Rock Stars Who Were Really Weird People
Rock stars are not known for being the most down-to-earth people. When your job is to have thousands of fans screaming for you every night, and this results in you making millions of dollars, it is hard to stay even a tiny bit grounded. This has resulted in many, if not most, rock stars living lives that are way outside of the norm.
However, not all the abnormal things rock stars do qualify as "weird." For example, Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx had a near-death experience when he overdosed and was technically not alive for a couple of minutes. That's a crazy rock and roll story, sure, and not something that happens to people every day, but is it weird? Or take GG Allin, known as the craziest rocker in history, but whose excesses and illegal acts stemmed from childhood trauma and substance abuse. Addiction and mental illness are not uncommon in rock stars, and they are more tragic than anything else.
So the stories on this list need a different element to qualify — that added strangeness that is unexpected in a rock star's or sometimes even any regular person's life. These might be out-there hobbies, obsessions, or lifestyle choices. Some rockers only have one thing in their lives that stands out as really weird, while others seem to live a life completely devoted to weirdness. Regardless of how they choose to let their inner strangeness shine through, here are some rock stars who definitely qualify as weird.
Rod Stewart
English rock and pop superstar Rod Stewart has plenty of incredible career achievements under his belt that he can be proud of, including a knighthood, four Billboard No. 1 hits, and a Grammy win (plus 15 nominations). But arguably his biggest accomplishment is something much weirder. That's because Rod Stewart has spent three decades building a massive model train set. And if he had to decide between his two loves? Well, when answering a fan question in The Guardian, he revealed, "I once said that I'd rather be on the cover of Railway Modeller than Rolling Stone magazine and Rolling Stone haven't spoken to me since."
Despite having more than enough money to pay people to make the bits and pieces for him, Stewart is proud to have constructed roughly 90% of the enormous set himself. Iconic music producer Pete Waterman, another model train enthusiast, sang Stewart's praises to The Guardian in 2022, saying, "Rod's work is fantastic. What he does with those American buildings takes skill. Not everybody can pick up a piece of plastic and cardboard and build like he does."
In an interview with Railway Modeller (via the BBC), Stewart explained that he doesn't let his busy schedule of being a rock star get in the way of working on his obsession: He just brings whatever bits he is working on with him to the hotels he stays in while on tour. "We would tell them in advance and they were really accommodating, taking out the beds and providing fans to improve air circulation and ventilation," he said.
Prince
Prince was known for his outrageous fashion, androgynous looks, and that time he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol. Yet none of that was what made him weird — the name change, after all, was an act of protest against his record company during a business dispute. No, when it came to the enigma that was Prince, those things were downright banal.
For example, when on tour, Prince would bring his own hairdresser, of course, but then would have them rent out a local salon for his personal use. This might not come with any warning, and Prince was willing to pay whatever it took. While windows were newspapered up to keep his presence secret, once in Washington, D.C., someone saw him, and the revelation that Prince was there almost resulted in a riot. This obsessive love from his fans was not always returned. In the 21st century, Prince often sued or threatened to sue fans who shared images of him or video from his concerts on blogs or social media.
Prince not only wrote a song about doves crying but also owned two of the birds as pets; they were even credited as singers on one of his albums. They lived at his iconic home-slash-recording studio, Paisley Park, in Minnesota. There, Prince hosted some of the most famous people in the world, whom he would then challenge to games of basketball or ping-pong – and beat them mercilessly at both. Perhaps the most unexpected thing Prince had in his recording studio was a swear jar, a policy that he rigorously enforced.
Tom Morello
As the guitarist in the overtly political and activist rock band Rage Against the Machine, Tom Morello doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would want to belong to an elite, selective group of Hollywood insiders. But as actor Vince Vaughn told Variety, "In an interview, [Morello] had talked about ... this group, this mysterious group ... in Hollywood had reached out to him ... And at first, I said, 'That kind of seems a little crazy. Are you actually going to go do it?'" Run by actor Joe Manganiello, members included other actors, big-name writers, producers, and even a professional wrestler. What was this mysterious group up to? Playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Morello started attending sessions held at Manganiello's home and got obsessed. "It's similar to what a high-stakes poker game might be," he explained. "It's a game where friends gather that's taken deadly seriously and is a lot of fun. But it's serious. It's very serious! We're on an adventure that I think about a lot during the week."
