H before C (and only one K)

At Christmas, I was made aware of "I Before E (Except After C): Old-School Ways To Remember Stuff", a little hardback book that started something of a trend in retro education guides for adults worried they may be losing the skills they picked up as kids. It got me thinking...

VISITOR: What, is he going to ditch the music and become a teacher at last?

This whole business of band names.

VISITOR: Ooff!

I once played a bit in Leicester with my friend Dominic who goes under the search engine-defying name of w/trem. We were hoping to be billed as "w/trem meets keshco", a potential nightmare for bookers if we'd kept it up. Instead they billed us as "Dom & Andy", a minor if typical cop-out.

But really though. This week's Time Out announces that there will be a gig on Sunday by a band called Kescho. I'm not sure who this band is but they've been following us around. Almost every gig we do, they show up, always when the signwriters forget to put our names up. They must have been to 70% of all the gigs we've ever played. There's that other band too, Keshko. They've been billed in our place more than a dozen times now. If I ever catch those double-K charlatans...

As for Keschko, well that's just a South London attempt to make us Communist.

There is one and only one accepted variant - Eshco, our own tribute band who for reasons best known to themselves have chosen to focus purely on our 1990s output.

Anyway, ladies and gentles, I hope that, should you find yourself engaged in writing the name of our band down in the near future, you'll think of our loosening grips on sanity, and recite the following:

H before C
and only one K

It doesn't rhyme, but it might just work.