XX Teens: Cut and paste, but don't copy

Choosing to borrow their name from a copier company was only the start of a rocky road to originality for XX Teens, <b>Nick Mitchell</b> discovers

Feature by Nick Mitchell | 20 Mar 2009

The trivia-heavy history of band naming has thrown up plenty of cases where a pre-existing act has got there first with that ideal moniker. And the legal clout of a copyrighted name can lead to ludicrous contests and contortions: so ‘90s grunge Nirvana had to settle out of court with ‘60s prog Nirvana to keep their name, The Charlatans and Suede had to add ‘UK’ to their name while trying to conquer America and, more recently, The Raconteurs become The Saboteurs whenever they touch down in Australia.

But there’s only one band who had to change their name because a copier company got there first. Step forward XX Teens - formerly Xerox Teens - who were forced to modify their name by the eponymous corporation, despite the fact that the verb ‘to xerox’ has slipped into popular usage. Singer Rich Cash is still bitter: “Xerox got in trouble in America for trying to stop people using it as an ordinary word, and we were told we'd have a chance of winning the case if we could get it to court. The problem is you don't get legal aid to fight that sort of thing so we never got the chance.” But then again, maybe the connotations of ‘xerox’ wouldn’t have done them any favours anyway, because XX Teens are the latest in that long line of art school bands (Byam-Shaw art school in North London, to be precise) who take pride in their creative independence.

“If you want to be an artist you can't start off making the tea and end up being the boss, the only thing you can do is make your work,” Cash says. “If you're serious, you're not going to be able to have a full time job, you're probably going to be poor, and you just have to accept that. I think it's very similar with good music. You shouldn't be making music if you're just thinking about making money. There's also something about being original: artists rip off and rip up the past but in the end if you haven't created something at least a bit new it's not worth doing. It's the same with music, or at least it should be.”

However, the band haven't always adopted such rigid rules of originality. The artwork, concept and title of their debut album Welcome to Goon Island was all 'stolen' from their art school friend Adam Latham, as Cash admits: “Adam came up with the Goon Island metaphor, it was going to be the title of a show of his paintings. He asked us to help him put on some sort of performance, with a hut and a chainsaw. Instead of helping we just stole the name, and put the paintings in the album sleeve.”

Welcome to Goon Island has the sense of anarchic energy that you might expect from such free-spirited larks, although any danger of direction-less doodling is reined in by a tough, angry, post-punk edge. Indeed, bands of that era loom large: Cash’s vocal style owes much to Mark E Smith’s rabid, street-drunk proselytizing, while The B-52s could have supplied the rhythm on The Way We Were and Pigbag the horns on Darlin’. Cash is happy to accept the comparisons: “They're exciting bands, they're not limited by anything, they're interesting, they tried to push things forward, they're about ideas and inventiveness. We never set out to sound like anyone else but I suppose if you're coming from the same sort of place you're going to tread some of the same paths.”

Interestingly, the album ends with a monologue by anti-war campaigner Brian Haw, who they also brought on stage at this summer’s Underage festival in London. Do they want to be seen as overtly political? “We're just talking about what's going on and what's on our minds,” Cash says. “We nearly got in trouble for having Brian at Underage, one of the organisers said politics wasn't allowed. It was a bit hypocritical because the whole festival was sponsored by Converse, and they had all these faux-political slogans daubed everywhere, things like 'It's your century' and 'Change comes from rebellion'.”

Whether change comes from rebellion, angry letters from corporate lawyers, nicking your mates’ ideas or reinterpreting your musical heroes, XX Teens are proof that, more often than not, it should be embraced.

Welcome to Goon Island is out now. Peace protester Brian Haw's website can be found here.

http://www.myspace.com/xxteens