Where did Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever get their name?
Australian indie band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever have been one of the prime movers in the resurgence of post-punk and garage rock guitar music during the last five years. After an impressive debut record and a solid second album, they went from strength to strength with their sterling third project, Endless Rooms.
Even for those not overly familiar with their music, though, the band has always stood out on gig posters and festival line-up cards for their unusual – and unusually wordy – name. For better or for worse, the name is always going to catch people’s attention, even if it doesn’t exactly stick in their heads.
It makes them sound somewhere between the estranged love-child of The Stones and an underground surf rock band and a superstar chillwave DJ trying out different titles for the name of their next boat party. Not that either of these things really reflects the sound of their music.
Surf rock bleeds through in certain songs, but the main RCBF (the acronym by which many fans abbreviate the band’s name) captures the spirit of straightforward noughties revivalism. There are sprinkles of various influences, from Joy Division to the tailenders of the 2000s indie boom like Real Estate and Two Door Cinema Club. None of these, however, explain the band’s name.
So, where did the name come from? And what does it mean?
At the time the Melbourne band appeared on the scene back in 2017, vocalist-guitarist Fran Keaney told The Music they were originally just called Rolling Blackouts. “We had to change that because there was a band overseas with the same name and it wasn’t gonna work.”
It’s not clear why Keaney and his bandmates chose the name Rolling Blackouts in the first place. The term refers to intentional and scheduled daily power cuts, which are unheard of in their native Australia but have become commonplace in South Africa over the past 15 years due to an energy crisis.
“It didn’t occur to us to shorten the name from Rolling Blackouts,” Keaney joked. And so, RBCF decided to make it longer by tacking “Coastal Fever” on the end.
The four words together certainly have an edge to them, even if they don’t exactly trip off the tongue. Or, as Keaney describes it, an “audacity… melodrama and… vagueness” to them.
As for the origin of “Coastal Fever”, it’s not, as Wikipedia might suggest, related to a serious parasitic disease suffered by cattle in East Africa. Or a psychological disorder suffered by inhabitants of islands and remote coastal areas. Although that might, in a “vague” way, have at least related it somehow to the group’s country of origin.
In fact, the “coastal fever” in question was that suffered by band member Tom Russo. He was “holed up sick” in a beachside hostel for an extended period with an unspecified illness while on holiday in Cambodia. Perhaps the Dead Kennedys served as an indirect inspiration to take that starting point and run with it.
Whatever’s behind it, the name has served RBCF pretty well so far. And its abbreviation does wonders for writing about them.
