What’s In A Name?

Semtek

DJ, producer and boss of the Don’t Be Afraid label.

This is a difficult question to answer, in the same way that it’s very difficult to say how a name might influence the way you relate to anyone in the public eye. I would dodge something on a name alone – I think if a name suggested to me that someone was racist, homophobic, crass or vitriolic I would dodge their music.

I never really thought about using my real name, to be honest. It just felt natural to choose a pseudonym. I can’t really remember why I chose Semtek. I liked the idea of a two-syllable word, I think. Time spent worrying about names is time which would be better spent writing music, releasing music, or otherwise pursuing your creative goals.

Time spent worrying about names would be better spent pursuing your creative goals.

I try to encourage the artists we work with not to create needless pseudonyms unless there are strong artistic or practical reasons for doing so. When people choose names which reflect fashion over substance, those names will inevitably date the artist. For example, male producers who have chosen female pseudonyms in recent years may one day regret that decision. As with all the packaging and apparatus which surround music, the best names are those which leave the most to the imagination, and which set as few boundaries as possible around the creative process as possible.

Bicep

London-based Northern Irish house duo that rose to fame of the back of their blog and all its retro curveball delights, now headlining from the Warehouse Project to Berghain.

I think the artist themselves makes the name. Any name can become something when associated with either a good or bad vibe. Nu Groove could be instantly thought of as a nasty Wigan Pier hard house label if we didn’t already associate it with that brand of awesome, sample-heavy 90s house.

We believe very much you can become the name. When we chose Bicep it was really that we wanted a wacky, arrogant and rather daft name for our blog, and we sat down one evening and just thought about 80s music, Italo disco, arrogance… “Ahh… FEEL MY BICEP would be funny!” It literally took us five minutes. It took a further ten minutes to make the logo, which was intended to just make do until we had time to do a proper one, but after a bit of time we realised it was good as it was. Then after about a year we started getting booked for DJ gigs and decided to maybe use Bicep again, only for a bit of time, and it kinda just grew and grew.

For us it was more fun to create something new that wasn’t instantly linked to us personally. We didn’t take it or ourselves very seriously and it was just a bit of fun. We got a lot of funny comments and looks in the beginning. Bicep is a ridiculous name for a DJ duo but it kinda naturally grew out of the blog and seemed to work.

You can brand anything you want, that’s were creativity comes in. You could call yourself Dr String or Lady Banana and probably brand it well and in a funny, creative way. We only have to really look back to the 80s and 90s to see very rich artist branding and imagery. Everything got a bit stagnant with the arrival of MP3s and the digital era. That’s really our main reason for releasing vinyl: because you can make it a visual, physical product with a look and feel. We both come from professional design and advertising backgrounds and so it all came pretty naturally to us. It’s not really something we thought about, we just did it for our own fun.

We got a lot of funny comments and looks in the beginning. Bicep is a ridiculous name for a DJ duo

Terry Farley

UK house veteran turned musical archivist who released under a plethora of monikers influenced by the scenes he loved. 

Both Pete [Heller, Terry’s frequent collaborator and partner in Roach Motel] and I were caught up in New York house culture when we looked at names and Roach Motel sounded sleazy and very Sound Factory-esque. I was watching late night TV in New York and this crazy advert came on for Roach Motel, “where roaches check in but they don’t check out”. Basically it’s an insect trap and killer. Fire Island, as a name, came from the Village People’s first (and very credible) disco LP from around 1977, that came as a mixed LP – the first time I’d heard of such a thing.

Fire Island was to New York in the 70s what Ibiza was to us in the 80s – hedonism at its most innovative and creative self. So our ‘dubs’ and druggy E records like ‘Wild Luv’ got the Roach Motel moniker and the more classic piano/Frankie Knuckles-style vocal mixes got Fire Island.

It used to be very important what name you gave yourself and your mixes, but nowadays no one seems to care. You really can’t tell the style of house on the record by the artist’s name any more, which is a shame, as thinking up names was great fun.