Jeremiah Johnson 
@JeremiahDJohns
Jun 27, 2025
9 tweets
One of my all-time favorite type of videos is pre-fame bands playing their extremely famous songs to a tiny room of people, because they're not yet known.
A thread of some examples:
Bastille playing Pompeii in what looks like someone's living room:
MGMT playing 'Kids' to a crowd of maybe 25 people on a college quad:
Tones and I playing Dance Monkey in a parking lot before the song came out
Mumford and Sons playing 'The Cave' to a crowd of 20 people at a pizzeria
Maggie Rogers, as an unknown music student at NYU, showing her unfinished song 'Alaska' to Pharrell (who can visibly tell it's going to be a massive hit within about 15 seconds)
Nirvana announces they're going to play 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' at a local gig, and nobody in the crowd reacts at all because they've never heard of it before:
Ed Sheeran playing a solo acoustic set in a black club in LA before he was famous:
Kendrick playing at a Best Buy:
Chappell Roan:
x.com/jkeatn/status/
Jake Eaton@jkeatn
Jun 27 25
View on Twitter
@Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 Chappell Roan playing to 40 people in a Hollywood bar before she had enough songs to fill a set, so she played pink pony club twice at the end
Jeremiah Johnson
@JeremiahDJohns
Founder @CNLiberalism. Writing at Infinite Scroll. Carly Rae Jepsen stan. Send me the worst tweets on this site. https://t.co/xONcXY5PQv
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