Welcome to the weekly SPIN.com feature “Name That Band!” inwhich we get the inside stories behind the mysterious monikers of some ofour favorite artists. (See past episodes of Name That Band! here.)
This week: Melbourne, Australia, synth-pop stars Cut Copy, whose much anticipated new album, their third,Zonoscope, is due February 8.
Why Cut Copy: “I was working at my day job at the graphic design company I owned back in Melbourne in 2001,” says vocalist-keyboardist Dan Whitford, “and I remember being on my MacBook. I was in the edit menu and I moved down in the document to the few words that didn’t make sense together, and at that particular day and time the words ‘cut’ and ‘copy’ really stood out to me. There are no other variables to the story. On a different day, I might have thought Edit Delete was a great name for the band. The other guys were receptive to the name. At the time it felt like a fairly abstract choice but now it feels very tied in with what we do. I imagine most bands feel like that about their name.”
Previously Rejected Names: “I actually think the name might have been Cut Copy Delete at one point – a slight variation. But when we first started out as Cut Copy, we played a lot of shows and adopted other weird alternative names for some of them. We were embarrassed at our lack of skill performing live so we’d change our name all the time so that our friends wouldn’t come see us. One of the names we used was Different Cigarettes. Another one was Red Arrow Down.”
Best Band Names Ever: “I always liked Neon Judgment, they’re an old industrial band.”
Worst Band Name Ever: “The Pixies has the potential to be a bad band name. It would be a terrible name if they were a psych-goth-rave band, but thankfully for the kind of music the Pixies make, it’s pretty good.”
