What's in a name?

As anyone who ever fantasised in their teens about forming a band knows, one of the most important things to decide on was the name.  For my friends and me, it was the most important, and came way ahead of actually buying an instrument, let alone learning to play one.  Researching names wasn't too difficult in our punky heyday (and I've talked about this once before here ) - simply a matter of looking up suitably grungey words in a Thesaurus as a starting point.  Hence the 14-year-old Arseknickers never actually did learn to play anything, but the name of the band still adorned many a school exercise book.

Now, though, surely the pool of potentially catchy band names must be running a bit dry? We've had colours, regal monikers, numbers, Black this's and White that's, a short-lived phase of changing 'The' to 'Thee', countries, cities, trends for suffixing names with '-beats', '-men', '-girls' and '-cats' etc, cars, animals, weather conditions and foodstuffs, as well as a whole load of combinations of the above.

I suppose all the more obvious, short, sharp names already being allocated has given rise to more unexpected combinations of words; unrelated adjectives, nouns and phrases.  I think you can go to sites which generate these names, although that seems like a cop-out to me. But I guess anything is possible if it has a certain ring to it (and some readers may already know that I'm married to a man who was in a group with a particularly ridiculous name.  Which also includes a colour.)  It's no wonder then that the sentence, "sounds like the name of a band!" is frequently heard in this house when, for whatever reason, some random words get strung together in haste and sound, unwittingly, rather weirdly good.  Ok, not necessarily 'good' but certainly weird.  At SDS Towers, in the last week alone, we've had 'clubfoot chaffinch' and also 'liquid biscuit', both of which were uttered by me in a genuine attempt to describe something real (in the first case it was a deformed bird, and in the second a very tasty Vanilla Chai tea).   I'm rather partial now to taking it one step further and putting those two together to form the (multi-instrumental seven-piece fusion) combo: Liquid Biscuit & the Clubfoot Chaffinches...  Look out for them gigging in a town near you some time soon.  Well, possibly.  They'd probably be shit but I'd love to see their logo.

(It had to be...!)  Half Man Half Biscuit