My fellow Record Collector columnist David Quantick beat me to the punch. Just as I had filed my copy on The World’s Worst Groups (My Bloody Valentine, since you ask), what should fall through the door but the latest issue of Record Collector with a column by David Q about, “The World’s Worst Groups.” Curses, and cunning in the extreme, as David also then wrote his next column about “The World’s Best Groups.” Now, using my column converter app, I am writing this column about The World’s Worst Fans. I may even follow this column up with a column about The World’s Best Fans. This is all one in the eye for those who think that Record Collector is a bit fusty. Record Collector is now beyond the zeitgeist. It is positively meta.
The thorny issue of which artist has the worst fans is deep and complex. Often great bands have awful fans. As do truly terrible groups. For the sake of argument, I’ll set a ground rule: It may be stating
the obvious that the fascist thug skinhead band Screwdriver have appalling fans, as does former black metal ex-Mayhem murderer, Varg Vikerness. So, no neo-Nazis and their followers. Oddly, I have met a few fans of The Manson Family’s music and they are generally OK. Perhaps they will make an appearance in next month’s inevitable “Best Fans” column.
The Clash were a band who struck genius as much as they struck a dumb pose. Consistency was never in The Clash’s armoury. It is in the armoury of their fans, who are consistently sentimental and earnest. The Clash man-gang-army are all post-middle age and very weepy about The Clash. Clash fans seem to think that being in The Clash – signing a major record deal, taking fun drugs (for fun) and singing songs around the world – was akin to serving in the World Wars. The fans have a grateful peasant-worships-veteran attitude to General Joe and Field Marshall Mick.
To critique the last gang in town is seen as akin to desecrating the Cenotaph. You don’t get this from Damned fans (stoical), or Johnny Moped fans (unsurprisingly, philosophical). Strangely, you don’t even get this from Dexys fans. But then, I guess they have been through a lot and are probably a bit shell-shocked.
There are worse fans than Clash fans. Smiths fans, naturally. Morrissey brilliantly groomed his army of teenage fanatics, much the same way that the dotty Symbionese Liberation Army locked poor old Patty Hearst in a cupboard and bored her senseless with Marx and Marcuse texts. Morrissey trapped thousands of impressionable British adolescents in their bedrooms and droned tatty old Shelagh Delaney phrases at them so effectively that now, in middle age, they have to fret about balancing their early Smiths love with the genuine fear of mad Moz’s somewhat “provocative” solo career.
So Stone Roses and Oasis fans notwithstanding (both disturbingly low wattage), which pop group has the worst fans? Well, surprise, surprise, it’s the biggest and best – The Fabs. Maybe there’s something about being a fan of the best that leaves one a little empty. The Beatles only really made half a dozen below-par recordings (by the standards of the time, Little Child isn’t so bad) so, where is there to go? You can’t just revel in how mind-bogglingly, perfectly fab the Fabs were.
You can’t even have a Fab you really dislike as they were all pretty great. All you can do is love them a little too much.
The first signs of loving The Beatles too much occurred in 1966. The group couldn’t get any bigger, so cue the Lennon “Beatles are bigger than Jesus” comments. And who were the first ones to burn their Beatle records? The Ku Klux Klan. That the Klan owned Beatles plastic would indicate that the KKK were once Beatles fans. This is the first evidence that the fabs had some really rotten fans. Not to be outdone by the Klan, up stepped Charles Manson (him again) thinking that “The White Album” was all about him. Charles was a crap fan. The 70s passed without Beatles fans doing anything really heinous to their favourite group, apart from abandoning them for the Beatle-lite of ELO and the Eurovision Fabs – ABBA. No one, not even Beatles fans, liked The Beatles in the 70s. Stand up Beatles fans, you are crap and disloyal.
The 80s and 90s made the transgressions of Beatles fans in the 60s seem fairly mild. I won’t do a joke about Mark Chapman, but it’s safe to say that Lennon’s murderer and Michael Abram, George’s disturbed would-be slayer in 1999, are the most nightmarish fans anyone could have. All this makes the fact that The Beatles song catalogue was bought up in 1985 by super-fan Michael Jackson seem like light satire.