His love of the game was even immortalized on the silver screen. Before the film "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves" starring Chris Pine was released in 2023, there was a rumor that a well-known celebrity D&D player had a cameo in it. While guesses by fans ranged from Joe Manganiello to Vin Diesel to Matthew Lillard, it turned out to be Morello. He had a non-speaking part in a crowd scene as Kimathi Stormhollow, which is the name of his character in his real-life D&D campaign.
Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper is known for his over-the-top antics onstage that were meant to shock. But what's weirdest about him as a person might be that once you scratch the surface, Cooper seems unbelievably wholesome. In fact, even his shows aren't what they might seem to be at first. According to what Cooper told NPR, "The funny thing was this: There was no bad language, there was no nudity, there was nothing un-Christian. But that made it even more irritating, I think, to the general public, that they couldn't really ban us because there was nothing to ban. ... There's much more blood and Satanic stuff going on in Shakespeare than ever in Alice Cooper."
Raised by a pastor (who loved his son's music and performances, deeming them to be hilarious), Cooper made some unexpected fans, including a few of the biggest stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood, like Groucho Marx, Mae West, and Frank Sinatra. To prepare before shows, Cooper watches terrible kung fu movies from the '60s and '70s. And when he's not performing, he is obsessively golfing. He even wrote a book on his hobby called "Alice Cooper, Golf Monster: How a Wild Rock'n'Roll Life Led to a Serious Golf Addiction."
Lest you think he is only weirdly normal, Cooper also has an odd way of, as he explains it, getting rid of his old pairs of pants. The shock rocker hosts a radio show and will test his listeners with difficult trivia questions. The winners receive an autographed pair of pants from Cooper's own closet.
Bill Wyman
Bill Wyman was the bassist for The Rolling Stones for three decades before leaving rock and roll behind in 1993. This was around the same time he bought his first metal detector and started wandering around England listening for the beeps that indicated he might have found an ancient treasure.
Many of his finds came from his country estate. He told the Guardian-Series, "I started to use a metal detector to find stuff in the grounds and in the local area, and I've built up the history of the place." Of course, rock and roll money paid for Wyman's extensive property, not metal detecting. "I do it more as a history thing than to find treasure to make me rich!" However, Wyman was successful enough in his searches that in 2017, he loaned some of the best pieces from his collection to a museum for a special exhibit. He also co-wrote a book on his finds and experiences, although he says it took him 20 years because he kept finding cool new things when detecting that he then needed to add to the manuscript.
Strangest of all, in 2007, the ex-rocker produced his own metal detector. In a statement (via NME) explaining his decision to sell such an unexpected product, Wyman said, "Metal-detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics; it's probably the best and the most enjoyable way of learning about our history. On any garden, country field, footpath, woodlands, beach, or moorland you can find a huge variety of historical objects, all easily located with this high-quality metal detector."
Björk
Björk Guðmundsdóttir, known professionally by just her first name, is definitely one of those musicians who were ahead of their time. One of the Icelander's albums consists of nothing but voices, while others include growls and strange verbal intonations. Even if you aren't familiar with her music, or at least not with anything beyond her 1995 hit single "It's Oh So Quiet," you are probably aware of her iconic fashion sense. The "swan dress" she wore to the 2001 Academy Awards is the most famous, but there are lists out there with dozens of entries that only scratch the surface of Björk's weird fashion choices — not even including what she wears when performing, as seen in one example above. These pieces are more like art than clothing, and the swan dress was actually displayed in New York City's Museum of Modern Art after Björk wore it.
