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And Finally
Menswe@r guitarist fakes platinum disc, hilarity ensues
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 26 November 2012
So, here’s a late contender for the title of my favourite music news story of the year. Last week former Menswe@r guitarist Chris Gentry mocked up a platinum disc he’d bought on eBay to look like it was for his band’s 1995 debut album ‘Nuisance’. He then posted pictures of himself with it on Instagram and presumably chuckled about it for a few minutes and got on with his day.
What he didn’t do was tell anyone that it was a joke. For a week. Possibly because he didn’t think anyone would believe it was real, though I’m listening to Menswe@r’s singles on Spotify right now and time has been kinder to them than you might expect.
Anyway, some people did think that seventeen years was a reasonable amount of time for it to have taken for ‘Nuisance’ to sell 300,000 copies. And said people tweeted congratulations to Gentry, leading – says Holy Moly – to the band’s frontman Johnny Dean starting to accuse people of stealing his money.
Various media outlets also reported the fake announcement as fact, including the NME, although the article on its website did at least come with a suitably dubious quote from Menswe@r-drummer-turned-6music-presenter Matt Everitt, who said: “To be honest, the idea that ‘Nuisance’ had sold 300,000 copies worldwide seems rather suspect to me, but Twitter appears to be very keen on the idea, so who am I to argue?”
He added: “Although now I come to think of it, my annual royalty cheques (approximately £83) would suggest something is amiss here. However, I’m currently expecting our long-delayed Led Zeppelin style reunion at the O2 and fifteen CD/DVD/Blu-ray boxset retrospective of our lengthy and critically acclaimed career to become a reality, just in time for Christmas”.
Hey, that’s a point. Rather than a big ‘get an old song to Christmas number one’ campaign this year, can we actually try to get Menswe@r’s album to go platinum by Christmas Day? I presume there aren’t very many physical copies still in branches of HMV, so we’d would need to convince Universal to release the album digitally (because, while the singles are available, the album isn’t), but I reckon this is still a goer. Someone start a Facebook group, quick!
