Namesakes #75: The Wallflowers

What is a Wallflower? Well, it's either the kind of pretty little plant pictured above, or it's "a person who has no one to dance with or who feels shy, awkward, or excluded at a party." Welcome to my teenage years! (To be fair, I over-compensated by becoming the class joker... I even went along to one school fancy dress disco dressed as Jack Nicholson's Joker... in full face paint, which played hell with my acne. Fortunately, no photos survive.)

When it comes to Wallflowers, Etta James put it best...

Etta James - The Wallflower (Dance With Me Henry)

Anyway, here are a bunch of Wallflowers...

THE WALLFLOWERS #1

We'll start with some German Wallflowers, woah-woahing along to Little Jürgen, back in 1965...

THE WALLFLOWERS #2

Peter Brickley's band The Telephone Boxes supported The Smiths on their first tour in 1983. When they broke up, Brickley formed The Wallflowers, self-releasing "one of the great lost C86 tunes", Blushing Girl, Nervous Smile. A couple more singles followed, but the band took too much time over the album and everything fell apart. Brickley went on to become a movie extra, notable for spending "four months, six days a week, as a Celt in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" yet never actually making it onto the screen. 

THE WALLFLOWERS #3

Around the same time that Mr. Brickley was looking for blushing girls with nervous smiles in Slough, over on the other side of the pond, another group of Wallflowers were being discovered... by Snickers, of all people. That must have been some Marathon effort!

I can't find music info on the Snickers New Music Challenge, or about these particular Wallflowers... other than what they reveal on the clip below.

THE WALLFLOWERS #4

It must be tough being Bob Dylan's son. I mean, not so much if you want to be a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker (is that still a job?)... but if you want to be a singer? Boy, that's one big shadow to haul your way out from underneath.

I reckon Jakob Dylan has done pretty well at carving his own musical identity, distinct from dad - he's certainly done a better job than Sean or Julian Lennon or any of Hank Williams' descendants. Forming a band, rather than initially going solo using the Dylan name as branding, was the key to his success. These Wallflowers got together in 1989, and although the line-up's ever-changing (the only constant being Jakob himself), they're still going strong, having produced one of my favourite albums of 2021 (and their first in 9 years), Exit Wounds.

 

THE WALLFLOWERS #5

Canadian Wallflowers who started out in the late 80s as the Edsels, changing their name, presumably, to avoid confusion with the 60s doo-wop group of the same name. After one album as The Wallflowers, they heard what Jakob Dylan was up to and changed their name again to The Barstool Prophets. 

Here's one of the songs they initially released as Wallflowers, and then again as Barstool Prophets...

 

THE WALLFLOWERS #6

The late 80s were clearly a big time for being a Wallflower. Here we see the Australian variety, found in Sydney in 1989...

There were quite a few other Wallflowers listed on discogs - including the Austrian Wallflowers who released a song called Sandwichman in 1969 - but sadly I couldn't find any more audio evidence. Quite a few bands just called Wallflower too... it's obviously a name that's cherished by introverted musicians. 

Which Wallflowers would you ask to dance? And which ones call for the weedkiller?