I owe the diary four entries today. Here we go.
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Putting together the set list for Fosca’s 45 minute performance in Sweden next month. The set is going to be recorded, possibly even released or broadcast. So now comes trying to strike a balance between what we think the audience would like, what we think we can do well in concert, and just the right amount of new songs too. It’s all very well someone writing in to ask us to play a particular song. It’s another when the song in question is nine minutes long and isn’t a particular favourite with most other fans, or indeed some band members.
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Am alerted to a concert by an artist calling herself Scout Niblett, taking her first name from To Kill A Mockingbird. There’s also been a band called The Boo Radleys, and I’m sure there must be an Atticus and the Finches out there somewhere. It might be possible to put on an entire festival of bands helping themselves to Ms Lee’s characters.
See also A Clockwork Orange and The Naked Lunch. Books that bands like, or want people to think they like.
I’m guilty too, with Fosca coming from the Sondheim musical Passion and Orlando managing to reference at least four different things I like: Woolf’s gender-switching immortal in the novel (made into a film after I named the band, honest) / As You Like It / Orlando The Marmalade Cat / Orlando Furioso. But I like to think these are at least less obvious than To Kill A Mockingbird, the archetypal student’s favourite book.
Other obvious sources to avoid when naming a band are The Bell Jar, The Catcher In The Rye, The Naked Lunch and A Clockwork Orange. Steely Dan being one notable culprit.
Then there’s the other cliche: naming one’s band after something to do with World Wars 1 or 2. Mark Radcliffe’s book Showbusiness also points this out, and he confesses to his own school band: The Berlin Airlift.
War: what is it good for? Naming bands, apparently. Spandau Ballet, Joy Division / New Order, Franz Ferdinand, Dresden Dolls, Free French, Vichy Government, Lancaster Bombers. I like all those bands (he hastily added, before the people in some of them end their friendships with me), just not the names.
Band names are nearly always embarrassing, though. But at least they’re a formality: once the music connects, the name means the music, not what it means.
Some other great artists with terrible names: Prefab Sprout, The Field Mice, The Pastels, Talulah Gosh, Marine Research, Neutral Milk Hotel. Blur, Pulp and Oasis are all terrible names, too. But again, only when you look at the words away from the music.
On one drunken occasion, I came up with an increasingly silly list of war-related band names only schoolboys would use: The Nazis. Hiro and the Shimas. The War. Rudolf The Red Nose Hess (doesn’t even work). Camp Concentration. The Hitlers. The Kaiser Chiefs.
Ho and indeed ho.
