until they mentioned that the album would be released via ‘Daft Life Limited’, and added in the album’s tracklisting, but just the song lengths rather than song titles.

Clash did a yarn about David Bowie opening up a pet shop called ‘The Spiders From Mars’ (in reference to his classic track Life On Mars) and trumped readers when they clicked on the link to the floor plan. Meanwhile, The Guardian whacked together a supposed story about Radiohead‘s Thom Yorke working with Ted Nugent on a musical adaptation of kids book We’re Going On A Bear Hunt, based on a report from ‘Pool Flair’ magazine.

And to round it out, closer to home, Beat reported that The White Stripes were getting back together, and that Jack White had replaced sister Meg with his “other biological sister”, actress Tilda Swinton. On top of this, they declared that the band had already recorded a new album, titled Evangelical Trout. Nice try, guys.

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