There is a tradition among U.K. rock writers of taking up an amusing nom de plume, arresting alias, or enigmatic pseudonym. Or a single word moniker that stands out graphically.
New Musical Express had a bunch - Penny Reel, Biba Kopf, Jane Solanas, X. Moore, Dick Tracy,
Even The Wire had Jakubowski, Hopey Glass, possibly others
However the paper that really went to town with this was Sounds. No idea why, but it seemed to become almost an institutional fixture.
Below is an inventory of daft aliases deployed by Sounds writers from the punk era onwards. Organized into categories. Let me know if I've missed anybody.
Surreal / enigmatic
My favorite out of all the ones I found - indeed the one that got me pondering this phenom - is Tibet.
This was the Sounds byline of David Tibet, as in Current 93. Yes, he had a parallel career track, writing about the sort of thing you'd expect (industrial / esoteric underground) but much else besides (Saxon!)
As well as looking good 'n' stark on the page, TIBET as a byline has a whiff of Anglo-surrealist comedy, making me think of a Monty Python sketch maybe, or perhaps Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy. A nation-state given the humble task of reviewing a Robert Haigh piano release or sent to interview Doctor and the Medics.
"Tibet" is also prone to inadvertently – or advertently – amusing juxtapositions, when it comes to the deks / standfirsts to pieces. Lotsa scope for copyeditor malarkey.
Like this one - which sounds like a country being subjugated by an invading religion
Tibet in the pages of Sounds as a journalistic object not subject
Rare occurrence of his full name being credited in Sounds - a piece on Derek Jarman
Another odd, enigmatic name: Luaka Bop
Which we all know as the name of the world-music (and other things - A.R. Kane!) label cofounded by David Byrne.
According to Wiki:
Byrne took the phrase "Luaka Bop" from the inner
packaging of a specialty tea which is sold in England. Luaka is the name of a
tea importer. Their "Broken Orange Pekoe" is packaged in a silver
foil block; when the sleeve is removed, it reveals a white label that reads
"Luaka BOP". Byrne found the phrase to be “strange, but musical”, a
combination he liked
"Strange but musical" - it does sound like the name of a style of dance music from a Polynesian island or a small country in Latin America.
So that's clearly where this Sounds scribe got it.
Then there's RAB
Now that might just be the initialization of an ordinary sort of name like Robert Andrew Brown. But without any periods between the letters, it takes on a certain baleful anonymity, like the acronym of a terrorist group
new addition August 6 - Ear and Ear
Punky
A cluster of monikers that give off vaguely seditious vibes or are faintly offensive, the kind of name that a punk singer might adopt.
Ralph Traitor
John Opposition (occasionally Johnny Oppo)
Jane Suck
(later, having switched to the NME, she became Jane
Solanas - a sedition-by-association name)
(now RIP)
I wonder if "Suck" was a semi-homage to Germaine Greer's underground-press sex-paper of the same name?
It does sound like the name of the bassist in an all-female band called The Castrators.
Jon Savage
(which I believe is a twist on his given name Jonathan Sage - that was what was on his Maida Vale doorbell when me and the Monitor crew traipsed up to London to pay a visit in 1985)
In an alienation effect / stylistic tic, Savage would sometimes write about himself in the text of his pieces using an anonymized third-person, referring to the Writer, or the Critic, or the Journalist. All part of the demystification politique of those New Musick days....
Angela Ripper
Presumably a psycho twist on Angela Rippon, the BBC newsreader. Could conceivably be one of those jarringly odd olde-Englishe names, though.
Literary
Another cluster of pseudonyms involve references to characters from novels - obvious, oblique, or genre-specific.
Jack Barron – a plausibly real name, but I knew Jack a bit and I am fairly certain this was not his actual moniker. Presumably it's a reference to the TV journalist character in Norman Spinrad's science fiction novel Bug Jack Barron
Winston Smith – from 1984
Culture Referential
Curt Vile (long before the musician of the same pun)
Popcult Referential
Betty Page
Betty wrote a lot about the Futurists and New Romantics, so presumably this campy alias indicated an interest in glamour and dress-up games.
