Band Names

I wholeheartedly disagree with those curmudgeons who insist that all the great rock music has been made, that its glory days were the '60s and '70s and that it peaked during punk. But you could quite reasonably argue that there hasn't been a decent band name for a while.

Then again, do the band names of the classic rock era only seem alright because the music was so good, achieving cool by association? "The Beatles" was deemed a terrible pun at the time and few thought it would work. "The Doors" was dreary without its "of perception" appendage. "The Grateful Dead" was acid whimsy at its most naff, if indeed the word "naff" was in popular usage in Haight-Ashbury. "The Beach Boys" was that double-whammy, crap and inappropriate, especially as the group's career progressed and it slowly dawned that these were hardly what you might call boys and, Dennis Wilson aside, they were allergic to sun, sea and sand.

It did seem that most of the good names had been used up by the '90s, Blur and Oasis being cases in point. Supergrass saw one Super-prefix too many (Supertramp, Supercharge, and that's before the arrival of Superthriller and Super_Collider), while Nirvana was nicked from an old British psych-pop outfit. In fact, the grunge band names were uniformly awful, especially when they tried to temper the earnest bombast with "humour" (Smashing Pumpkins, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam).

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