The Pooh Sticks

The Pooh Sticks were rock's most inside joke, a monumental yet affectionate prank on the very mythology of pop music itself. Cloaked behind ridiculously overblown marketing schemes, made-up histories, and cartoon-character images, the Welsh group punctured the industry's myriad excesses, freely pilfering from the entirety of pop's past by shoplifting titles, lyrics, and melodies at will; wrapping their barbs in cotton-candy singalongs, their subversions worked on many levels -- postmodern cultural criticism, retro-irony, slavish imitation, and power pop manna among them -- to ...