Anna Nasty is officially retiring the punny name
Olivia Neutron-John is no more: Washington D.C. musician Anna Nasty says they will retire their punny stage name after receiving a cease and desist letter from the legal team of Olivia Newton-John, the singer, actress and star of Grease.
As BrooklynVegan reports, yesterday (October 7) the experimental pop artist announced that their September 28 show supporting Stereolab in New York was their last performance under the Olivia Neutron-John moniker. “I thought about booking a goodbye show, but I couldn’t have planned a better way to go out,” they wrote.
Nasty said that in July, about two months after the release of their debut self-titled album on Sister Polygon Records, they received a cease and desist from Olivia Newton-John’s legal team. “Because I have very limited resources, I was unable to fight it,” they explained.
“I am going to take this as an opportunity to step back and reinvent,” Nasty continued. “Although it has been very difficult and emotional closing this chapter of my life, I’m excited for a new beginning. I’ll be back again, under another name.” Read the full post below.
Sister Polygon Records, which released the ‘Olivia Neutron-John’ record in May, made a post on Instagram calling for fans to support Nasty in “any way” they could. “Anna is one of the greatest living artist we’ve ever met, and it is so upsetting to see a group of lawyers representing someone with a disproportionate amount of money and power get in the way of their expression for some non-existent capital gain,” they wrote.
They continued, “It is absolutely soul-wrecking to see someone’s life work get trampled on this way.” See the label’s post below:
Anna Nasty started recording as Olivia Neutron-John around 2013: Per their Bandcamp, they released the track ‘(death/tango)’ that year, and the single ‘Injury Train and I’m Never Getting Off It b/w Vulnerability’ in 2014.
