Knuckleheadz take over McDonald's and play 'F*** McDonaldz'

Knuckleheadz performing art McDonalds, with someone dressed as Ronald McDonald crowd surfing — (Image credit: Knucklehead Tom / Blake Housenga)

One day, someone will write the definitive guide to guerilla gigs.

Jefferson Airplane's 1968 show on a Manhattan rooftop – held two months before the Beatles' famous Savile Row show and similarly shut down by the police – will be featured. U2's shoot video for 1987's Where The Streets Have No Name, another rooftop performance, will get a chapter.

And now, Knuckleheadz. The punk outfit, from Whittier in Los Angeles County, have made headlines after performing an unannounced show at a branch of McDonald's in South Central LA and playing a song written for the occasion. Its title? Fuck McDonaldz.

"At first, it was just talks," frontman Tom Knucklehead tells L.A. Taco. "Then we put a date on it. Then it came by so quickly, and we weren’t ready for it, so we put another date on it and finally pulled it off."

"We wrote that song Fuck McDonaldz because we all know that McDonald’s is poison. It's our version of a classic punk song against a corporation."

Knuckleheadz played a seven-and-a-half-minute set for a flash mob of 100 fans and some presumably startled staff, during which time they played Fuck McDonaldz twice, as well as Glory Daze and Fighting Solves Everything. One fan, dressed as McDonald's mascot Ronald McDonald, can be seen happily crowd surfing during footage shot at the gig.

"I think we'll play a show like this again," says Knucklehead, a professional MMA fighter and skateboarder who also owns a protein supplement store. "I'm just grateful it all happened so smoothly, even the employees came out to record the show on their phones!"

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Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 40 years in music industry, online for 27. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.