The Beatles may walk it with the “Worst Fans” trophy, but the band with the most surprisingly ardent, unforgiving and angry fans are, historically, fairly insignificant. A few years ago, on social media, I made a slightly surreal joke about this particular band piloting a boat up the Thames to join the Queen’s jubilee flotilla. The response? Hundreds of angry tweets. The senders of these tweets? Fans of The Boomtown Rats. There is nothing as strange and dangerous as pop fans.
The thorny issue of which artist has the worst fans is deep and complex. Often great bands have awful fans. As do truly terrible groups. For the sake of argument, I’ll set a ground rule: It may be stating
the obvious that the fascist thug skinhead band Screwdriver have appalling fans, as does former black metal ex-Mayhem murderer, Varg Vikerness. So, no neo-Nazis and their followers. Oddly, I have met a few fans of The Manson Family’s music and they are generally OK. Perhaps they will make an appearance in next month’s inevitable “Best Fans” column.
The Clash were a band who struck genius as much as they struck a dumb pose. Consistency was never in The Clash’s armoury. It is in the armoury of their fans, who are consistently sentimental and earnest. The Clash man-gang-army are all post-middle age and very weepy about The Clash. Clash fans seem to think that being in The Clash – signing a major record deal, taking fun drugs (for fun) and singing songs around the world – was akin to serving in the World Wars. The fans have a grateful peasant-worships-veteran attitude to General Joe and Field Marshall Mick.
To critique the last gang in town is seen as akin to desecrating the Cenotaph. You don’t get this from Damned fans (stoical), or Johnny Moped fans (unsurprisingly, philosophical). Strangely, you don’t even get this from Dexys fans. But then, I guess they have been through a lot and are probably a bit shell-shocked.
There are worse fans than Clash fans. Smiths fans, naturally. Morrissey brilliantly groomed his army of teenage fanatics, much the same way that the dotty Symbionese Liberation Army locked poor old Patty Hearst in a cupboard and bored her senseless with Marx and Marcuse texts. Morrissey trapped thousands of impressionable British adolescents in their bedrooms and droned tatty old Shelagh Delaney phrases at them so effectively that now, in middle age, they have to fret about balancing their early Smiths love with the genuine fear of mad Moz’s somewhat “provocative” solo career.
So Stone Roses and Oasis fans notwithstanding (both disturbingly low wattage), which pop group has the worst fans? Well, surprise, surprise, it’s the biggest and best – The Fabs. Maybe there’s something about being a fan of the best that leaves one a little empty. The Beatles only really made half a dozen below-par recordings (by the standards of the time, Little Child isn’t so bad) so, where is there to go? You can’t just revel in how mind-bogglingly, perfectly fab the Fabs were.
You can’t even have a Fab you really dislike as they were all pretty great. All you can do is love them a little too much.
The first signs of loving The Beatles too much occurred in 1966. The group couldn’t get any bigger, so cue the Lennon “Beatles are bigger than Jesus” comments. And who were the first ones to burn their Beatle records? The Ku Klux Klan. That the Klan owned Beatles plastic would indicate that the KKK were once Beatles fans. This is the first evidence that the fabs had some really rotten fans. Not to be outdone by the Klan, up stepped Charles Manson (him again) thinking that “The White Album” was all about him. Charles was a crap fan. The 70s passed without Beatles fans doing anything really heinous to their favourite group, apart from abandoning them for the Beatle-lite of ELO and the Eurovision Fabs – ABBA. No one, not even Beatles fans, liked The Beatles in the 70s. Stand up Beatles fans, you are crap and disloyal.
The 80s and 90s made the transgressions of Beatles fans in the 60s seem fairly mild. I won’t do a joke about Mark Chapman, but it’s safe to say that Lennon’s murderer and Michael Abram, George’s disturbed would-be slayer in 1999, are the most nightmarish fans anyone could have. All this makes the fact that The Beatles song catalogue was bought up in 1985 by super-fan Michael Jackson seem like light satire.
The Beatles may walk it with the “Worst Fans” trophy, but the band with the most surprisingly ardent, unforgiving and angry fans are, historically, fairly insignificant. A few years ago, on social media, I made a slightly surreal joke about this particular band piloting a boat up the Thames to join the Queen’s jubilee flotilla. The response? Hundreds of angry tweets. The senders of these tweets? Fans of The Boomtown Rats. There is nothing as strange and dangerous as pop fans.
Luke Haines tweets at @LukeHaines_News
