‘The London Suede’: Why were UK bands forced to use different names in North America?
The annals of transatlantic rock are filled with tales of both unexpected overseas success (Def Leppard were bigger in America than their native UK) and frustrating anonymity (the first four Blur albums all failed to reach the US charts). Sometimes, though, the biggest hurdle for a British band trying to make it in America isn’t cultural…it’s legal.
Over the decades, numerous UK groups have had to modify their names and branding when crossing the pond, thanks to trademark conflicts with little-known American acts, record labels, or businesses that just happened to claim a trademark first. The results are a quirky side chapter in modern music history: familiar names rendered slightly unfamiliar, simply for the sake of avoiding a lawsuit.
One of the more famous examples is Suede, the glammy Britpop outfit fronted by Brett Anderson. In the UK, they were heralded as scene leaders by the early 1990s. But if you were living in the States at the time and perhaps reading about Suede in a British magazine purchased from your local Borders bookshop, you would struggle to find their album over in the CD section. That’s because, thanks to a little-known New York lounge singer who’d already trademarked the name “Suede”, Brett and the boys had to identify themselves as “The London Suede” in all of their American promotional materials and record sleeves. The band hated the change, unsurprisingly, and American fans eventually caught on and usually ignored it, but legally, the distinction stuck.
The Charlatans faced a similar issue. Tim Burgess’ stalwart Madchester band were informed early on that an obscure 1960s San Francisco psych band called The Charlatans had dibs on the name in the US. As a result, the alter-ego of “The Charlatans UK” was born—despite the fact that the original American Charlatans had long since disbanded and were far too obscure to have generated much confusion in the first place. Interestingly, even when these legal hurdles were cleared in the late ‘90s, Burgess and his bandmates kept the “UK” on their American releases for a while after hearing that their Stateside fans got more confused by NOT seeing it attached.
Very similar scenarios had already played out a decade earlier for two of the finest and darkest ‘80s bands from the North of England, The Mission and The Chameleons. Both bands had to hook a “UK” to the end of their names, as well; one due to a Philadelphia funk group (The Mission) and the other, it seems, because of a Minnesota rock act called Chameleon (singular rather than plural) that was still playing shows during the same time period.
Another beloved ‘80s band, the influential 2 Tone sextet known as The Beat, were geographically outed as “The English Beat” in the US, differentiating them from the Los Angeles power-pop band fronted by Paul Collins.
Among the more unusual examples, Canadian radio listeners of the ‘90s will recall that Bush, the British grunge-lite outfit, were required to go by “Bush X” in the Great White North for a while due to a name clash with a Canadian band from the ‘70s. That dispute was resolved amicably when Gavin Rossdale and company agreed to donate to Canadian charities in exchange for dropping the “X”, which was later, presumably, purchased by Elon Musk.
The 1990s also saw the Chemical Brothers forced to abandon their original name, the “Dust Brothers” for the quite legitimate reason that they’d literally named themselves after the still-active US production team behind the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. The Verve, meanwhile, had to give up being simply “Verve” after threats from the US jazz label Verve Records. Between that ordeal and the infamous royalties battles over ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, poor Richard Ashcroft had to spend way too much of his rockstar prime chatting with lawyers.
