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I knew Freddie Mercury was gay, I assumed however that he was gay with Brian May, and John Deacon and Roger Taylor were gay together. My friend thought this also. Didn't seem to bother us, very accepting 10 year olds we must have been.

So I assumed all their songs were similar.

My mum hated him & complained every time he came on TOTP. The only other people my mum ever complained about were robbers & burglars, so in my 5-year old brain made a connection & assumed she disliked Bolan as he was one of them. Couldn't have been because of his music as even at 5 I knew it was ace.

To form the Housemartins.

:/

just by the sound of the name.

Same raspy voice, apparently.

She also said that in the sixties everyone thought Leonard Cohen was a joke and people laughed at you if you liked him.

She might have been right about that, actually.

because he was openly shagging a 13-yr old. Turns out I was wrong & he isn't. But I still haven't worked out why.

I understood about making a record, but I thought he just pressed record and then played and sang whatever came into his head.

esp. John and Paul

must be MEGARICH and live in MEGAHOUSES and drive MEGACARS and have eleven MEGADRIVES.

but I remember being on a daytrip to France with my parents when I was a kid. My Dad picked up a U2 album in the hypermarche, and I thought it would be rubbish because the singing would all be in French (although in retrospect maybe that would have improved U2)

One of the reasons was the Queen is Dead album art and I think I saw a picture of Morrissey lying next to a tombstone. Could have been on a documentary.

Also my Dad was always talking about a singer who had died. Turned out it was Jim Morrison and I had gotten confused.

I thought that bands like Iron Maiden and Megadeth were super scary due to their artwork and merchandise, I didn't dare listen to them for that reason.

Turns out they are.

LOL

I had no idea what the song was actually about

and I thought that NME's news pages were filled by people phoning up every band to ask if they had news, or doing some detective work. I fancied that job.

*Hello, is that Ash? Do you have a new single out soon? Never mind, no worries. Do you know if Mansun are doing anything?*

I thought it was called "Seamoo" and was about some kind of whale/cow hybrid. I kept asking my mum to show me a picture of what a seamoo looked like, & she had no idea what I was on about until one day it came on the radio, & I said "This is the song about the seamoo".

and that 'Michael' was an American way of spelling and pronouncing 'Michelle'

remember watching top of the pops with my parents & wuthering heights was at no 30 & my mum said
this can't be much good then
because it was at number 30.

I remember seeing the headline of the paper saying Nelson Mandela was a hero, I assumed this meant he could fly and/or had superhuman strength.

I assumed the singer was just repeating the words over and over while lowering his voice. See also fade-outs.

My sister thought Gary Glitter and Gary Newman were the same person

and one of them was, 'What band is Thom Yorke the lead singer of?' and quick as a flash I answered Razorlight. Luckily I was 13 and nobody around me knew what an embarrassing mistake I had made.

Also, my dad insisted for years that Shaun Ryder was the lead singer of Joy Division despite my correcting him. I thought I'd got through to him, he admitted he was wrong but then added, 'It must have been New Order.'

I though it had something to do with collecting bits of lead and bismuth and stuff. (I was well into chemistry when I was a little kid)

was the best singer in the whole world, mainly because nobody in my family could hold the note for that same length. this logic didn't extend to any other singers talents, only hers.

insisted he was the black one

Lou Reed was in Velvet Revolver.

at six minutes or so, i thought this was the longest song ever recorded. i therefore proceeded to tell just about Everyone that this was the longest song ever recorded.

this went on for a while.

what a dick.

Because their first singles were In The Name of The Father and Reverend Black Grape I presumed that they were some sort of christian rock group.

The week after George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1 came out, some teenage lad of about 15 came in & asked for Vol 2. I told him there wasn't a volume 2, & that volume 1 had only come out last week. He said "I know - volume 1 came out last week, so volume 2 must be out this week right?" I said no, that wasn't the case, & we had no idea if or when volume 2 would be out but given Mr Michael's productivity rate it wouldn't be any time soon. He refused to accept this, & told us if we wouldn't sell it to him he'd go to HMV & buy it there, & off he went.

