This Is This

Time was when bands had proper names. These days it’s all The Killers and The Cure and The Darkness and The Whatever.

1960’s - The Hat Trick
In the 1960’s and 70’s you had a lot of bands with three names. They carried authority more than a simple label did. Earth, Wind and Fire. It’s like a cosmic shopping list. Blood, Sweat and Tears. It’s a police report or a government white paper.

More Words and the Use Thereof
Things went even further towards the end of the decade. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The Bonzo Dog Doo Da Band. Was it because there was more room on the vinyl format? Or perhaps because it took up more room on the festival posters? Maybe it was an ancient rite of passage. The truth is we just don’t know.

What is clear, however, is that these longer names were so popular that bands who didn’t have them actually made their own ones up, like Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, or Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Names
And if they couldn’t make them up, they just used their own names, and the longer the better and these were often better than band names. Have many people heard of “Tom and Jerry”? OK, what if I said Simon and Garfunkle to you? I thought so. When Crosby, Stills and Nash thought about taking on Neil Young, did they think about a band name? No. Without batting an eyelid, they became Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

The world was ready for it and the smaller rock bands were ripe for this convention. Count Basie tried it in the 1940’s but “Edison, Killian, Lewis, Clayton, Cuffee, Wells, Minor, Tate, Smith, Young, Warren, Washington, Byas, Green, Page, Jones and Basie” never really took off.

The Minimalist 80’s and 90’s
Then came the 1980’s, where in contrast to the greed displayed displayed by the western world, their band names became increasingly spartan. In fact, a lot of names weren’t even proper words. Eurythmics. Bananarama. Wham. This was followed by the indie 1990’s, where actual, shorter words were used. Pulp. Suede. Ride. Blur. Oasis. Verve.

The Present
This trend continued to evolved up to the present day, where although bands have used two real short words in the 90’s style, they combine them into a name which uses the 80’s device of stark meaninglessness: Coldplay, Razorlight, Nickleback, Stereophonics.

The Future
But what if we could make it different? What if, to quote Bono and get it wrong, the world could change music. Think about it.

“Hey, who’s this?”
“It’s the new Bono, Edge, Mullins and Clayton. I love them.”
“You too?”

The Proclaimers would become Reid and Reid. Keane would be Chaplin, Rice-Oxley and Hughes. In fact Keane is a surname, although admittedly not theirs, but it’s a step in the right direction.

But these are proper band titles, like law firms. Names you can trust.

Jagger, Richards, Wood and Watts would duly instruct you to vacate their cloud while informing you that they have been unsucessful in their attempts to obtain satisfaction and you would sit up and take notice.

Also on This Is This
“Look, there’s you right there on the couch. You’re sitting just like you are now. That was a great minute, two minutes ago… "
Read this post...

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 16th, 2005 at 11:53 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or leave a comment yourself.