Indie Band Names

Being in an indie band doesn’t require much.  The music is generally pretty basic, as is the fashion.  Cool kids tend to give most stuff a go if they hear it on FBI – a blurry psychedelic sound and Ian Curtis sounding vocals tend to help – and seeing some old black clothing and messy hair up on the stage somewhere can often be enough to make any hipster feel superior to their less culturally aware friends who are eating pills and fist pumping to Ibiza beats at the neighbouring club.  It’s all really in the name.  You need something that sounds super cool when that radio presenter says it in their super sleepy ‘Shit I had such a big night drinking long necks in Surry Hills’ voice.  But never fear, there is a very simple formula.

First you need a noun.  Any kind of noun is fine; proper, common, abstract.  In fact the less thought you put into it the better.  Then you need an overseas location.  This is a little harder as it needs to be somewhere cool.  Either cool in the sense that it is where cool people like to go and hang out, in that it just sounds quite cool, or you can take a bit of a risk and choose a place so boring and uninspiring that using it in the name of your inner-city-intellectually-derelict half band half performance art group is obviously ironic, hence cool.  And then simply combine the two as you think sounds best. I’ll try a few right now with items from my desk and Google maps;

Stockholm Sticky Tape, Boston Hole Punch, Warsaw Telephone.

Just off the top of my head, here are a few Australian Indie artists that have done this;

Miami Horror, TeenagersinTokyo, Architecture in Helsinki, Riot in Belgium, Philadelphia Grand Jury, Moscow Schoolboy, Dukes of Windsor, Hungry Kids of Hungary.

I think it probably pays to be a bit careful and I’d suggest that in the quest for a cool name and alliteration, some sort of line has been crossed by I Heart Hiroshima and Bricks of Berlin, neither of whose music is at all political.  I can’t imagine why three Brisbane kids would ‘Heart’ the world’s most notorious bomb site or what post pubescent Sydneysiders would know about the bricks of Berlin other than the time they spray painted a mural on the wall whilst tripping on acid during their art school exchange.  But maybe I’m just looking too deep.

But there are other ways to make a suitable Indie band name.  Anything with ‘Black’ in it seems to go down well.  On the Triple J Unearthed band listings, there are 185 artists with Black in their title (see  http://www.triplejunearthed.com/Search.aspx?keyword=black).

But all of this won’t get you too far.  The Indie thing in Australia has become pretty meaningless and for the most part talent or lack of it will become apparent and more significant.  Most bands that survive past a show or two at Oxford Art Factory tend to have at least some promising tracks and there are a few who have shown signs of becoming brilliant.  That said, there is nothing a fading subculture loves more than reflexivity, so if you want your friends in nose rings and Dr Denims to think your cool even though you’re talentless, then start criticising and commenting on the world you’re a part of....and make up a name.