From that point on, "Try HMV, they'll have it" was our standard response to anyone who asked for a record we knew to be non-existent.

based entirley on the sound of his voice, that the lead singer of Counting Crows looked like an amalgamation of George Clooney and Adonis. I'll never forget her disappointment when she saw the overweight chap with a potted plant head. We left after 3 songs, every cloud eh.

Morrissey was dead
Bob Dylan was dead

was the reason The Beatles stopped

I was 4 when this came out and, like kids across the country, kept asking my mum what a ding-a-ling was. To keep me quiet she made the mistake of saying it was a kind of toy (as he sings about playing with it & so on) which meant that every time we went shopping, I would ask her if she could buy me a ding-a-ling. She even went through the charade of walking round a toy shop pretending to look for one & telling me they'd sold out, bless her.

it's oh so quiet yeah

I used to think that Jarvis was singing about staying at a Youth Hostel. The words "I wanna sleep with common people" had no other meaning to 6 year old me.

Turns out he just wore sunglasses to look cool as fuck all the time. It worked.

told me he was killed driving a truck. I beloved this to be true for many years. It was a shock to learn that he in fact died sitting on the toilet eating burgers.

This is a bit off topic, but my mate from high school thought (or claimed) that The Beatles just made songs up on the spot, and it all came to them naturally. No songwriting, rehearsing, nothing. They just picked up their instruments and played.

but my favourite instance of this sort of thing is a story of what happened when me and my friend went to one of our university's quite shitty rock society club nights. They played 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', and one of the Rock Soc people said -- after I'd mentioned my liking of Joy Division -- that she'd seen them at Sonisphere that year and that they'd played 'The Final Countdown'.

It was pretty funny at the time.

Reason: when I was twelve a friend of my mum's would get her eighteen-year-old son to tape me music. I was well into metal at the time and over a month or so she gave me most of Iron Maiden's back catalogue. When she gave me 'Fear Of The Dark' she said, "if you want something really heavy, I can get John to record some Stone Roses for you". So I assumed the were the heaviest of the heavy, like some unholy combination of Maiden, Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth. I soon turned indie and never did get the tape off him. When I was sixteen I finally heard the Stone Roses' first album and got a rather pleasant surprise :)

In retrospect, I assumed she'd mixed the Stone Roses up with Guns 'n' Roses. Bless her :)

My favourite DIS thread ever. Oh I've laughed :D

cos I'd only heard Fools Gold.

Then I listened to their debut album and was very surprised that it was all extremely melodic 60s tinged jangle pop, which sounded more like C86 than all the Madchester bands they were lumped in with.

Especially west coast US bands. Then when I heard about the Wrecking Crew, I started listening real close. All those music beds are pretty similar, and mistake-free! So now all those hit singles I used to hate on the radio sound much more appealing to me when I think about Earl Palmer, Carol Kaye, Glenn Campbell et al. Now THOSE guys are in my musical hierarchy!

was some terrible goth band. I imagined a heavily made-up female lead singer in black clothing and music like the Cure but even more miserable. I avoided them for some time, you can imagine how my mind was blown when I heard Loveless for the first time aged about 20. I even had dabbled with other shoegazey acts but assumed MBV were lumped in with them due to some kind of mistake.

I was convinced it was 3 females with a male drummer.

Despite my dad telling me many time they weren't (in my defence, some of their albums have a lot of vocal overdubs!)

was Bryan Robson's dad. I was so sure of this, in fact, that I laughed at my friends for not knowing it and made them believe it too.

I know this isn't music related, but I had to share.

and heard on radio 1, were ALL THE BANDS, like, there were no other bands, and they were bringing it to us like, hello people! heeeeere's what THE BANDS have been up to this week!

thank you everyone.

to buy singles until they were in the top 40. I was in town with my mum & she asked me if I was going to buy the new Soft Cell single. I said "I can't, it's not in the top 40 yet." She said "How do you think records get in the top 40?" I said I didn't have a clue. I just saw the top 40 display in HMV & thought they were the only singles available.