Cowboy Fan?

Veteran alt-country band Cowboy Junkies were “forced” to change their name for a performance in China, Spinner reported June 10.
Instead of the Cowboy Junkies the name in Chinese was being rendered as “Cowboy Fan.”

The group was slated to play at a festival organized by a famous Chinese DJ, who was responsible for all the contracts and permits related to the foreign acts.

Spinner related a blog post written by the band’s guitarist Mike Timmins, which said, “This included not only getting the government to agree to specific bands … but also getting all of the repertoires translated and approved by the necessary departments. An example of the type of detail that he and his team needed to deal with was trying to come up with a translation of our name so that we wouldn’t be ruled out by the censors.”

Timmins wrote that several of the group’s songs were also “crossed off” their set list.

The next day, Timmins contacted Spinner to say that the music website had been “overplaying the name change.”

Apparently, they were still known as Cowboy Junkies in China, but the censors did not know what that name meant.

“They know what ‘cowboy’ is because they have a translation for that,” he wrote. “But for ‘junkies,’ well, what does that mean? So the thing they came up with is ‘junkies’ – that’s somebody who is obsessed with something. So they said, ‘Okay, we’ll call it Cowboy Fan.”

But Timmins stressed that this designation was only for official purposes. “It’s not like we were billed as Cowboy Fan.”

He also downplayed the removal of two songs from the set list, “I Cannot Sit Sadly By Your Side” and “Third Crusade.”

“Because there’s so many issues involved, they’ll look at your set and if they feel there’s anything that’s going to cause any kind of ripple with the censors, then they’ll come back and ask [you to change it]. One song has the word ‘gun’ in it and therefore they felt there was a violent side to it.”

The point, according to Timmins, is that they were working with promoters ‘who are trying to do something very special and very different in a country putting up a lot of roadblocks in doing something like that.”

In other words, if they were willing to go that far to present a music show, then the band would certainly do “what it takes” to help them achieve that goal.