Any time a band or musician decides to screw around with the rules where they have to lip sync and/or are required to have a backing track.
- Rod Stewart's performance of "Maggie May" was the first recorded instance in the show of a band deliberately messing around onstage. By the time the song got to the guitar solo, Ronnie Wood couldn't be arsed to mime playing the guitar, and by the last verse, half the band was playing around with a soccer ball, including Rod Stewart whose vocals were supposed to be live.
- Near the end of Suzi Quatro's performance of "Devil Gate Drive", her keyboardist suddenly decided to join her in dancing to the song for a brief moment, despite the fact that the playtrack track at that moment still had keyboard sounds in it. Her drummer did the same thing after the keyboardist went back, and eventually she herself decided to stop miming her bass playing in favor of dancing.
- When Squeeze performed "Up the Junction" on the Christmas 1979 episode, they decided to swap instruments; lead singer and guitarist Glenn Tilbrook pretended to play the drums, keyboardist Jools Holland pretended - very unconvincingly - to play lead guitar, drummer Gilson Lavis pretended to take over bass guitar, and rhythm guitarist Chris Difford pretended to play the keyboards.
- Faith No More's performance of "From Out of Nowhere" had frontman Mike Patton burble his lips, bobble his tongue in his cheek, and give an overall Large Ham performance.
- Nirvana's performance of "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Kurt Cobain already didn't like performing the song to begin with so he decided to mime playing his guitar, change the lyrics to be more darker (he opened with "Load up on drugs, kill your friends"), and sing in a low Morrissey-like voice. Krist Novoselic joined in the fun by swinging his unplugged guitar around and Dave Grohl deliberately hit the cymbals on the beats where he's supposed to hit the drums as if he was channeling Animal from The Muppet Show.
- Oasis mixed things up with their performance of "Roll With It" by having Liam Gallagher switch places with Noel Gallagher. Noel put on sunglasses so nobody would notice it's him lip syncing and Liam didn't even try to pretend to play Noel's guitar parts well.
- Travis's performance of "Sing" starts out normally enough (aside from having a fake lobster on the microphone). Then, lead singer Fran Healy gets hit with a pie and a Food Fight similar to what happened in the song's music video breaks out on stage.
