The story behind
Platinum Weird began when pop songwriter
Kara DioGuardi was sent to England by Interscope exec
Jimmy Iovine to write for
the Pussycat Dolls with former
Eurythmics member and fellow songwriter
Dave Stewart. Though the meeting didn't produce anything for the expressed purpose, they did end up creating their own material -- material that
Iovine liked enough to have them make an entire album. Thanks to their star status,
DioGuardi and
Stewart were able to collaborate with rock stars like
Mick Jagger,
Elton John, and
Stevie Nicks in an elaborate hoax to promote their new band, called
Platinum Weird, which they claimed had been around since 1974, when lead singer Erin Grace disappeared the day before the album was set to be released, eventually ending up in a young
DioGuardi's Scarsdale, NY, neighborhood, where she acted as her musical mentor.
As the story went, when
DioGuardi arrived in the studio to meet
Stewart, she heard him singing
Platinum Weird's "Will You Be Around" and joined in -- thanks to her "mentor" she knew the words -- shocking
Stewart and prompting him to revisit the old recordings and remaster them, then releasing one version of the album with Erin Grace's vocals and another, more modern one with
Kara DioGuardi's. A number of fan sites were created, supporting the supposed popularity of the group in London's early-'70s rock scene, and VH1 even produced a half-hour documentary (or rockumentary, or mockumentary, as it were) corroborating the story
Stewart had been telling (though he did eventually confess that it was made up).
Platinum Weird's debut album, the aptly titled
Make Believe, was finally released in the fall of 2006, a good 30 years after the "original" songs were supposed to have been written. ~ Marisa Brown