No, not the band. But the current obsession with bands whose names begin “The —-.”
It can’t just be me, but there seem to be evermore of them – particularly in the indie/rock genre that my employer plays.
It’s certainly true that there have always been bands with names that start “The”. Most obviously bands like, The Beatles, The Beach Boys or The Who. Going back, it was perhaps more common to have the name of a star artist and their backing band. So we had Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and Freddy and the Dreamers.
Perhaps nothing really ever changes, but it does strike me that there are more bands beginning with “The” than ever before.
There’s nothing like a bit of original research, and far too few blogs have charts or graphs on them. Here is the previously unpublished results of my ‘study’. Since I have access to an electronic log of the nearly all the tracks played by Virgin Radio from 2003 onwards, I’ve examined whether the artist name of every track that the station’s played and counted those that began “The”. If the track was played more than once, then it’s counted more than once. In other words, popularity of tracks counts. I then took that as a proportion of all the tracks played, to give me a “% The” score.
And here’s the chart:
A couple of things to say about this chart. First, I’ll freely admit that Virgin Radio plays only a subset of all best-selling bands. You won’t find too much pop, dance or R’n’B on the station. Secondly, there was obviously a brief surge of popularity back at the end of 2003 and start of 2004 with bands like The Darkness and The Thrills, but not to the same extent as currently. And finally, the number of plays a band gets is obviously down to how the station is programmed. But no Programme Director has ever gone out of their way to play tracks unpopular with the audience. Indeed regular research is undertaken to ensure that the audience does enjoy the music Virgin Radio plays. Oh and obviously Q1 07 is examing the songs played to date.
But I think that there’s a clear indication that bands like The Killers, The Feeling and The Fratellis are where “it’s at.” “The” Klaxons have got it so wrong…
