Progressive indie band from
Richmond, Virginia, initially composed of singer/songwriter Paul Allgood and
programmer Jeff Hathaway. Allgood later moved to North Carolina, where he looked
for cooperation with keyboardist Jonathan Kidder and bassist Kirk Bryson. The
musical offspring of this relationship can probably best be described as
electro and synth pop.
Originally the band would have been known as This Is
Wedlock, if it wasn’t for the fact that Allgood has a soft spot for band names
that consist of one single word.
The word Wedlock ('the state of being married',
as the Oxford dictionary assures us) was deliberately chosen to fly in the face
of US president of the day George W. Bush, who in the founding year of the band
made a serious effort to ban gay marriage in America (among others by threatening
with a constitutional amendment in a TV broadcast). Bush Jr. justified this by
stating that the voice of the people must be heard.
Wedlock has an 'alternative' name: 105 Deckowls, used only outside North America. The reason: Wedlock
is one of the many aliases of Dutch DJ and producer Patrick van Kerckhoven
(born 1970). To avoid confusion the Americans use a somewhat forced anagram of
Wedlock (105 Deckowls) when they are away from home. Not uncommon in marriages we’ve been told.
Active: 2004-present, US
Site:
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/wedlock-mn0000479110
We can be brief about how the Canadian pop/punk band Simple Plan (Montréal, Québec) arrived at its band name: thanks to the film A Simple Plan (1998), directed by Sam Raimi, or actually - but now this lemma is becoming more complicated again than we had anticipated - thanks to the novel of the same name by American author Scott Smith.
