When the darts star's face popped up behind Dexys Midnight Runners on Top of the Pops in 1982, it looked like a cock-up. Not so …
As news spread of the death of two-time Darts World Champion Jocky Wilson last weekend, Twitter was trending and Facebook was aflame with tributes to the great man. Many included YouTube clips. But curiously, few of those featured footage of his finest moments on the oche, such as the 1989 World Final thriller in which he overcame Eric "the Crafty Cockney" Bristow. The vast majority, instead, featured footage of a Dexys Midnight Runners Top Of The Pops performance from October 1982.
Why? Well, that was the TOTP edition that has gone down in folklore as featuring one of the great TV bloopers. Dexys were performing their cover of the Van Morrison song Jackie Wilson Said, a tribute to the titular soul singer, although the backdrop featured not Jackie Wilson but a grinning mugshot of Jocky Wilson, who at that time was a household name.
"I'm in heaven when you smile," sang Rowland, and despite the gap-toothed Scots arrowsmith's undoubted charisma, this unlikely juxtaposition of words and imagery made it all the more memorable.
Most viewers naturally assumed that clueless TOTP producers were behind this screw-up, and interviewers were probably too scared of Dexys' inscrutable frontman Kevin Rowland to ask him about it. When they finally did, though, he explained that it was his idea all along.
"For a laugh, we told the producer to put a picture of Jocky Wilson up behind us," he told the Guardian in 2002. "He said: 'But Kevin, people will think we made a mistake.' I told him only an idiot would think that. The morning after, the [Radio 1] DJ Mike Read said: 'Bloody Top of the Pops. How could they mix up one of the great soul singers with a Scottish darts player?'"
The version of events that has the producers to blame still survives (indeed, it was even repeated by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight this week). Maybe it endured because it served to confirm something that many music fans wanted to believe: that people making pop shows know relatively little about music, and in this case had never heard of Jackie Wilson.
This is a common characteristic of urban myths. They invariably serve to confirm our suspicions of how the world is, or at least how we would like it to be. And since such tall tales combine the extraordinary with the just-about-believable, pop music is a natural home for them, as the following shaggy dog stories demonstrate:
Bob Holness played sax on Baker Street
The idea that the avuncular host of ITV kids' quiz Blockbusters was a secret saxophone ace who lent his talents to Gerry Rafferty's biggest hit was appealing, in the mould of Monty Python's portrayal of an accountant as an aspiring lion-tamer. During the 1990s, this spread far and wide, until writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie revealed the truth in his 2004 memoir Cider With Roadies. He had made the story up for a spoof of media "did you know …" lists in the NME's satirical Thrills page in 1990. That didn't stop numerous wags referring to Bob's sax prowess on his death last year.
Charles Manson auditioned for the Monkees
This hair-raising "fact" used to make regular appearances among lists of things you supposedly "didn't know" about both Manson and the Monkees, until the age of the internet helped disseminate the truth, which was that Manson was in jail between 1960 and 1967, so he could not possibly have attended the auditions in September 1965. But this fiction proved powerful enough to overcome such obstacles, not least because it helped taint a manufactured pop group with the kind of evil we like to think is lurking somewhere beneath those toothpaste smiles.
Bono's "handclap" heckler
The story goes that everyone's favourite globetrotting politician and occasional rock frontman stopped a U2 show and began clicking his fingers slowly and rhythmically. "Every time I click my fingers," he was said to have told his audience, "a child dies of starvation in Africa." Shortly, a wag in the crowd yelled: "Well stop clicking your fingers, then!" Alas, in the real world, no one is quite that spontaneously witty. Especially in the front rows of a U2 arena show. According to urban-myth resource snopes.com, the story originated in Jimmy Carr's joke about the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign (which featured Bono and other celebs performing making just such a finger-clicking point). The story has since been retold starring everyone from Barack Obama to Fearne Cotton, and continues to help mean-spirited folk everywhere feel a bit more smug about telling charity campaigners to stick their do-gooding where the sun don't shine.
Keith Richards had his blood changed
The Stones guitarist's reputation for supernatural excess was enhanced by his story that he twice had his blood changed for the clean, non-heroin-addicted variety at a Swiss clinic in order to get off smack in the 1970s. Richards (above) eventually admitted that he made up these stories just to humour people when they kept asking him how he kicked the junk. He first denied, then re-confirmed his more recent claim to have snorted his dad's ashes, but can we really handle the truth? We like to think of our rock stars as living lives so hedonistic that they routinely venture way off the beaten track in search of the next high. Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks was said to have employed a roadie to blow cocaine into an orifice not usually associated with it, due to her nasal passages having eroded. And Freddie Mercury was said to have had parties featuring trays of cocaine carried around on dwarves' heads. But everyone who worked with both these artists has denied any such thing went on, despite plenty of motivation to do otherwise.
Marianne Faithfull and the chocolate bar
Just as we like to think musicians are enjoying way more recreational drugs during the average backstage soiree than we could consume in our lifetimes, we also think of them as hugely over-sexed libertines who spend their leisure time in tireless pursuit of new ways to get their rocks off. Hence the yarn that Faithfull was being pleasured with a chocolate bar when the Rolling Stones were busted for drugs in 1967, which she blames on police and prurient tabloids looking to demonise her as a woman of easy virtue. The same goes for other unlikely tales, such as that of the popstar who, it has been whispered in many a school playground, collapsed at a party and had several litres of male secretions pumped from their stomach. The tale has been attached to everyone from Marc Almond to Britney Spears over the years, despite the fact that the substance concerned is not toxic, and they would have had to minister to the sexual needs of the whole of Wembley Stadium at one go to consume the amount mentioned.
Not that any of these stories seem to have stained their subjects' reputations too heavily. In fact, while a Conservative MP might find their career in trouble after reports of unorthodox sexual practices with popular confectionery, pop stars only rise in our estimation. So, One Direction, if you're reading this and you want to add a bit of credibility to your snowballing transatlantic success, how about discreetly spreading that story about the three-toed sloth and the mountain of meow meow in a bathtub at the Chateau Marmont?
Amazing but untrue!
Other rock-related urban myths you may have encountered
Myth: The Beatles smoked a spliff in the toilets at Buckingham Palace when receiving their MBEs.
Truth: In a 1970 interview Lennon made this claim, but George Harrison later ruined our illusions. "What could be the worst thing you could do before you meet the Queen?" he asked. "Smoke a reefer! But we never did."
Myth: Marilyn Manson played uber-geek Paul in cutesy TV series The Wonder Years, and also had a rib removed so he could perform "a sex act" (© all newspapers) on himself.
Truth: He was never quite that cute or that desperate.
Myth: Mariah Carey once admitted to envying the starving, saying "I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff."
Truth: It was invented by a humour website in the early 1990s, then rapidly spread across the known universe.
Myth: There is a note known as the "brown note" that can cause vomiting and involuntary defecation in those who hear it.
Truth: The KLF claimed to have a sonic weapon that produced such frequencies in the 1990s, but it was merely one of their hilarious publicity stunts. The Discovery Channel TV series Mythbusters examined such frequencies in a show a few years ago, and found no such illness ensued.
Myth: Phil Collins once threatened to leave the country if Labour got in.
Truth: He made no such threat, and claims never to have voted since 1969 anyway. As for leaving the country, as he was said to have done for tax reasons in 1994, he told the Daily Mail: "I moved to Switzerland because I'd fallen in love with a woman who lived on Lake Geneva. As I said at the time, I'd have moved to Grimsby if she happened to live there. Inevitably, everyone in Grimsby turned around and said, 'Why's he having a pop at Grimsby?'"
