The Daily Tonic: The Wonder Stuff

Like Paul McCartney dying in 1966, or Cheryl Cole and Kimberley Walsh’s secret lesbian life together, one of the music industry’s most enduring conspiracy theories is that Stevie Wonder isn’t actually blind.

The most compelling evidence we ever heard? One London club owner tells a story about a time he was at a house party after hours with Stevie when someone brought out a stash of coke. The guy chopped out five lines – one for everybody in the room. Stevie’s manager-assistant dutifully walked him across the room to the table and handed him a rolled-up note.

After hoovering up his own portion, Stevie proceeded to make his way across the table, devouring everybody else’s line as well.

The club owner maintains to this day that the neatness and precision with which Stevie hoovered up those lines could only have been achieved if he could have seen each and every one of them.

During the recording of We Are The World in 1985, Stevie Wonder announced to the supergroup that he’d called a friend of his and had some of the song’s lyrics translated into Swahili for them to sing.

The suggestion caused a huge argument to break out – especially rankling with some of the country singers. Waylon Jennings even went so far as to storm out of the session in protest, and didn’t return.

It was left to Bob Geldof to point out to Stevie that their focus was on raising money for those affected by famine in Ethiopia, where they don’t speak Swahili.

We’d also like to thank Stevie Wonder for indirectly contributing to one of our favourite music media gems.

The Telegraph’s chief rock critic Neil McCormick once went to pay a visit to a recording studio where an engineer was playing a Stevie Wonder record through the studio’s speakers. The track caught his ear and, after a while, he piped up to ask: “This is OK. Who is it? Jamiroquai?”

Even the most ‘authentic’ celebrities have a degree of artifice to their showbiz personas, but we want to know about the people who are absolutely nothing like the person they present publicly.

Today’s Question: Have you ever met a celebrity who was the exact opposite of their public persona? A TV grouch who turned out to be very sweet in person? An angelic movie star who was an absolute throbber IRL?

Send your stories of mismatched personalities to hello@popbitch.com and we’ll reward the best with some digital PB goodies.

Yesterday we asked for stories of celebrities with unusual hobbies. It seems as if absolutely every male celebrity from Frank Sinatra to Pete Waterman is bang into model railways – but here are a few that weren’t.

Bernard Sumner: Not only does he like big sailing boats, he also likes small remote control model boats. In his lounge, beneath a retractable floor.

Patrick Swayze: Was introduced to skydiving during the filming of Point Break and wound up getting certified and being very good at it.

Vincent Price: An accomplished art expert and collector, Price used to stay in crappy hotels with shared bathrooms when shooting in England so that he could spend his accommodation allowance on antiques. He would fly back with paintings under his arm.

Today’s audio quiz is about siblings. Each of the ten songs we’ve snipped and stitched together are by bands that feature family members in their line-ups.

All you have to do is guess the song title and the band. A point for each; twenty points in total.

[Play it here]

How Radiohead’s Bond theme would have looked in the Spectre opening credits
[See on YouTube]

Another goat uprising has occurred
[See on Twitter]

What do pundits’ bookshelves say about them?
[Bookcase Credibility]