Why did Suede need to change their band name?
You wake up with a craving. It’s for some good old-fashioned Britpop, the Britpop that arguably started it all. So you open your phone or your laptop or wherever you’re streaming music and search for it: “Suede”. If you’re in the UK, that’s fine. You’re sorted; enjoy ‘Animal Nitrate’. But if you’re elsewhere in the world, the search will put up a fight, asking you how you might feel about a band called The London Suede instead. They’re the exact same, but every time it happens, somewhere, Brett Anderson shudders.
This isn’t an uncommon thing. As the music industry has become exactly that, an industry, copyright cases surrounding band names have become more and more common. The Chemical Brothers were originally called The Dust Brothers until a band from the UK with that name found out and made them change. Blink-182 initially just wanted to be Blink, but they had to add the numbers like someone trying to get a password to get through the security measures. There have been some recent cases, too. The Last Dinner Party were originally just The Dinner Party, but that was already taken. Wargasm now have to add (UK) at the end on Spotify to get around it. Easy Life aptly switched to Hard Life after the flight company EasyJet came after them.
A band is a business, you see. It’s just like any average shop. Around the world, there will be hundreds of thousands of corner shops with the same name. But the second it hits big-business scale, that has to change.
So, really, it’s a sort of twisted compliment when the moment comes when a band is making so much noise and gaining enough hype that the suits come knocking. But picking one band name is hard enough, let alone having to alter it to something new when you’re already in the game.
It was especially hard for Suede who picked out their name incredibly early in the game, before they even had a drummer. It was a name that Anderson had in mind for a long time, so when the group was first coming together, it stuck.
It was also quickly famous. It wasn’t long before the group were leading the charge of the Britpop pack, but, as the story always goes, that’s exactly when these things come out of the woodwork. In their case, it was a lounge singer in America who already performed under the name and had it trademarked. So, for any future tours, releases and appearances in the US, the band would have to think of something else.
To make things simple and also to keep cashing in on the Britpop moment, they landed on The London Suede—but I’m sure everyone can agree that’s nowhere near as good.
How did Brett Anderson feel about the new Suede band name?
In short? Livid.
The band did their best to essentially ignore that this ever had to happen. The London Suede only appeared on the records in territories it had to, and they did their best to keep it from everywhere else, deciding to remain simply Suede there.
It’s a risky move. Most bands prioritise uniformity, so a forced name change in one place would mean a forced name change everywhere. But Anderson was so unhappy with it that he’d rather risk a bit of confusion than have to front a band forever called The London Suede.
He said, “The London Suede is not the name I chose for the band; I didn’t change it happily, and I’m not going to pretend I did”.
