Bollock Brothers

The Bollock Brothers were Jock McDonald's idea, and McDonald, a London promoter, DJ and manager, started them up in 1979 with a punk's instinct for mischief. They made their name chewing up other people's songs: an English-language take on Serge Gainsbourg's "Harley David (Son of a Bitch)", a snarling go at Alex Harvey's "Faith Healer", and raids on Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf, David Bowie and Vangelis. The cheek peaked in 1983 with an electro remake of the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, featuring Michael Fagan, the intruder who had got into the Queen's bedroom at Buckingham Palace. For a spell in the early '80s, Johnny Rotten's brother Jimmy Lydon sang with them too.

It wasn't all covers. "Horror Movies", "The Bunker", "The Legend of the Snake" and "The Slow Removal of the Left Ear of Vincent van Gogh", with Killing Joke's Martin Glover along for the ride, showed a taste for the lurid and the absurd. The Prophecies of Nostradamus in 1987 carried "Harley David", which rock radio's listeners embraced, and The Last Supper followed in 1989.

Nine studio albums later they were still at it, mostly across Belgium, Germany and France. Last Will & Testament (2009) was dedicated to longtime keyboard player "Big Mark" Humphries, who died in 2008. McDonald drowned at Bundoran on 26 July 2025, at 69.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.