Morning Goods

I was walking past the Whistlestop shop in waterloo station, a place which does some pretty decent pain aux raisins and chocolate croissants, and saw they had a sign advertising what they called their "wide range of morning goods". At the time it struck me as yet another marketing term to sum up a whole collection stuff in one or two words - like 'white goods' meaning fridges, washing machines and cookers, even though they now come in all sorts of colours.

It also struck me as a great name for a band.

I looked into the term 'morning goods' a bit more and found that, according to the ever-useful Flour Advisory Bureau on their page dedicated to facts about bread in the UK:

Morning goods are so called because whilst bread was traditionally baked in a hot oven during the night, morning goods were baked after bread in the morning when the oven was cooling.

Interesting. I am sure that it has been taken over by marketing types to mean types of food which are traditionally eaten in the morning, whether bakery-related or not, and most of the public must understand it in that way, but there is an official original meaning too. In the future this might mean that when the term is used in ways which include yoghurts and cereals pedants will object and bemoan the fact that teh original meaning has been lost - in much the same way that they now complain that "gay" has lost its original meaning.

And on the subject of 'gay'... it appears that 'morning goods' has a meaning in the gay subculture too, or if it doesn't queerty.com is trying to establish some sort of meaning. It has a regular feature called mornign goods which is nothing more than photos of young men revealing oiled biceps and waxed chests. I think just means that such men would be a good way to start your morning.

Because of that Morning Goods would have to be either a gay or gay-friendly band. Either that or they could find out the other connotations later and just not care - like AC/DC did with their name. Perhaps they would even have chosen the name becasue it sounds a bit like 'morning wood' (which has already been snapped up by a band called Morningwood). I don't know why, but I just see Morning Goods being like the Flaming Lips or the Arcade Fire - doing their own thing and defying a genre label.

Landbank

Originally a Land Bank was a bank which issued long-term loans on real estate. It does still mean that and there are plenty of Land Banks around, but more recently the term has also come to refer to the holding of parcels of land for future use.

This has hit the news in Britain most often regarding Tescos supermarkets, and is the cause of some controversy. The suggestion is that the large supermarkets are buying up land which could be locations for stores, often without developing them. One accusation is that a supermarket will buy up suitable land near their own stores so that nobody else can open in competition with them.

The whole issue of the morality of large supermarket companies is complex and wide-ranging but one thing is certain - land bank would be a great name for a band!

Landbank would have to be a band in the Radiohead or Coldplay mould, known as much for their opinions on big business, globalisation and poverty as for their music, which would be rock but not heavy.

Pramface

Pramface is a term either invented by, or made popular by Popbitch, the celebrity gossip site. According to the Urban Dictionary it means:

"A woman who looks so young she ought to be pushing a pram around a council estate in the shittiest part of town."

But that doesn't seem quite right. It always seemed to me to mean a young girl looking old beyond her years, probably through having a child at a young age. Anyway, its a term a bit like "chav" - patronising and a way for the middle classes to denigrate the working classes who they just see as an amorphous mass of council house-dwelling, tracksuit-wearing single mothers.

Despite that, its still a great name for a band.

I think that Pramface would be similar in style to Hard-fi, the Arctic Monkeys, The Ordinary Boys or one of those other back-to-basics new guitar bands. They would be gritty, ironic and young.