As a journalist active in the area of entertainment, I am always being sent — deluged with might be more appropriate — emailed press releases from rock bands. Long past the age where I take an interest in such matters (The Oxford Times’s admirable Tom Goodwyn keeps readers up to speed in this area), I despatch them to electronic oblivion, with barely a glance.
One, however, was given a more than usually attentive reading by me last week. It related to the Leeds-based group Chickenhawk. As it happens I have noted releases sent by them in the past. This is because of their name, which they share with that applied to a particular type of gay — an older man with the taste for much younger ones.
Were band members, I wondered, aware of this? (I wonder, similarly, whether the bosses of the Cowley Road fast foot outlet Chicken Cottage are aware that this is a perhaps unfortunate conflation of two pieces of homosexual parlance.) Anyway, if they weren’t aware of it before, they certainly are now. Last week’s release announced a change of name to Hawk Eyes.
Singer Paul explained: “When we named our band Chickenhawk after the book by Robert Mason, we never really, like most bands probably, thought things would go as far as they have done for us!
“So, only now that we have a possible US and European release of Modern Bodies forthcoming, a new album being recorded in March and us trying to get our own website up, it’s appeared that we can’t get certain rights and/or any of the domain names we wanted to for Chickenhawk!! Frustrating, but, these are the breaks!
“So with no further delay, we have simply chosen to drop the Chicken, move Hawk to the front and add Eyes! Simple! Everything stays the same.”
A misunderstanding, then, it would appear. The daddy of them all in this area was supplied by the former local government boss who listed one of his Who’s Who hobbies as ‘uphill gardening’. To an old pal of mine fell the difficult task of putting him right.
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