Almost thirty million Spotify plays: when fictional bands become real sensations

14 October 2025

‘Back then, cocaine was just another way of waking up’ … Stereophonic, the play about a 70s band. Photograph: Marc Brenner

It begins as a conceit of fiction: a band that exists only on the page, or the stage, or in cinematic imagination. But in recent years something curious has happened. These invented ensembles have begun to transcend their fictional origins, releasing music, drawing crowds, and taking on a life of their own. The Guardian’s recent account traces exactly this phenomenon, from Spinal Tap and The Commitments to The Flaming Dildos and the unnamed band in Stereophonic, and the lines between myth and reality are becoming increasingly blurred.

In London’s West End, Stereophonic is commanding attention not just as a play but as the birth of an actual musical act. Deliberately crafted as a 1970s-style rock band by writer David Adjmi and composer Will Butler, this fictional group has now racked up hundreds of thousands of Spotify streams and opened for Butler’s own live project. Its “debut” album from 2024 has been praised for evoking a lost classic era, an album that feels vintage while sounding newly minted.

Of course this blending of artifice and reality is not entirely new. Spinal Tap, born from a mockumentary in 1984, chartered its own single and staged reunion shows decades later. The Commitments, drawn from Roddy Doyle’s novel and immortalised in its film adaptation, has enjoyed chart success, touring life, and continued legacy in ways no one might have expected for a “fictional” soul band.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad introduced The Flaming Dildos, a punk outfit residing only on the page but vivid enough to capture readers’ imaginations. And then there’s Sex Bob-Omb, the garage band in the Scott Pilgrim universe: Bryan Lee O’Malley actually wrote lyrics and printed guitar chords so fans could play along, and after adaptation into film and streaming, their song “We Are Sex Bob-Omb” has amassed nearly thirty million plays on Spotify.

What drives this curious metamorphosis? In the case of Stereophonic, Adjmi says he was drawn to the mythic appeal of rock’s heyday when stories of band tension, creative clashes, and romantic crises were as essential to the music as the songs themselves. Within the play, the band’s private moments conversations, downtime, arguments are as crucial as their public performances. Butler approached his songwriting with that duality in mind: his songs had to feel like they grew from the characters’ lives, and yet also justify their presence onstage. The cast became the band; live performance became part of the narrative; fiction became flesh.

From Doyle’s perspective, writing The Commitments was a way to bring people together through music even if the band itself was imagined. He chose a narrator who was first a fan rather than a performer, and the novel’s energy came from that fan’s voice, assembling a group and dreaming of soul music in Dublin. Early on, critics dismissed the book, but when Elvis Costello in Hot Press said “if you want to know what it was like, read The Commitments,” everything shifted. The novel’s success, the film, and subsequent musical versions all emerged from that convergence of fiction and passion.

Egan, for her part, embraced the spirit of late 1970s California punk, mixing memory and myth. The Flaming Dildos name, she says, came to her fully formed. She sketched their world using her teenage experiences in punk enclaves, imaginary set lists, venues like the Mabuhay Gardens, and a song titled What the F***?. She declined to perform that song herself, preferring it remain a creature of the page. O’Malley, likewise, felt that by giving Scott Pilgrim’s band a real sound, he would extend the book’s afterlife. When scenes of the band were adapted for film, producers made their own sonic decisions; O’Malley says he can no longer distinguish the streamed version of Sex Bob-Omb’s songs from how he first imagined them.

This curious alchemy reflects broader changes in music, nostalgia, and audiences’ appetite for authenticity. These fictional bands tap into longing for analog textures, creative innocence, and the messy human stories behind the music. What was once playful fiction has become tangible output. So now we live in an era when some of the most exciting new acts may not have begun as acts at all but as ideas.