Thee <insert band name>

Weren’t there a few britpopsters with “The” in the name?

Anyway, I’ll leave the explanation to someone else. My impression is that by that time things had settled down and there were plenty of bands both with and without the “the”, it was no longer seen as part of making a statement. I expect something similar will happen with “Thee”.

From the DiSers as bands thread:

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Also:

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Yeah always thought that this was the reason, pretty sure Thee Oh Sees at least have cited Billy Childish as an influence.

Theesis

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Seems to be a garage/psych trope in particular

Good news friend, we can use bots to generate band names:

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Big big sting :grin:

“theewarn”

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For some reason this brings to mind Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu’s. Not very Theeo.

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Many of those fake names are less lame than some names of actual bands, that were presumably devised by humans. I think a lot of bands don’t put much thought into it anymore; they may be mostly concerned with making sure they are not infringing someone else’s name rights and leaving themselves open to being sued.

I think they stole their extra e from Th’ Faith Healers.

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Thee Bee Gees. Sorry

Thee HeeBeeGeeBees

Using the prefix Thee rather than The began amongst Mexican-American gangs in the 1950s, I’d heard. The first band I know of to use it was Thee Midniters in the early 1960s, a hispanic group from East LA. The reason, in their case, was to differentiate themselves from another band that already existed called The Midnighters (the group led by Hank Ballard who did the original version of The Twist).

There was a British group called simply Thee in the mid-1960s but that’s totally unrelated.

There were a few other groups in the sixties who used Thee as well, for a similar reason. But it was the previously mentioned Billy Childish who resurrected the idea for one of his bands, not for the same reason, but in homage of those sixties bands that he’d admired. Other 1990s garage bands influenced by 1960s garage bands picked up on it too.

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Interesting stuff!

This seems to suggest I could name my band “Thee Beatles”, for example, without any copyright concerns.

In this country, nowadays, I’d assume that a court would find that Thee Beatles is OK because everyone knows there’s no real Beatles any more, and that it’d be taken that you’re a tribute band.

But if you called yourself Thee Kings of Leon the court would say you were trying to pass yourself off as The Kings of Leon.

I don’t know if copyright laws have changed since 1963. Or if things would be different in the USA in any case. It does seem that things were a bit more loose back then from what I’ve read on this subject.

But I think Thee Midniters did it so fans wouldn’t be confused rather than for copyright reasons or passing themselves off as the other band.(I’m tempted to email the singer and ask him all about it.)

FTFY

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Why I would wish to do that is another question.

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Theeo GB