Guide to Weird Band Names (from Independent)

Bonkers monikers?
There's logic to the current crop of bizarre band names: it's getting harder to find an original one, says David Sinclair
Published: 29 September 2006

The vogue for bizarre band names has grown on the pop world like a Russian vine. Even a moniker as silly as Arctic Monkeys now seems quite sensible when compared to such names as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Bullet for My Valentine, Snowfight in the City Centre, Living with Eating Disorders or Dogs Die in Hot Cars, to name but a few.

Other acts go further, and add punctuation marks to the mix, as per the Texan band ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, or Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly - the nom du rock of the 20-year-old singer from Southend known to his mum as Sam Duckworth. Exclamation marks, too, are popular, spicing up already over- heated names such as The Go! Team; Panic! At the Disco, You Say Party! We Say Die! and the Canadian group Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Some bands, meanwhile, make waggish use of spacing (Alexisonfire) or weird combina- tions of upper and lower cases (iLiKETRAiNS). Still others have filtered out boring old letters altogether. The band from Sacramento via New York called !!! (known verbally as "chk chk chk") was declared "the hardest band name to Google" by Spin magazine.

But there is a serious side to the quest for ever-more quirky names. With so many acts from all over the world now trading in such close proximity to each other - thanks to the internet - the chance of suffering a clash has never been more likely.

Take the case of a metalcore band from London called Cyanide. Not such a bad name. But a quick search on MySpace reveals an astonishing tally of more than 50 acts presenting themselves as Cyanide, from as far afield as Stockholm, Norwich, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Colorado and Carlisle. And if any one of those bands were to sign a recording contract and release a big-selling album, the chances are they would find a queue of other Cyanides - and their lawyers - seeking to prove a prior claim to ownership of the name.

This happened when Nirvana, the kings of Nineties grunge, from Seattle, were successfully sued by Nirvana, the progressive rock group from London who released a string of albums between 1967 and the early 1970s, and enjoyed one minor hit with "Rainbow Chaser" in 1968. The terms of the settlement were never revealed, but it seems possible that the UK Nirvana enjoyed a pay-off from their American cousins that was considerably in excess of any receipts they had earned from recent sales of their own recordings.

Other high-profile bands have run into similar difficulties. Verve became The Verve after legal representations from the jazz record label Verve. The Charlatans are obliged, when in America, to refer to themselves as The Charlatans UK, to distinguish themselves from the 1960s American band of the same name. And Blink 182 added the number to their original name when they were threatened by legal action from an Irish band called Blink.

In 2003, the boy band Blue reached an unusual agreement in the High Court with the 1970s rock band Blue (by then aged in their fifties) that both parties could continue using the same name since, as the judge put it, "fans were hardly likely to confuse one band with the other". This was something of a disappointment for the older Blue "boys", who were suing their youthful counterparts for the wildly optimistic sum of £5m.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is a specialist website designed to put an end to all this misery. For the princely sum of $12 (£6.40), any artist can register their name at www.bandname.com, thereby lending moral and apparently legal weight to their claim to that name. "It's all about establishing an audit trail of prior usage," says the founder of the website, Paul Berrow. "It acts as a deposit of musicians' intent to use a certain name and records it for posterity."

According to Berrow, disputes over names is a growing problem, especially now that everybody is operating on the web. "In the past, bands with the same name in different territories would not have been aware of each other unless they became successful in each other's markets," he says. "Now they are all colliding in cyberspace."

Berrow is aware of "three or four" serious conflicts over band names already this year, but is coy about giving specific examples of when his website has been helpful in resolving such disputes. Registering with Bandname certainly shored up the case of Liberty, the 1990s funk band from east London, when they discovered that their name had been appropriated by a group from the Popstars television talent contest. The ex-Popstars band had already enjoyed two hits under the name of Liberty and were about to release their third single when a High Court ruling in 2002 forced them to change their name to Liberty X.

But Bandname.com is not a panacea. A quick search of its registry reveals six bands named Cyanide. The two from Adelaide, both formed in 2000, are clearly duplicates, while the others - from Northern Ireland (formed 1999), New Jersey (no date), Dhaka, Bangladesh (2000) and Reading, US (2005) - leave few clues to their activities or current status. Interestingly, the London Cyanide have since changed their name to Send Forth the Colony. Not such a snappy sobriquet perhaps, but unique - at least for now.

