https://www.nme.com/news/music/jonny-greenwood-pretended-play-keyboards-radiohead-3156953
“Thom [Yorke]’s band had a keyboard player — [whom] I think they didn’t get on with because he played his keyboard so loud,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross. “And so when I got the chance to play with them, the first thing I did was make sure my keyboard was turned off … I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard, and they didn’t know that I’d already turned it off.”
“They made quite a racket, quite a noise. It was all guitars and distortion — and so I would pretend to play for weeks on end and Thom would say, ‘I can’t quite hear what you’re doing, but I think you’re adding a really interesting texture because I can tell when you’re not playing,'” he said. “And I’m thinking, ‘No, you can’t, because I’m really not playing.’ And I’d go home in the evening and work out how to actually play chords and cautiously over the next few months, I would start turning this keyboard up. And that’s how I started in with Radiohead.”
lol damn i sure hope he wasn't just trolling, which is a real possibility too
There are create a reference companies out there, but they charge a fee typically (it was $20/reference back in 2010 for the cheaper places), some would go as far as make up a company and all that for you. My aunt's wife swears by them, I personally go the do my own voice acting route and use a spare phone number I keep for such things and link it someone I worked with there, so its semi legit, just can't reach the recommender directly.
There's a sub on r*ddit for references, no clue how good it is /r/BeMyReference/
Oh damn that's pretty interesting, man gotta love the millennial solutions to bullshit job requirements.