Prank You For The Venom: Bands tell us their best April Fools' Day pranks

Whether it’s classic (like a bucket of water on top of a door) or the complex (covering your coworker’s entire cubicle in Justin Bieber posters), pranksters have their day every year when April Fools’ Day comes along. With all the tomfoolery musicians seem to get into while on tour, who better to ask about the pranks they’ve pulled than bands themselves? AP chatted up some of your favorite bands to get their prank history to the masses—and they don’t disappoint in the creativity department. Read on to see what your favorite bands pull on their friends each year.

I used to manage a pet store when I was a senior in high school, and we used to sell crickets. For April Fools’ Day our senior year, me and three girls I went to school with who worked with me at the pet store bought 300 crickets. There were three floors, so we put three bags of 100 crickets on each floor and just let them go all over the hallways between periods.
Toree Cioffi
Transit

Our tour manager was always sensitive about how many Twitter followers he had, so I got in contact with everyone I could that followed him to tell them to unfollow him on April Fools’ Day. It was, like, 400 people who unfollowed him. He just came up to me and was like, “Man, I was kind of drunk last night. I don’t remember if I said something really racist or what, but so many people unfollowed me on Twitter.” I think I told him while we were onstage and he was really pissed. He thought it was funny, but then not as many people re-followed him afterwards.
Jimmy Stadt
Polar Bear Club

I always pulled the breaking-up-with-girlfriend-on-April-Fools’ thing, but would have it pre-planned. A week ahead of time, I would show some hints that I wasn’t feeling the relationship, make asshole moves and then break it off a day before April Fools’. Then on April Fools’, I would tell her it was all a joke.
Levi Benton
Miss May I

None of us have ever been able to pull off a clever, mastermind of an April Fools’ joke. However, we released our controversial video for “Kids In Love” on April 1 and a lot of people thought that was exactly what it was—an April Fools’ joke. It was interesting explaining to everyone that our video was real. In hindsight, it would've been really cool to do a joke video to release on April 1 before the real one came out.
Derek Sanders
Mayday Parade

There was a show a while back that was on April Fools’ Day and our whole tour crew and management were at the venue wondering where we were. We told our lighting guy to tell them we went out last night and no one’s seen us since. Our management is running around banging their heads going, “Where are the guys?” just going crazy while we’re actually just across the road at a little restaurant having some beers. They’re just about to cancel the show and are literally going mental and then we just sort of stroll in, really relaxed. It was pretty funny.
Rou Reynolds
Enter Shikari

It's honestly hard to answer which April Fools’ joke I've done was the best. Years ago, I had a fake press release about us doing a theme song for straight-edge wrestler CM Punk called “X Up, Chin Up” and had hundreds of people believe us. I did my research and made it very elaborate. But the best one was when I released our upcoming album information with a fake track listing, the record was called Battle Factory, and the cover was a tiny grill with a burger and a bottle of beer on it. In my mind, it was too obvious because the first letter of each song spelled APRIL FOOLS. Watching it appear in a video blog about pop-punk world news one day was the funniest thing I've ever seen.
Jono Diener
The Swellers

I worked at a postcard printing company. After hours one day, I took boxes and boxes of postcards home with me. I must have had 15,000 postcards, ranging from cards about hemorrhoids to promoting lawyers' offices. What did I do with these postcards, you ask? With the help of my other two roommates, we covered every inch of our third roommate’s room in postcards. I mean, every inch, from the floor to his computer, his closet, his lamp, his bed, his A/C unit, his ceiling—pretty much anything they would stick to. It was by far the most fun and elaborate prank I've done.
Zack DeWall
Set It Off

Equal parts prank and revenge: A family friend who is a long-haul trucker made the mistake of being disrespectful to my then-girlfriend. I broke into his truck and hid over a pound of lunchmeat and cheese in the air conditioning vents, under the seats and inside the doors. The truck then sat in 100-plus degree heat for two days before he had to leave for a cross-country trip.
Damien Lawson
Awaken The Empire

My fifth grade teacher gave us all a test with super-hard questions on it and told us if we didn't all pass, she would lose her job. As we handed them in, she frowned, got teary eyed, said goodbye and that it was fun teaching us and left the class. We sat in disbelief for what felt like forever. A few kids started crying. She the re-entered the classroom and yelled, “April Fools!”
Will Allard
Xerxes

