Starting a contemporary a cappella band from scratch is quite hard. But naming the band is really really hard.
Why are we called Academix? As Anita is fond of saying, the ‘Aca’ indicates ‘a cappella’, the ‘mix’ denotes the mixture of genres that we sing, and ‘dem’ is to remind Neil, our bass, of his words.
But there were many other names that fell by the wayside before we got to this one.
Alison Rogers recently asked Twitter for ideas on a cappella names. Here’s some of ours that didn’t make the cut:
- On That Note
- Forge (or The Forge – as in banging stuff together to create something else!)
- At Six (@6) (@Six)
- The Brink
- Reduce Speed Now (!)
- The Sound Borrowers
- Destination Anywhere (ref The Commitments)
- Defiant Celebration of the Uninvited Trout and Elusive (one of our offspring trying to ‘help’)
- Sponge… (exactly)
- D’a cappo
- All wow’s, no do’s (one of us actually like this…)
- B Natural
- The Cat’s whiskers …
- The Five (a little restrictive if we ever got a sixth member!)
- The Six (a little presumptuous that we could ever find a sixth member!!)
- The Accidentals (though there is already a college group with this name)
- Atomic Shutdown
- Fadeout
- Vice Versa
- Xpresso or Expressivo
- The Blades
- Four Alarm Fire
- Noteworthy
- Arse (we were most of the way down the wine bottle by this point in the evening)
- Take Note
- The Mellowtones
- Mac And Ella
- Sha Na Na s
- ShangaLangs
- The Star Tones (like star turns)
- The Rama Lama Ding Dongs
- The Songbirds
- The Nightbirds
- Satin Voices
- Velvet Voices
- The Long Tall Sallys
- The Mustang Sallys
- The Mustangs (we had returned to the Committments theme by this point)
- The Nightingales
- The Grapevines
- The Humzingers / Humsingers (Humzingers turned out to a brand of fruit sweet)
- The Velvet Crows (a bit dark).
Alison, use what you will! But you also have to follow the Godfather’s Deke Sharon’s rules.