The vogue for bizarre band names has grown on the pop world like a Russian vine. Even a moniker as silly as Arctic Monkeys now seems quite sensible when compared to such names as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Bullet for My Valentine, Snowfight in the City Centre, Living with Eating Disorders or Dogs Die in Hot Cars, to name but a few.

Other acts go further, and add punctuation marks to the mix, as per the Texan band ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, or Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly - the nom du rock of the 20-year-old singer from Southend known to his mum as Sam Duckworth. Exclamation marks, too, are popular, spicing up already over- heated names such as The Go! Team; Panic! At the Disco, You Say Party! We Say Die! and the Canadian group Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Some bands, meanwhile, make waggish use of spacing (Alexisonfire) or weird combina- tions of upper and lower cases (iLiKETRAiNS). Still others have filtered out boring old letters altogether. The band from Sacramento via New York called !!! (known verbally as "chk chk chk") was declared "the hardest band name to Google" by Spin magazine.

But there is a serious side to the quest for ever-more quirky names. With so many acts from all over the world now trading in such close proximity to each other - thanks to the internet - the chance of suffering a clash has never been more likely.

Take the case of a metalcore band from London called Cyanide. Not such a bad name. But a quick search on MySpace reveals an astonishing tally of more than 50 acts presenting themselves as Cyanide, from as far afield as Stockholm, Norwich, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Colorado and Carlisle. And if any one of those bands were to sign a recording contract and release a big-selling album, the chances are they would find a queue of other Cyanides - and their lawyers - seeking to prove a prior claim to ownership of the name.

This happened when Nirvana, the kings of Nineties grunge, from Seattle, were successfully sued by Nirvana, the progressive rock group from London who released a string of albums between 1967 and the early 1970s, and enjoyed one minor hit with "Rainbow Chaser" in 1968. The terms of the settlement were never revealed, but it seems possible that the UK Nirvana enjoyed a pay-off from their American cousins that was considerably in excess of any receipts they had earned from recent sales of their own recordings.

Other high-profile bands have run into similar difficulties. Verve became The Verve after legal representations from the jazz record label Verve. The Charlatans are obliged, when in America, to refer to themselves as The Charlatans UK, to distinguish themselves from the 1960s American band of the same name. And Blink 182 added the number to their original name when they were threatened by legal action from an Irish band called Blink.
In 2003, the boy band Blue reached an unusual agreement in the High Court with the 1970s rock band Blue (by then aged in their fifties) that both parties could continue using the same name since, as the judge put it, "fans were hardly likely to confuse one band with the other". This was something of a disappointment for the older Blue "boys", who were suing their youthful counterparts for the wildly optimistic sum of £5m.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is a specialist website designed to put an end to all this misery. For the princely sum of $12 (£6.40), any artist can register their name at www.bandname.com, thereby lending moral and apparently legal weight to their claim to that name. "It's all about establishing an audit trail of prior usage," says the founder of the website, Paul Berrow. "It acts as a deposit of musicians' intent to use a certain name and records it for posterity."

According to Berrow, disputes over names is a growing problem, especially now that everybody is operating on the web. "In the past, bands with the same name in different territories would not have been aware of each other unless they became successful in each other's markets," he says. "Now they are all colliding in cyberspace."

Berrow is aware of "three or four" serious conflicts over band names already this year, but is coy about giving specific examples of when his website has been helpful in resolving such disputes. Registering with Bandname certainly shored up the case of Liberty, the 1990s funk band from east London, when they discovered that their name had been appropriated by a group from the Popstars television talent contest. The ex-Popstars band had already enjoyed two hits under the name of Liberty and were about to release their third single when a High Court ruling in 2002 forced them to change their name to Liberty X.

But Bandname.com is not a panacea. A quick search of its registry reveals six bands named Cyanide. The two from Adelaide, both formed in 2000, are clearly duplicates, while the others - from Northern Ireland (formed 1999), New Jersey (no date), Dhaka, Bangladesh (2000) and Reading, US (2005) - leave few clues to their activities or current status. Interestingly, the London Cyanide have since changed their name to Send Forth the Colony. Not such a snappy sobriquet perhaps, but unique - at least for now.