This week, Pieces walked a lot to save bus money, ate home-grown to save food money, and generally enjoyed the free pleasure of basking in bright sunlight. Best time of the year? Sunny late May runs Christmas pretty close…
Besides the sunshine and the improbable heat, the main thing on our minds this week was the difficulty of finding band names that don’t sound either ridiculous or stupidly contrived. Several friends are looking for names for new groups, and each one asks for advice, and each time we say the same thing – ‘oh, that’s the hardest bit of being in a band’. Because it is. The pitfalls are many: pick a bad name and you’ll be labelled with it for all time, the shelves of HMV will forever mark the moment of madness that saw you decide that Arctic Monkeys was the best you could do. Poor guys.
There are actually precious few really, really good band names written in the annuls of history, which may be one of the reasons that we find it so hard to do right now. The ranks of the massively great bands who went by similarly great names is very small. Joy Division is probably the best band name ever – exciting, full of both suggested and referential meaning, wonderful metaphorical implication. Thank god it was found by a group whose music fit it perfectly and not a bunch of leather-dressed pub rock stallions from Philly. Thank god also that The Mother Of Invention were formed by someone as effortlessly inventive as Frank Zappa.
The catalogue of bad bands with bad names is too huge to properly sum up in a blog post, so I’ll just list a few of my favourites: Gay Dad. Hootie And The Blowfish. Bowling For Soup. Milli Vanilli. Wet Wet Wet. Babyshambles. KoЯn (as in, sweetKoЯn?). Get Cape Wear Cape Fly. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Coldplay. Counting Crows. And so on…
Then there are bad fits. These can be subdivided into at least two categories: Bad Bands With Good Names, and the infinitely funnier Good Bands With Bad Names. Razorlight are a great example of the former – decent name, sounds like it could mean something. Then you put on one of their CDs and it all unravels. Never mind. I always thought The Darkness was a pretty good name too, and it’s amazing that noone actually used it before a bunch of cock-rockers with silly voices came along six years ago. By contrast, there’s any number of good bands whose good taste just didn’t quite extend to picking a good moniker. Then the ultimate clunker – The Beatles. Bad pun, bad connotations, looks awful. Guys, you’ll never make it in this town with a shite name like that. Not a chance.
Then there are the It Could Have Been So Much Worse files. The band names that could have been foisted upon an unsuspecting world but instead were snatched away just in time. The Beach Boys were only given their all-american-surf-buddy name by a record company drone at the last minute, when he realised that The Pendletones is, well, just terrible. Blur were famously called Seymour before having second thoughts about their ‘why don’t we give it a person’s name’ moment. Pink Floyd toyed with The Tea Set for ages before finally noticing that it’s crap, and would have led to lots of uncomfortable ‘so you play with The Tea Set?’ conversations. And the less said about On A Friday the better. Before anyone asks, Pieces were once known as Out Of Her Reach, so we’re not immune to the perils of awful, awful bags of poo being slung across our shoulders.
There. See, occasionally we think about things other than massive cultural or political trends. Next week – Pieces shows you how to erect an attractive yet practical yurt.
Piecesounds this week combines the slick with the very, very daft. Enjoy Sparks rubbing shoulders with Van Dyke Parks – possibly the biggest silly/sensible divide in the history of pop music. As ever, click the link below to hear all of this in, of and through your own ears.
1) Spank Rock – Chilly Will
2) Architecture In Helsinki – Heart It Races
3) Johnny Trunk – Sister Woo
4) Ofo The Black Company – Eniaro
5) Sparks – Amateur Hour
6) The Bonzo Dog Band – Canyons Of Your Mind
7) Van Dyke Parks – All Golden
8) Nico – The Fairest Of The Seasons
9) Los Campesinos! – You! Me! Dancing!
10) Sly Stone – You Really Got Me
11) Thomas Dolby – Hyperactive!
12) Richard and Linda Thompson – When I Get To The Border
13) Gene Greene – King Of The Bungaloos
Catch you next week for more
Pieces x
Does It Offend You, Yeah? is kind of like an Adam Sandler film, in that I can't tell whether it's being knowingly stupid or just stupid.
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