are the White Stripes Goodies fans?
01/03/2007 21:30 GMT

Posted by lisa

According to various articles popping up on the web, the White Stripes new album is to be entitled Icky Thump.  Multiple articles are claiming this is a reference to The Goodies' Ecky Thump (thanks to Steve Hughes for sending along a link).
Here's an excerpt from an article at http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1553538/20070301/white_stripes.jhtml.  I'm not sure if this convincingly makes the case for it being a Goodies reference, but it's fun to think it might be.


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It's sometimes hard to tell when the White Stripes are messing with your head. So when the candy-striped duo announced Wednesday on their Web site that the follow-up to 2005's Get Behind Me Satan is done and will be called Icky Thump, you'll forgive us if we were a bit skeptical....[From] what we can tell, "Icky Thump" is the name of a BattleBots team from Iowa, but the more U.K.-friendly spelling "Ecky Thump" is a bastardization of the word "eck" or "heck" and it's a way of saying "what the hell?" Which makes a bit more sense.

While it doesn't appear to be a Nine Inch Nails-style cryptic reference to some global conspiracy (see "Weird Web Trail: Conspiracy Theory — Or Marketing For Nine Inch Nails LP?"), a Web search for "ecky thump" also pulled up an episode of the British comedy "The Goodies" from 1975 called "Kung Fu Kapers" — alternately known as the "Ecky-Thump" episode — in which one of the lead characters, Bill, is revealed to be a master of a heretofore unknown Lancashire, England, martial-arts style known as, you guessed it, the "Ecky-Thump," in which unsuspecting saps are hit with black pudding.

The Stripes copped to the "Kapers" lift in the posting, saying, "though some residents of Northern England might almost recognize the title, The Stripes stress they are spelling it wrong intentionally just for 'kicks' and 'metaphors.' "
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