Records On Ribs

I have just emailed the following to the Formica company after they forced our good friends My Formica Table to change their name:

Dear Formica,

So, you see fit to stop a group of people releasing music for free under the name ‘My Formica Table’ because you own the letters FRMOIAC when they’re put in a different order and you didn’t want them to use them. How grown up of you. In all honesty, I’m surprised that we – the people – hadn’t stopped them earlier. They were, after all, using the word ‘table’ with staggering impudence. Everytime I went to eat my tea in my dining room I found the whole eating experience very confusing. I put the food on the ‘table’- but this was not a table like My Formica Table the record label. It was a wooden one for putting food on. My miniscule brain really struggled to cope with these two uses of the word table. I can only imagine the trouble I would have been in had I had a Formica Table in my dining room.

Seriously: you bunch of staggeringly petty dullards. A group of people put a few years work into releasing music by DIY bands onto the internet for free (do you get that? making no profit), increasing the number of people who listen to this music by an enormous number. Having built a following, you tell them they have to change their name (which was meant reverently, because they’re fans of formica tables). You say their name causes “detriment” to the “distinctiveness” and “reputation” your trademark. I’ll tell you what causes ‘detriment’ to ‘reputations’- being petty killjoys. When you’ve got time, read Wilhelm Reich’s ‘Listen, Little Man’. You might recognise some of its insights.

All is not lost thankfully, because My Formica Table (that’s the record label, not the thing some people eat their tea off) is reborn as Foetal Orange, although how I’m going to cope eating my daily dose of citrus I do not know. The orange industry is surely bracing itself for a terminal decline to its reputation and distinctiveness.

Yours,

Records on Ribs