Home Alone star Macauley Culkin’s ‘pizza-obsessed’ band met tragic beer-soaked end in UK

Many child stars struggle with grappling normality as they get older.

The crushing weight of fame can prevent them from doing the things normal teenagers do, and often these baby celebs turn to drugs and alcohol in order to cope with their warped reality.

In some extreme cases, however, the pressures of stardom see them start up novelty pizza-themed bands – as demonstrated by Macauley Culkin in the early 2010s.

READ MORE: Home Alone fans floored after hearing Macaulay Culkin’s ‘real voice’ in new clip

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Together with four other leather jacket-clad would-be musicians, the Home Alone actor formed a Velvet Underground tribute band, except with a twist – most of the words were replaced with pizza references.

In late 2013 the Pizza Underground was born. Macaulay Culkin and the group’s ‘pizza-box’ percussionist Deenah Vollmer recorded the band’s first demo at Culkin’s New York City apartment.

“We soon realised you can replace most any word with slice or cheese,” Vollmer told the Philadelphia Inquirer. In November 2013, the group performed a Lou Reed tribute show at the Sidewalk Cafe in the East Village of New York. An attendee of that gig – a man called ‘Weiner’ who played in local band Low Cut Connie – dubbed the Pizza Underground’s set “sacrilege”.

The group went on to release its first music video in January 2014 – an absurd clip that parodied various Velvet Underground like Pizza Girl (Femme Fatale), Take a Bite on the Wild Slice (Walk on the Wild Side) and All Pizza Parties (All Tomorrow’s Parties).

The bizarre video saw the members perform in an apartment which had pizza chequered walls while lying on a bed made of pizza boxes. All members wore slices of pizza as masks and the display managed to bag them an 18-date North American tour for later that year.

Unfortunately, the Pizza Underground’s life as a touring outfit was cut short just a dates into the tour, by what the band called a ‘cheese-emergency’. While performing at the Dot to Dot Festival in Nottingham in the UK, they were booed off stage and pelted with beer.

“Why are you throwing these,” Culkin had asked the jeering crowd. “I’d rather drink them.” They hurried off the stage after just 15 minutes of playing. One unrepentant fan told the Nottingham Post: “It just sounds awful. I can’t believe he is doing this. Why bother? It didn’t land, must go down well in America or something.”

Not everyone was as scathing though. “I for one enjoyed pizza underground at dot to dot yesterday,” one person tweeted the Monday after ‘cheese-emergency’. “They gave the crowd pizza… what more do you people want?”

The group never performed again after their ill-fated trip to Nottingham, with Culkin officially confirming the band’s split on the Marc Maron podcast in 2018.

Culkin described the band as “one of those good ideas you have when you’re drunk, and you wake up and forget about it”.

Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk