“I think you have to have the concept in your head,” Ed Sheeran told Vibe magazine three years ago. The concept he meant, now mostly complete, was to name his albums with mathematical operations: + came out in 2011, followed by x in 2014, and ÷ is out this week. Sheeran told an interviewer that + described the way he added a number of new songs to those he had recorded in his early career, and x aimed to build on the first album exponentially. He went on to suggest that ÷ would be “between me and one other person” and, in a later interview, that -, when it arrived, might be stripped down and acoustic. “Not necessarily [to] say, ‘Oh, I’m going to take away from my fan base,’ but rather take away from the production.”
If the greatest band of all time can call themselves the Beatles as a punning tribute to Buddy Holly’s Crickets, then all musicians deserve clemency when it comes to names. They hardly matter anyway, if you like the music. But for Sheeran’s fans, as well as his detractors, it can still seem bloody-minded not to supply an album title that is easy to say. (Or even to type, in the case of ÷, which is well-hidden on most keyboards.) This is probably why Sheeran, being a thoughtful boy, has included an official pronunciation – “Divide” – on the cover of the new album. The first two are known semi-officially as Multiply and Plus.
Sheeran might prove to be the most dogged practitioner of nuisance titles, but he is far from the first. The Beatles themselves released what the world calls the White Album in 1968. The world had to call it that, and the Beatles did too in the end, because the album appears to be called just The Beatles, or a serial number on the original vinyl copies, if it is called anything at all. (Pop fact: the album was titled A Doll’s House during recording, and might have stayed that way had not another band, Family, released an album called Music in a Doll’s House four months before.)
But neither Sheeran nor the Beatles – nor indeed many other human beings at all – could come close in awkwardness to Prince. In 1987, he attempted something more extreme than the White Album. Known as the Black Album, or sometimes the Funk Bible, it would, strictly speaking, have no name at all, nor feature Prince’s name, nor any of his pseudonyms. It would be just a black sleeve with a catalogue number printed in orange on the spine. Days before the album’s release, however, Prince withdrew it altogether, ordering 500,000 printed copies to be destroyed. As always, his reasons were opaque, but it seems he became convinced that the record was evil.
In 1992, however, Prince conceived of something still more problematic. Again, the Love Symbol Album, as it became known, had no apparent title or artist, other than a symbol unreadable in any language, because Prince had commissioned the designers Mitch Monson and Lizz Luce to invent it for him. From 1993 until 2000, this symbol became the only name that he would publicly attach to himself. It was so difficult for the music press to refer to him in print that his record label, Warner, sent out floppy disks loaded with a custom font for them to use. Prince also trademarked “Love Symbol #2”, and zealously sued fanzines for misusing it. It is now widely assumed that Prince’s main purpose was to inconvenience Warner, who he felt were releasing his music too slowly and had too much control over his name, but he was serious enough to insist on not being called Prince in person.
Even this extreme move, however, had its precedents. After the release of their first three albums, Led Zeppelin were superstars all over the world, but there was talk that they had peaked. Led Zeppelin III was not the critical success that Led Zeppelin I or II had been, and from this Jimmy Page developed the idea that their next album would be released anonymously, and without a title. When it arrived, in November 1971, all fans would have to go on, besides the artwork and track listing, would be four symbols, one chosen by each band member to represent him. The air of mysticism was in tune with the times, but in practice it made little difference. This was still obviously a Led Zeppelin album, and everyone just called it Led Zeppelin IV. Soon it would also be called one the greatest rock albums of all time.
An awkward name need not hold you back, even if you don’t quite reach the heights of Led Zeppelin or Ed Sheeran. The affable dance-punk band !!!, generally pronounced “chk chk chk”, have managed a long and respectable career despite their name being the most famous thing about them. In comparison, the Las Vegas rock band Panic! at the Disco seem to worry too much. Having begun very successfully with a rogue exclamation mark (in the avant-garde tradition of Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor) they dropped it for their less successful second album, to the consternation of fans, then restored it for their third. You probably can think about these things too much.
• This article was amended on 7 March 2017. An earlier version said x was released in 2011, and + in 2014. This has been corrected to say + was released in 2011, and x in 2014.
