XL Recordings

Here is the trailer for the first episode of our forthcoming web series, coming out later this month.

As a freelance music journalist, I spend a chunk of every day listening to publicists doing their best to convince me â€' an idiot who secretly spends all day listening to bad finger-in-ear folk records â€' that their young charges are the next big thing.

And while there is something infinitely crushing about reading the words "Oasis/Kasabian-inspired four-piece from Coventry", it's always fun to marvel at their names. Recent new bands, for example, include Titus Andronicus, an indie band named after Shakespeare's earliest tragedy, and Empire of the Sun, an Australian electro duo named for the JG Ballard novel.

Literary band names are nothing new, of course. Rock music and literature have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, from Douglas Coupland's novel Girlfriend in a Coma â€' named after the 1987 Smiths song â€' to the many (oh, so many) bands who have lifted their names from books.

But is the literary band name a fast track to credibility, or a lazy and contrived way to make the band look smarter than they actually are? A bit of both, most likely.

It's all a matter of taste of course, but the literature of the counter-culture inspired some good bands, with the Fall (Albert Camus), the Doors (a reference to Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception) and the Velvet Underground (Michael Leigh) perhaps the most obvious.

Some texts, however, are cooler than any band ever could be, and naturally spawn band names that scream, "Look, we're dark and edgy too!" With...

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