Platinum Weird: the greatest hoax in music history
Platinum Weird began, as so many things in music do, with a love story.
Long before he reached megastardom as one half of the Eurythmics, Dave Stewart met his soul mate – take that, Annie Lennox, I guess… No, this was Erin Grace, a mercurial, erratic, somewhat eccentric old soul who had a God-given musical and songwriting ability that Stewart was completely in awe of, and he knew the two of them could make amazing music together, so after a lot of convincing, the duo formed the band Platinum Weird and began working together… as much as Grace’s personality would let them.
As majestic as her smoky, soulful voice and blinding way with a rhyming couplet was, Grace was as frustrating as she was talented, and she was intensely talented – she was insecure, ill-tempered and prone to fits of melancholy, the kind that would get so bad she’d disappear for days at a time, returning with nothing more than a wry smile and a few new songs, except in 1974, she didn’t return… So devastated was she by the death of Nick Drake that she packed up all her belongings and ran off with Elton John’s boyfriend.
All that she left behind was a song called ‘Will You Be Around’, one that Stewart had wanted to record for decades. Finally, he found the outlet he needed to make the record after striking up a writing partnership with songwriter Kara DioGuardi. He gathered up all the songs that he and Grace had written and played them to DioGuardi when they decided to form a band together, but found that she knew all the words to ‘Will You Be Around’, as a hippy neighbour of hers who taught her how to write songs played it all the time.
Only two people in the world knew ‘Will You Be Around’, one of them was Dave Stewart and the other… Did not exist.
What was the real story behind Platinum Weird?
Yeah, if the story sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is. The truth is that all of the songs by “Platinum Weird” were in fact by Stewart and DioGuardi, who added the concept because they thought it would give the album a bit of flair. To be fair to them, they were absolutely not wrong, and they committed to the bit 100%. They even made an extended, in-character behind-the-scenes documentary for VH1, where Stewart and DioGuardi raided their address books for anyone who could give the story a bit of heft.
They even somehow made Stevie Nicks say on camera that she’s copied her entire style off of “Erin Grace”, who’d also actually been the woman that Lindsey Buckingham was singing about on Rumours, which is going a little bit far to be honest. The irony of all of this is that the whole Platinum Weird project came about from a place of abject failure. You see, Stewart and DioGuardi were first brought together to write songs for a client of DioGuardi’s, the Pussycat Dolls.
The material that the duo came up with, needless to say, did not work as Pussycat Dolls material. In fact, they sounded more like Fleetwood Mac than anything else, but the songs were still good, and Jimmy Iovine, the head of the Dolls’ label Interscope, encouraged the duo to keep writing and produce an album together – their first album, the pleasingly titled Make Believe, was released in 2006, but unfortunately, the band weren’t anywhere near as good as their back story.
Still, that would be a high bar to clear.