On April 2, 2006, The Sunday Times treated its readers to a review of an exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art documenting the gloried and storied past of a notable German band from the 1970s some of you might remember called Lustfaust. Their sound followed in the footsteps of The Sweet and T.Rex with some power tools and a little electronica mixed in—this band was German after all), Lustfaust consistently wowed audiences in their favorite venue in West Berlin (the Cold War was still a thing, remember), Der Blaue Auster Bar. Of course their music was mainly the provenance of connoisseurs, so they never got nearly as big as Can or Einstürzende Neubauten. But back in the day, they impressed some people. 

The author of the article, highly esteemed cultural critic Waldemar Januszczak, gushed that Lustfaust “cocked a notorious snook at the music industry in the late 1970s by giving away their music on blank cassettes and getting their fans to design their own covers. There’s also an interview with the band’s surviving guitarist. ... [The exhibition] all makes for creepy and fascinating viewing.”
 

 
According to the bio on the band’s impressive Facebook presence,
 

Lustfaust were an experimental noise band active in West Berlin during the late seventies and early 1980s. Featuring a Japanese jazz drummer, Matsushita Bobby Kazuki, a Belgian guitarist/multi-instrumentalist, Guido van Baelen, a German bassist, Hans Berger, and the California-born, German/American Peter Kruger, the band was a curiously international mixture, initially formed through a mutual distaste for the inoffensive music that it was for the most part their job to produce. They freaked out and rocked out with cement mixers and guitars and an aggressive on-stage presence. They also pioneered the burgeoning cassette culture of the late seventies.

 

 
There was only one problem with all of this: There never was any experimental noise-rock outfit in Germany called Lustfaust. It was all made up, the invention of a British conceptual artist named Jamie Shovlin. Lustfaust supposedly played gigs in 1977, but Shovlin, their inventor, wouldn’t be born until 1978. Januszczak, the writer at The Sunday Times, had been duped. (Alas, the article that got Januszczak into trouble is behind a pay wall.)
 

Fake Lustfaust memorabilia
 
Januszczak’s colleagues didn’t come down too hard on him, I think because deep down, they all felt, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Both David Lister and Alice Jones in The Independent defended Januszczak. Jones called Shovlin’s mock tribute “a masterful, elaborate piece of fakery,” continuing:
 

A thorough researcher need only Google the name, and an entire page of web-links pops up, from Lustfaust’s Myspace profile, complete with mp3, to an entry on Wikipedia and even a very rare recording of Lustfaust’s album Uberblicken/Uberzeugen on eBay (sadly no longer for sale), not to mention www.lustfaust.com.

 
As Shovlin says, as befits a proper “conceptual artist” rather than some slimy con man, “I don’t think that the ultimate aim of the work is to trick someone into thinking that Lustfaust existed. ... It’s just slightly humorous when that happens.” He did sprinkle a reference or two to Spinal Tap in the curator’s notes, after all.
 

This split 7-inch actually exists.
 
It’s worth checking out that aforementioned Lustfaust Facebook presence—the elaborate ingenuity and TLC that went into it is fairly astonishing. There are lots of photos of the “band” in their heyday (1977-1979), and that includes studio pics as well as shots from gigs in Berlin and Rotterdam. There’s memorabilia and album covers up the wazoo, gig posters, buttons, you name it. Spend three minutes scrolling through all the pictures and you’ll begin to wish that they had existed, they looked like they were a force to reckon with.

Once the band, er, “existed,” the only thing to do was to ... put out some music! In 2007 Lustfaust put out a split 7-inch with Schneider TM, an actual German musical act. The two acts also played a gig together on September 13, 2007, at the improbably named Haunch of Venison venue in Berlin (no more Cold War by this time), which video is supplied below (it’s multi-part, but you know how this works).