“I didn’t take Lemmy’s advice and I got a beer glass in my face”: The wild story of the spoof heavy metal band who beat Spinal Tap by a year

Spoof metal band Bad News posing for a photograph in the 1980s.

The forthcoming movie Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is a sequel to landmark 1984 ‘mockumentary’ This Is Spinal Tap, which introduced the eponymous band to an unsuspecting world. But Spinal Tap weren’t the first spoof heavy metal band – they were beaten to the punch by anarchic British outfit Bad News, whose own movie had come out a year earlier. In 2019, Metal Hammer talked to the comedians behind Bad News about dodging bottles of piss at Monsters Of Rock and recording a comedy cover of Bohemian Rhapsody with Queen’s Brian May.