Would you pay a tenner on the door to see the Cockroaches, the Fireman, Patchwork, the Network and Bingo Hand Job play your local pub? This unpromising line-up becomes a little more appealing (perhaps) upon learning that these are pseudonyms used by, respectively, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Pulp, Green Day and R.E.M. over the years.
Pop stars spend the first part of their careers trampling over their grandmothers in the unseemly rush to demand the world take notice of who they are, and the second part whining about being pigeonholed. The only thing harder to escape in the music industry than your name is your original haircut. Hence, the pseudonymous offshoot, offering a degree of separation with very little sense of jeopardy.
The Cockroaches’ gnarly blues-rock could not have been made by any band other than the Rolling Stones
Earlier this month the Rolling Stones released a new single, ‘Rough And Twisted’. Or rather, the Cockroaches did. Operating under an alter ego the group first utilised in March 1977 while playing a couple of secret gigs at the tiny El Mocambo club in Toronto, the Stones hyped up the release of their first new music in almost three years with a bit of playful misdirection.
On April Fool’s Day, pink posters appeared across London featuring the Cockroaches name above a QR code. The code led to a website depicting a picture of a room furnished with vinyl records, a desk, a rotary phone and some very unlovely retro patterned flooring. Those who signed up to the mailing list were shown a pop-up message: ‘Who The Fuck Are The Cockroaches?’, a coded reference to a T-shirt once worn by Keith Richards which asked the same pointed question of Mick Jagger. The clock in the room read 1.41 p.m. and the date Saturday, 11 April. The song was duly released on the given day as a one-sided white label vinyl 12-inch, a mere 1,000 copies distributed to selected stores worldwide.
These shenanigans, apparently, are a precursor to a new Rolling Stones album arriving in the summer. Presumably, the idea is to inject a little fun, intrigue and spoofing into the PR process – the kind of tactics the band’s original hustler-manager Andrew Loog Oldham was practising more than 60 years ago. The intention certainly isn’t to provide cover for a creative left turn; the Cockroaches’ gnarly blues-rock could not have been made by any band other than the Rolling Stones.
Some artists, however, deploy pen names to take a few risks. Paul McCartney records sporadically as the Fireman with producer and Killing Joke bassist Youth. A vehicle for more experimental electronic work, the project was initially intended to be genuinely pseudonymous until the identities of the two artists were leaked around the release of the first Fireman album Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest, in November 1993. The Fireman has since released two more records. They contain some of McCartney’s more interesting later work. Likewise, I’d also far rather listen to Green Day’s synth-heavy new wave alter ego the Network than the
mother band.
Sometimes the impetus appears more wilful. Another of McCartney’s collaborators, Elvis Costello, is a master of the perplexing alias. He went under the name the Imposter on 1983 single ‘Pills And Soap’ and long before the film of the same name, became Napoleon Dynamite on the 1986 album Blood & Chocolate (which features a painting by Eamon Singer, another Costello alias).
On other occasions pseudonyms can, alas, be an excuse for outbreaks of wackiness. When R.E.M. were promoting Out Of Time in March 1991, they played two secret gigs at the Borderline in London as Bingo Hand Job, accompanied by Billy Bragg and Robyn Hitchcock. Both the name and the shows were in part intended to puncture the group’s rather solemn image. The first 100 punters were given a commemorative hand towel reading ‘Bingo Hand Job: sanitised for your pleasure’. Singer Michael Stipe adopted the moniker ‘Stinky’, the band played jokey versions of country songs and Bragg beatboxed on ‘Tom’s Diner’.
Just as pseudonyms are almost never truly intended to deceive, secret gigs are never really meant to be secret. A sense of exclusivity is ingrained. The first Bingo Hand Job show was a knees-up for 200 industry insiders. Similarly, the annual ‘secret’ slots at Glastonbury are exercises in manufactured intrigue: the entire planet knew days in advance that the act billed as Patchwork on last year’s festival bill was Pulp. A large part of the appeal of these things is giving people the illusion of being party to
insider information.
As for ‘Rough And Twisted’, it’s assuredly the greatest song the Cockroaches have ever made. It’s not a bad Rolling Stones track, either. The youngest member of the band, Ronnie Wood, will turn 79 in June. Cockroaches, remember, are among the most resilient creatures on Earth.
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