Jock MacDonald: An Appreciation

 Jock McDonald passed away in July of 2025. He was the frontman and brain behind English joke punk band The Bollock Brothers.

The Bollock Brothers were largely a nonentity in the US, but had a string of records in the 1980s that made headlines in Europe. Someone surely would have made the joke inherent in “Never Mind the Bollocks”

Related stunts including a disco version of the Sex Pistols “Never Mind the Bollocks…” album in 1983, and I have heard it’s not bad. For a short time, they hired Jimmy Lydon (Johnny Rotten’s brother) as vocalist. On record, they gave the mic to Michael Fagan who famously broke into the Queen’s bedroom in Buckingham Palace. (Martin “Youth” Glover even played bass for them around the time he briefly left Killing Joke in 1982.)

Song ideas include writing a sequel to the Velvet Underground’s “The Gift” and covering Serge Gainsbourg’s “Harley David (Son of Bitch)” (which became a bit of a cult hit)

I doubt I would have encountered them if a friend didn’t lend me his copies of The Last Supper (1983) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1985). He had served in the military and heard the band in Germany.

The truth is the band did have some tunes and sometimes comedy punk if done well can be as good as the serious stuff. Besides, where is the line between this and “serious” bands like the Damned and the Stranglers, and does it really matter.

As much as I love “Horror Movies”, the band sticks out in my mind for the timeframe I encountered them. In the 1980s and 1990s, trading cassettes and making “mixtapes” was a major component in discovering music. The music industry hated it, though as usual, short sighted by greed, the practice probably helped their pocketbooks as much as hurt them.

In more recent years, there may be a rare case of a friend “burning” a CD or outright occurrence of giving of music. But we don’t really put as much significance on that. If you want to let someone know about a particular piece of music, you can post a video or the actual song; or not even necessarily do that as the person can do such things for themselves. In fact, they may prefer to do for themselves.

But cassette swapping was where I heard a lot of bands for the first time, and the Bollock Brothers in the middle of the 1990s may have been the end of that era for me.

This is one of the 2025 tributes I wrote that I plan on sharing this week.