The other day I found the original artwork I created for the very first band I was in. It was a long, long time ago. The art was folded carefully, with “original for photocopy” written on the outside in pencil. For photocopy? When I unfolded it, I found a very carefully rendered depiction of a bandage-wrapped mummy below the name TUTANKHAMUN. Pretentious, moi?
Much older me looks at the art and thinks “you sweet summer child!” It’s rendered in soft black and red pencil on nice quality textured art paper. That sucker would never have worked as a photocopy; what was I thinking? Well, I can tell you I was thinking it was a really cool name, and I was probably a bit pleased that I could spell it – I was possibly the only band member who could. I think the design was influenced by an Alan Parsons Project album cover belonging to my older brother.
The name didn’t last long; it was replaced with The Object. There may have been other names, it’s not as if we were attached to them.
What’s in a name, then? For one thing, memories. Sometimes eye-rolling memories of the “how did we think that was cool?” ilk, but mostly fond recollections of time spent writing and rehearsing, discovering the culture around our favourite music, hanging out. In that short Sex Pistols timeframe I recall shoving a blanket pin into my cheek and connecting a chain to one of the many badges on my jacket. With mirror shades I felt like a character out of a movie, overlooking the fact that only six months earlier I looked like an escapee from Revenge of the Nerds, complete with a v-neck knitted vest. Not long after the Pistols phase we moved on to New Wave… sorta. Our setlist was a horrendous mashup of Anarchy in the UK, Roxanne, a couple of Angels songs and a number of tunes we’d put together ourselves; protypical things that never really coalesced into finished products. Looking back, the most hilarious aspect of this was that we regularly played a dance called Dragonflight in the hills to the east of Melbourne. The hippies who formed most of the audience would go crazy, dancing bizarrely as we played. A couple of decades passed before I realised that they probably thought we – a bunch of 15 year olds – were cute. They were being incredibly supportive of us!
Ultimately Tutankhamun / The Object faded away, but it had provided an amazing learning curve, practical lessons that only playing and writing with others could provide. Although at its end I would cringe at the band name and some of the songs we played, decades later I look back fondly at that time and recognise its importance to everything that came later.
Object lesson: don’t sweat the band name too much. No matter how dumb or weird it is, it’ll come to be meaningful to you and your audience. Embrace the eye-roll!