Last year on April Fools’ Day, we decided to pull a prank on our friends in the Downtown Fiction.  It was the last night of our tour together and we knew the band had a late flight out of the country after the show for their Japan tour, so while they were onstage, we broke into their trailer, filled each of their suitcases with an array of dildos, male thongs and guy-on-guy pornography. They didn't realize their bags contained these items until security opened their bags at customs.
Mike Kitlas, Slade Echeverria and Greg Garrity
Anarbor

In 11th grade, Jose [Villanueva, vocals/guitar] and I had a pre-Calculus teacher that was kind of weird and was really obsessed with baseball. We had a love-hate relationship with him, so for April Fools’ we bought a baseball, roughed it up—burned it, rolled it in mud and soaked it in coffee—and signed it as Babe Ruth. I printed up a “Certificate of Authenticity” from Major League Baseball, complete with a signature from the commissioner of baseball. Then on April Fools’, we took it to class and presented it to him as a huge present. He was super-excited about it. We still haven't told him what we did to this day.
Matt Morgan
Divided By Friday

In high school, one of my best friends had just gotten her license that year and got a really nice, shiny red car for her birthday. She was a pitcher for the softball team and on April Fools' Day they had a super important away game, which meant they'd all be taking a bus from the high school where she parked. My sister and I bought hundreds and hundreds of Post-it notes and the entire time she was at her game, we covered every single inch of her car so no surface was showing. When she came back, she obviously cracked up, but got kind of mad that she had to spend an hour pulling Post-Its off her car before she could go home.
Mariel Loveland
Candy Hearts
 

I worked at a postcard printing company. After hours one day, I took boxes and boxes of postcards home with me. I must have had 15,000 postcards, ranging from cards about hemorrhoids to promoting lawyers' offices. What did I do with these postcards, you ask? With the help of my other two roommates, we covered every inch of our third roommate’s room in postcards. I mean, every inch, from the floor to his computer, his closet, his lamp, his bed, his A/C unit, his ceiling—pretty much anything they would stick to. It was by far the most fun and elaborate prank I've done.
Zack DeWall
Set It Off

Equal parts prank and revenge: A family friend who is a long-haul trucker made the mistake of being disrespectful to my then-girlfriend. I broke into his truck and hid over a pound of lunchmeat and cheese in the air conditioning vents, under the seats and inside the doors. The truck then sat in 100-plus degree heat for two days before he had to leave for a cross-country trip.
Damien Lawson
Awaken The Empire

My fifth grade teacher gave us all a test with super-hard questions on it and told us if we didn't all pass, she would lose her job. As we handed them in, she frowned, got teary eyed, said goodbye and that it was fun teaching us and left the class. We sat in disbelief for what felt like forever. A few kids started crying. She the re-entered the classroom and yelled, “April Fools!”
Will Allard
Xerxes

Last year on April Fools’ Day, we decided to pull a prank on our friends in the Downtown Fiction.  It was the last night of our tour together and we knew the band had a late flight out of the country after the show for their Japan tour, so while they were onstage, we broke into their trailer, filled each of their suitcases with an array of dildos, male thongs and guy-on-guy pornography. They didn't realize their bags contained these items until security opened their bags at customs.
Mike Kitlas, Slade Echeverria and Greg Garrity
Anarbor

In 11th grade, Jose [Villanueva, vocals/guitar] and I had a pre-Calculus teacher that was kind of weird and was really obsessed with baseball. We had a love-hate relationship with him, so for April Fools’ we bought a baseball, roughed it up—burned it, rolled it in mud and soaked it in coffee—and signed it as Babe Ruth. I printed up a “Certificate of Authenticity” from Major League Baseball, complete with a signature from the commissioner of baseball. Then on April Fools’, we took it to class and presented it to him as a huge present. He was super-excited about it. We still haven't told him what we did to this day.
Matt Morgan
Divided By Friday

In high school, one of my best friends had just gotten her license that year and got a really nice, shiny red car for her birthday. She was a pitcher for the softball team and on April Fools' Day they had a super important away game, which meant they'd all be taking a bus from the high school where she parked. My sister and I bought hundreds and hundreds of Post-it notes and the entire time she was at her game, we covered every single inch of her car so no surface was showing. When she came back, she obviously cracked up, but got kind of mad that she had to spend an hour pulling Post-Its off her car before she could go home.
Mariel Loveland
Candy Hearts