After The XX five other bands who should have thought a bit more about SEO

There was a hilarious moment last night on BBC Five Live when the female presenter (forget her name) said that the Mercury Prize winner hadn’t yet been announced as on her screen it said it had gone to XX and they would be filling in the name of the winners later.

Which got me thinking. Since the advent of the web having a searchable name has been a bit of an advantage. You get top billing on Google and YouTube and your MySpace page is instantly memorable. So I guess The XX probably had some SEO related issues in their early days.

Here then are a few more bands who stuck two fingers up to the internet marketing rule book.

1 Girls – Looking for Girls on Google? It might be a long time before you land on anything connected with this SF indie/sunshine pop band. Which is a shame as they are really rather good – see the Laura vid. They played at London’s Scala a few months back. I tweeted about going to Kings Cross to see Girls, which maybe I shouldn’t have…

2 Women – They are a great Canadian band who sound like a cross between Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd and new wavers like Wire (and the three million bands that have ripped them off). Again, not much of an internet fan base…

3 .co.uk – Perhaps the most spectacularly badly named band ever, they were an Irish band (!?) from about ten years ago who sounded a bit like Ash. I spent ages (allright three minutes) looking for them online but could find no trace. There must have been a band called .com – anyone got a link for them?

4 Apple – Ok, so they were around in the 60s when the iPhone wasn’t even a twinkle in Steve Jobs eye, but they are never going to be a band that people stumble across online. They were from Wales, released one fairly good psych album and hit the motherload with this Beatley track. Genius

5 Fanny – No explanation required here. They were early 70s all female hard rockers.

And finally a few other bands who might have thought differently about their band name had the web been around then

X – Californian new wavers
The Church – Aussie psych band
Family – British progressive rockers
The Times – 80s Brit mods featuring the genius that is Ed Ball
The United States of America – 60s US psychers, whose debut album is much loved this side of the Atlantic
The The – Well they wouldn’t have made it today, would they?