Jack Spratt - as in the nursery rhyme "Jack Spratt, could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean..."
Rose Rouse (I assume this is a reference to Rolls Royce... I suppose it could be a real name )
Valac Van Der Veene - this certainly sounds like it's borrowed from a literary or dramatic character.... a cruel aristocrat in a Nabokov novel.... a cop in a set-in-Holland detective series.
T
A
With this sort of name, the daftness deflates the pretensions of the critic - self-inflicted wound, or honorable levelling gesture?
Mr Spencer (makes me think of Some Mothers Do Have Em)
Chas De Walley (strong whiff of Stiff about it – Wreckless Eric and the like. Kursaal Flyers)
Des Moines (groan)
Biro Penman
(no relation to Ian Penman – and funnily enough didn’t Sounds actually have someone genuinely called Ian Penman, but who wrote as Ian Ravendale? Yes indeed https://ianravendale.blogspot.com/p/about.html)
There was also later a Karen Penman writing for Sounds.
Goffa Gladding - your guess is as good as mine
Flying Your Flag
Heavy Metal Heather
Hey look, accidentally caught another silly pseudonym - Kelv Hellrazer - along with the Heavy Metal Heather byline
Heather reviewing Girlschool - the perfect conjunction of hard rocking chicks.
Eugen Beer
Ron Rom
Edwyn Pouncey (seems to be from another century - a character in a Dickens or Fielding novel) (Pouncey has a proper alter-ego in his cartooning mode - Savage Pencil)
Andrie Jus Lasys
Marguerite Van Cook
Adele-Marie Cherrison
Giovanni Dadomo (okay, probably quite a normal name in Italy, but in the context of the UK rock press, it seems flamboyant and conceivably chosen to stand out from the pack).
Of course, the flamboyance of the name doesn't necessarily correlate with the writing style. Some of the most eccentric and stylized critics at Sounds had common-or-garden sort of names: Chris Roberts, Dave McCullough.
Then there were those who expressed their dandy tendencies with just a single shift of letters within an otherwise sensible name:
Jonh Ingham
A mannerism echoed, presumably in homage, by
Jonh Wilde
(like Chris Roberts, originally at Sounds before moving over to Melody Maker)
(See also Jhon Balance - apparently that's a spelling popular in Latin America)
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Straying beyond Sounds, here is the inverse category: sensible-seeming name but actually an alias for a wild 'n ' crazy writing personality.
Susan Williams
That's the prim pen name initially used in NME by Steven Wells
(who already had a more accurate, "what it says on the tin" performance alias Seething Wells for his identity as ranting poet)
Well, I think I knew this but forgot it - Seething Wells is a place - a neighborhood on the edge of Surbiton, in SW London.
It sort of sounds like a sign-off to an angry letter to a newspaper: Yours faithfully, "Seething", Wells, Somerset.
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But I did once write as Julie Kristeva – twin homage to early influence Burchill and later influence Kristeva.
This was when I was at MM but did a few moonlight reviews for a
short-lived monthly spin-off of Time Out - called, if I recall correctly, 20/20.
I also adopted a pseudonym - Ian Tarr - for the publication in Melody Maker of a profile of Tricky. I think I had written about Tricky in the Village Voice at more or less the same time, so didn't want to piss them off.
I must have just read the Wyndham Lewis novel Tarr. It’s also a sort of pun on “enter” maybe? Who knows what I was thinking. ...
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Big up Soundsclips and Zounds Abound for all these clips
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Bonus pseudonym from New Music News, a short lived publication that leaped into the weekly rockpaper vacuum left by NME and MM when IPC publications went on strike.
Teen Pheels
Conceivably, this alias is because the writer is moonlighting and is actually normally employed by NME or MM.