Life has an infinite capacity to surprise us, though some surprises are more welcome than others. When green-haired Finnish pop queen Alma went big, Pete Lambrou and Ciaran Morahan, aka VLMV, had to act quickly. Until then, they had been known as ALMA. Tempting as it might have been to piggyback on Alma’s fame, Lambrou achieved a cunning compromise: invert the lettering and keep the original pronunciation. “At every gig, we still get one person who asks us how we pronounce it,” he laughs wryly.
One of the pleasures of chatting to Lambrou is his ability to bring humour to this situation. VLMV have emerged from the world of post-rock, and as Lambrou reminds us, “The post-rock rule is always four words for a band name, so I wanted to keep it at four letters. The irony is that it was the one that we had to change.”
