Entertainment

This guy hid the lyrics to All Star by Smash Mouth in his tweets and no-one suspected a thing

Richard Cook has won the internet for today.
Richard Cook has won the internet for today. Richard Cook has won the internet for today.

For about the past year, covers of Smash Mouth’s All Star have become something of an in-joke on the internet – with efforts ranging from the bizarre to the sublime.

This week, Twitter user Richard Cook created the latter option. Disguised as innocuous yet entertaining tweets and unbeknownst to his followers, the 27-year-old smuggled the song’s first verse into his Twitter feed.

Pay attention, because here it is in all its glory…

A truly inspirational effort – but Cook, from Cambridge, thinks he could have taken it even further.

“I should have done the whole song over a month or something” he told the Press Association. “But I don’t think I’d have had the patience.”

Cook, who works in social media for Spotify, said the whole process was “nowhere near as difficult as people might think” though.

“I just wrote down the first verse backwards and tweeted like normal,” he said. “All you have to do is reword your tweets to have that first word. Nothing complicated.”

He said he was worried someone would work out what he was doing or somehow beat him to it, but he’s “very happy” with the reaction his creation is getting online.

“I’m glad it only took 21,000 bad tweets to get here,” added Cook.