Eddie Jordan (centre) preparing for transition to ageing rocker. Photograph: PA
Over the past few years we've rather grown used to out of the ordinary (the ordinary being chaps with guitars and hair that makes their mums shed a tear) acts gracing the stages of UK festivals. Yet the bill for this weekend's T In The Park seems to boast the strangest inclusion yet. Namely Eddie The Robbers, a band set to follow electro geeks Hot Chip's Sunday night set. You probably haven't heard of Eddie The Robbers, but there's more than a whisper of a chance that you've heard of their drummer, Eddie Jordan, former boss of Formula One. The Robbers, as people probably won't be calling them, have been described as "like the Commitments, but not naff" by Geoff Ellis, the man who booked the band. I for one, am not quite convinced. But Jordan isn't the first and, it pains us to say, certainly won't be the last celebrity to try to transfer their skills into a more musical field.
Clearly, many celebs assume that, because they're a little bit famous, everyone'll want to hear them. OK, granted, they may have a smidgen of a point, but surely we're never listening because we think we're going to end up with the next Rolling Stones on our hands, are we? We're listening because we think it'll be a bit funny.
So in mind of this rock'n'roll moonlighting we've had a think about some of the main offenders. In fact, moonlighting is an appropriate term, because it brings us straight to one Bruce Willis, who, whilst he was starring in said classic eighties drama-rom-com made his very own album, The Return of Bruno, which was, amazingly, released on Motown Records. Other Hollywood stars to be momentarily lured away from the big screen with an axe to grind include Keanu Reeves who played bass with Dogstar and Russell Crowe, whose band Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts morphed into The Ordinary Fear of God. William Shatner's been releasing hilarious sprechgesang albums since 1968, whilst Jared Leto and Steven Seagal also dabble and, closer to home, Rhys Ifans' band The Peth are releasing their debut album this September.
More successful are the ladies of the silver screen. 2008 has seen two actresses, Scarlett Johansson and Zooey Deschanel (with M Ward as She & Him) proffer up some quite listenable indie offerings, whilst Juliette Lewis actually seems to have chucked in the movies for a life spent doing a Freddie Mercury impression. We'll politely skip over Minnie Driver's acoustic folk career. Sorry Minnie.
Though actors seem to dominate the world of sidelining famous folk, like Eddie Jordan, these stealthy rock stars can spring up anywhere. Jamie Oliver drummed in a band called Scarlet Division - whose single got to a not entirely pathetic number 42 in the charts - while both Pat Cash and John McEnroe have at times ditched their tennis whites for leathers, and a gang of cross-party MP's - led by Lembit Opik, of course - recently played a gig with Razorlight's Johnny Borrell for charity do, the Big Ask. We're not sure who that was more embarrassing for.
A certain Dr Karl Kennedy of a place called Ramsey Street in Australia also fronts his own group (what do you mean, he's not a real doctor?), and it seems we critics are in on it too - Mark Kermode's plays double bass in Americana group the Dodge Brothers. So if you don't mind hanging on, we've a little something we've been working on we'd love you to hear...