To accompany her unique music, Björk has always made extremely creative videos, but it was her early embrace of virtual reality that might have seen one of the strangest. In 2015, the video for "Mouth Mantra" was shot from inside her actual mouth with specially made VR cameras. The whole process took a year to complete and was described by the director, Jesse Kanda, to Dazed as "a terrifying horrific experience."
Her oddities go beyond just aesthetics, as well. In 1998, for example, Björk accepted the Best International Female BRIT Award with a speech that consisted entirely of her slowly stating, "I am grateful grapefruit" (via BRITs/YouTube).
Jack White
The music magazine Consequence summed up their review of Jack White's 2018 album "Boarding House Reach" in one word: "weird." But if you need more words to understand just how weird it was, one of the songs was based on music Al Capone composed by hand while doing time in Alcatraz. But this was in keeping with a guy who became famous for being in a band with his sister Meg — until it became impossible to hide the fact they were actually a married (and then divorced) couple. Even then, he tried to keep up the charade for a while.
In 2012, a reporter from The New York Times visited an industrial corner of Nashville where Jack White had purchased a building before turning it into an office, music venue, record store, and more. The resulting article described the place as looking like it was "designed by an imaginative kindergartner — a cross between Warhol's Factory and the Batcave." One thing there was plenty of was taxidermy, which White loves to collect. He even appeared in an episode of "American Pickers" where he purchased a taxidermied elephant head. Back in 2001, his home in Detroit was filled with animal heads in various states of deterioration and with questionable provenances, which he was very proud of and liked to show off. There were so many, some weren't even hung up because there was no room.
Also, he has a serious dislike of nurses and reads scrapbooks from old insane asylums, two things which may or may not be related.
Stephen Morris
Stephen Morris was the drummer for Joy Division and New Order, but his hobby takes punk to a whole different level. He has a collection of old tanks and armored vehicles, ones that he actually takes out for drives in the English countryside, having pretend battles with post office vans. Morris tried to explain the draw of such a thing to a slightly bewildered reporter from Electronic Beats: "Some people like rollercoasters ... It's a bit like that, driving a tank, and the fact that you could destroy a lot of things by driving over them and somehow when you don't do it you feel very relieved. It's an adrenaline thing but it's a slow sort of adrenaline thing because they don't go very fast."
Originally, however, Morris really wanted a vintage car, but his wife wasn't a fan of the idea. "Two weeks later I saw someone selling a tank, and I said maybe I'll get a tank instead. And she said yeah, get a tank. So I ended up buying a tank!" However, the experience could not have been more different from riding in a classic car, and it doesn't sound like he recommends it: "I always wondered what it was like inside one and now I can tell you it's not very nice."
Sadly, the rock and roller has other responsibilities that take away from time in the tank: "I don't drive it as much as I ought to ... this bloody music keeps getting in the way. I never seem to have enough time."
Tom DeLonge
Tom DeLonge's obsession with aliens was evident on Blink 182's third album, "Enema of the State," which included a song called "Aliens Exist." Since then, his belief in visitors from outer space has taken over his life in a big way.
Not only does DeLonge own hundreds of hours of interviews with government workers who allegedly know about aliens, but he also claims to have had contact with them himself. He told Papermag, "My whole body felt like it had static electricity ... It sounded like there were about 20 people there, talking. And instantly my mind goes, okay ... they're not here to hurt us ... But they're working on something." DeLonge also says he had his phone tapped by the government for years and has been contacted by scientists who know aliens are real.
Muse's Matt Bellamy was asked about DeLonge's claims backstage at a festival, and he said he's tried to get his fellow musician to put up or shut up. "Apparently there's a warehouse in Vegas holding some weird alien s*** that he's going to take me to one day," Bellamy told Tone Deaf. "I'm holding him to it, and every time I see him, he says he 'can't do it this week, maybe next week.'" DeLonge did help lead to the declassification of some UFO videos in 2020, however, so his efforts are having some effect. But now that more people are open to the idea of UFOs being alien crafts, he has moved on to trying to prove Bigfoot exists.