[x] Dan(iel) Johnston

Seriously... does anyone else think it looks pretty silly to have a solo artist called Dan Johnston and another one called Daniel Johnston while they're actually the same guy? Can't we have a rule that merges these two entries and allows us to use || for the Dan entries?

Yeah, I think that's silly.

I think we should blame the artists for intentionally choosing different names under which to release their material. Why should bandtoband group them together if the artists themselves did not?

In this case, because one bunch of releases is released under a diminutive of his full name. I agree that if had released solo stuff as e.g. The Great Pharaoh Of Egypt that would be another story. But this guy is just using his (shortened) real name.

I still like it. You use a different name, presumably it's for a reason. It might be an idea to have some kind of display available where all solo work by one person could be seen as a group. But no, I think on balance I would keep the core rule as it is.

Part of my problem with this is that we don't always have all the evidence. Many times we are just going with the cover, and the artist could be using the full/diminutive version differently on the rest of the artwork. Therefore, we could easily be making an imaginary distinction.

I think that's worse than mixing them together.

On a related note:

The band GBH, had the word "Charged" with their name on the covers of their releases for the first few years of their existence. Then they dropped it.

We currently have it as two different bands. Nobody ever called them "Charged GBH" and the spine of my copy of "City Baby Attacked By Rats" says only "GBH".

I think we should discuss changing this as well.

I too never heard anyone call GBH anything other than GBH, but then again, I didn't live in the UK in the early 1980s, so I didn't know the story until today. It seems to me that grouping them together would be rewriting history.

[www.sputnikmusic.com] http://www.sputnikmusic.com/bands/GBH/2547/ : "They were originally called Charged GBH to seperate itself from another band of the same name."

[homepages.nyu.edu] http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cch223/uk/gbh_main.html : "After they established a name for themselves on the local punk scene, they a metal band who had already taken the name "GBH", so they changed their name to "Charged GBH" to avoid a legal dispute (after the demise of the metal band, "Charged GBH" was once again shorted to "GBH")."

[en.wikipedia.org] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charged_GBH : "In 1984 the band changed their name to GBH (grievous bodily harm)."

The original of 'City Baby...' seems quite clear on the label. [www.discogs.com] http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=374350

Yeah, I'll concede that one, but the underlying point still stands.