In 2002, the rock group Cornershop released two singles from their album Handcream for a Generation. In March, we saw Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III, while August bought Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform.
Before writing this entry, I listened to both tracks. They’re both solid guitar-driven and riff-heavy pieces that should have been hits, yet neither song gained traction. Only the first of these even reached the Top 40.
I think two factors were in play here. Firstly, and most obviously, they found it difficult to escape their massive track Brimful of Asha five years earlier. Secondly, in my experience, the public finds it difficult to overlook a long or unwieldy title.
I was reminded of these songs when I heard about the upcoming science-fiction series The War Between the Land and the Sea. It’s produced by Russell T Davies and is part of the Doctor Who universe, so the BBC is unlikely to encounter much resistance to the nine-syllable title. If they had attempted this title for a new show, by contrast, that hurdle might have been much higher.
There are other instances of media where a long title has been used. Right now, I can think of:
- The novel Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg (1987).
- The film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain (1995).
- The Channel 4 comedy The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (2009).
Like them or not, titles of this length tend to slow the reader or viewer a little. When the first on the list was adapted into a screenplay, it was given the truncated title Fried Green Tomatoes. This reminds me of a point made in the George Orwell novel 1984:
COMINTERN is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily.
Sometimes the gamble does pay off, and the audience successfully beyend behind the title:
- The film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) is known by its fans as simply Lock, Stock.
- The police procedural show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000) goes so far as to nudge its viewers into abbreviating it.
- Mark Haddon didn’t lose any readers by calling his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003).
The final two examples, both from the world of music, are each making a definite statement.
For her second studio album in 1999, Fiona Apple chose the following title, with the capitalisation as it appears on the Genius website:
When the pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a king
What he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight
And he’ll win the whole thing ‘fore he enters the ring
There’s no body to batter when your mind is your might
So when you go solo, you hold your own hand
And remember that depth is the greatest of heights
And if you know where you stand, then you know where to land
And if you fall it won’t matter, cuz you’ll know that you’re right
It’s a rather twee sentiment, but it’s nonetheless out to make a statement. The cover art makes the first three words legible from a distance, while the rest require a closer look, giving the listener an easy abbreviation.
Apple held the Guinness World Record for the longest album title until Chumbawamba beat it nine years later with the following. The capitalisation has been converted to sentence case:
The boy bands have won, and all the copyists and the tribute bands and the TV talent show producers have won, if we allow our culture to be shaped by mimicry, whether from lack of ideas or from exaggerated respect. You should never try to freeze culture. What you can do is recycle that culture. Take your older brother’s hand-me-down jacket and re-style it, re-fashion it to the point where it becomes your own. But don’t just regurgitate creative history, or hold art and music and literature as fixed, untouchable and kept under glass. The people who try to ‘guard’ any particular form of music are, like the copyists and manufactured bands, doing it the worst disservice, because the only thing that you can do to music that will damage it is not change it, not make it your own. Because then it dies, then it’s over, then it’s done, and the boy bands have won.
In this instance, the last five words are emphasised on the album cover, which echo the first five words and again make an unignorable statement.
In short, a long title certainly makes a statement, but consider carefully whether your audience will look beyond it or not.
Gavin Cameron 
