Photo: The Spice Girls 1996 | By Danny Wright, GQ / Culture / Pocket | “It’s so bad that the tribute bands don’t sound worse,” is how frontman Alex Turner once described his band’s name, The Arctic Monkeys. The moniker was randomly suggested by the group’s guitarist Jamie Cook, who all these years later still refuses to explain why. “There might have been other ideas for offshoots at the time, but the Monkeys was the first one,” Turner told Q Magazine in 2011. “If you realized you were gonna be doing this 20 years later, you might’ve had another hour in that meeting.”
A band’s name is fundamental to their identity, that particular combination reflecting the essence of how you define yourselves and the music people can expect. It’s said there are rules and formulas to a good band name: Is it original? Memorable? Can you Google it? Does it have a good story and reflect the music you’re making?
For every group that comes up with a terrible name and sticks with it, there have been some near misses with bands who were very close to getting it very wrong. Would Creed have been as successful if they’d kept the name Naked Toddler? Would “Iris” have topped one million UK sales if the Goo Goo Dolls had stuck with the name, The Sex Maggots? Would we love Radiohead if they were still called, the frankly appalling, On A Friday?
“The Spice Girls is a great band name” says Michael Cragg, author of the excellent Reach for the Stars, an oral history of UK pop music from ’96 to 2006. “It was Touch, then it was Spice, and then people in label meetings kept calling them ‘those Spice Girls’, so the name evolved over time. It also meant they were easy to caricature in the way that happened with the whole Posh Spice, Scary Spice etc nicknames. Posh Touch? Sounds like something unsavoury that happens at Eton.”
For Michelle Kambasha, a music publicist with a decade of experience working alongside bands such as Bon Iver and The War on Drugs, the Spice Girls moniker made them a brand. “Ultimately for someone like them, selling the Sporty, Posh, Scary element seemed so integral to their success. They’re a product, not a band.”
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Read more of this opinion article at:
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/do-band-names-matter-in-music?
Photo: The Spice Girls | https://www.facebook.com/spicegirls/
How Much Do Band Names Really Matter?
