What's In A Name?: How punk scene choose names

It’s a tale as old as time - four teenagers in a garage fiddling around with musical instruments, spending more time trying to think of a cool band name than actually writing and rehearsing songs. It was almost two decades ago that Ed, the drummer of the gang, pleaded we don’t spend all day trying to think of a name. A name for a band that never played a single gig! But we did think of a cool name; The Manhattan Project. We weren’t from Manhattan, we were from York but it was a timeless reference to Nuclear war. I’ve been in two bands since, one a similar line-up with Ramones/Stooges covers and grunty punky energy called The Shambolics (we played only one gig). The name, obviously, came from the fact were shambolic.

I did manage to form a ragtag collective called Pewter City Punks for a few years (the premise was…what if a folk-punk band existed in the Pokemon universe? The name was a reference to Pewter City (“a stone grey city”) and the habit of punk bands using ‘city’ (like the band Red City Radio and the song ‘Rebel City Rockers’ by The Exposed).

Music movements and collective scenes seem to find a common theme for band names. UK BritPop bands were allergic to using ‘The’. You wouldn’t be caught dead with a ‘The’ in your name in the 1990s. In the 1908s d-beat bands wanted to be as gnarley and nasty as possible. The genre is named after the inventors Discharge and characterised by the specific drum beat. Enter Discord and Disorder and a few others from around the world - Disrupt (USA) and Disclose (Japan). It’s partly why Chumabwamba chose their name - they wanted something meaningless and silly in response to a raft of bands embracing the crunchy negativity of in-yer-face punk bands.

A beautiful scene I loved dearly were the indie-punk bands of the mid-2010s. Though none received chart success, they galvanised a scene of anti-austerity millennials. Often queer bands singing about mental health, these bands chose names, like Chumabwamba, which in-of-themselves don’t really mean anything. Each of these bands will have their own specific, unique reasons for naming themselves, but on a gig poster they don’t distinctly identify and tie themselves as a genre - Austeros, Sniff, Happy Accidents, Suggested Friends, Little Fists, Colour Me Wednesday, Haters, The Spook School, Crumbs, Jesus & His Judgemental Father, Ay Carmella, Personal Best, Muncie Girls, Shit Present. And to me, that made it feel like this scene didn’t want to be tied down to a musical style or binary position of fashion or identity. It’s a home for the outsider punks that don’t have to wear their hair a certain way, don’t have to wear leather and patches and skate and curate their music solely around three chords.

The neighbouring 2010s scene of skatepunk and hardcore punk also wanted to break away from the usual routine of The somethings. After all, we’d had 40 years of punk bands with predictable angry hard-done-by names from The Damned to the Exploited to The Casualties to The Unseen to The Rabble. The template set by Household Name bands was chaotic and fun - so Revenge of The Psychotronic Man takes their name from a c-list sci-fi film. Wonk Unit was coined when Alex ‘Daddy’ Wonk and the original guitarist realised how rubbish they were at laying crazy paving. Pizzatramp, Botched Toe, Pi$$er, Piss Kitti Pat Butcher, Bobby Funk, Bruise Control - Chewing On Tinfoil over in Ireland…these names are all a bit silly and that’s OK because so are the bands - boozey, dancey, in-jokey social friendship communities (as well as being political and heavy-sounding).

I love it when a movement sorta kinda finds common ground on names.

But my favourite trio of names have to be Fistymuffs, Tuffragettes and Milky Wimpshake. I sometimes wish we'd called that old band back in 2006 The Shambollocks. Love a good pun.