CHAPTER 4:

The Name Game

Back at the Mews we were still in rehearsals torturing Eddie Cochran.

Every week someone suggested a different name. There are endless tries in the ideas book, all of them terrible like Teenage Barbie Dolls, The English Opium Eaters. Degville had come up with "Sperm Festival" Then there was the suggestion "Nazi Occult Bureau". Great name to get you on Radio 1, Not. Terrible connotations. It’s that desperate dilemma of all bands like us. That exact combination of outrage and originality. That old Reich shit is too easy a play and definitely brings bad Karma.

We were looking for something special, original, like all bands. It’ll come when we are ready.

Fachtna comes up with it again... He calls to say I should come over to where he is living in Bruton Mews and read this article he's found in the Herald Tribune about this Russian street gang.

I call everyone and I’m excited as I bring home the piece torn out of the paper that day. I still have it. It is about a 23 year old Fagin like character who controls a Moscow street gang involved in money laundering. Its perfect, it somehow captures the essence of the band image we’re trying to project..

The gang is called SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK... Even the “Sputnik” connection fits into my vision of man’s first object in space - like some kind of man made god. I get the name translated by our friend Kass into Japanese phonetic lettering.

Actually Fachtna never got the credit he deserves as one of the true mentors of Sputnik. The Sputnik name makes a great story every time its printed, like all great names, so different that you can guarantee every journalist who ever writes about you will repeat the story, furthering the myth...

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