Celebrity baby names give me the blues

Katy Harrington says Beyoncé’s daughter’s moniker is just the latest in a long tradition of offbeat choices by famous parents.

WELCOME to the world Blue Ivy Carter. Seeing as your doting mum and dad have already lavished approximately $1 million worth of gifts (including a rocking horse worth $600,000 and a Swarovski-studded high chair for $15,000) on you, I think it is safe to say you will have a pretty charmed existence. You’ll be surrounded by other celeb offspring, with Kanye West as a godfather, access to everything money can buy and all the other trimmings that come with having gazillionaire parents. Taking all this into account, it seems only fair that to balance things out a little, you parents have decided to call you Blue.

Why is it that celebrities love nothing more than private jets, referring to themselves in the third person and naming their children after obscure things? Because they can. You see, celebrities use their children to serve as yet another reminder to us civilians that they are different. ‘We’ call our kids Jack, Emma, Connor and Kate; ‘they’ call them Moon Unit, Kal-El (good work Nicolas Cage) and Sparrow. In the real world, baby names couldn’t be duller or more traditional. In Ireland, surprisingly Kal-El didn’t even make the top 10. Instead good old Jack and Sophie proved the most popular with ordinary Daniel, James, Conor, Emily, Emma, Sarah and Lucy also popular.

Celebrities don’t pay heed to the same social obligations as we mere mortals, they don’t even seem to care if the child is named according to its sex. Surely it is only rudimentary parenting to check the sex of the newborn before announcing your precious little girl will be called Xavier Solomon Jeronimo III. When it comes to celebrity baby names, the rules are there are no rules. The wilder the name, the wider the gap between celebrity kids (in their bejewelled high chairs) and our little angels (sitting on the floor with permanent Ribena stains on their chins).

So forget naming your kids after your grandparents, it’s all cities, weekdays and random numbers. Poor kids would struggle to pull off Princess Tiaamii (Katie Price’s creation) but celebrity children are likely to attend private schools to be educated with similarly-named children, so risk little chance of being mocked unless it’s something along the lines of, “My daddy has six Bentleys and your daddy only has three”.

As well as enforcing the notion that they are not like us, celebrities also like to like to prove how smart they are via their baby monikers. Poor Harper Lee has been exploited recently by the Beckhams (Harper Seven), while Russell Crowe’s kid is called Tennyson — presumably not because he sprang from his mother’s loins reciting verses from The Lady of Shalott, but probably because Russ wanted us to think he’s not just handsome and rich, but bookish too.

Stella McCartney went for the authorial Miller and Beckett for her first two children — so she must be really smart. Greek and Roman history is also a popular go-to for picking baby names. These include Atticus Affleck, son of actor Casey Affleck and Summer Phoenix; and Aurelius Cy Andrea Busson, son of Elle Macpherson and Arpad Busson.

In the hierarchy of batty names, Sly Stallone’s kid Sage Moonblood comes pretty close to the top, Micheal Jackson did well with Prince Michael II and Blanket, but alas, he was still trumped by his brother Jermaine Jackson, whose unlucky son was named Jermajesty. All superb efforts from our top celebs, but you have to hand it to Frank Zappa, daddy to Moon Unit, Diva Thin Muffin, Dweezil and Ahmet, who, all things considered, got off pretty lightly.

The grand dame of silly baby names is Gwyneth ‘Goop’ Paltrow, whose lovelies are called Apple and Moses. Apparently the macrobiotic domestic goddess and homemaker chose the name Apple because of its associations with purity, so at least the child can be thankful it was spared ‘Brita water filter’ then. The Jolie-Pitts rule when it comes to exotic baby names with Shiloh, Pax and Maddox, while Mariah Carey managed to hit a new low, naming her twins Morocco and Monroe.

Finally, Jools and Jamie Oliver named their brood Poppy Honey, Daisy Boo, Petal Blossom Rainbow and Buddy Bear.

However far out Beyoncé and Jay-Z think they are, it seems Blue is a particular favourite with the rich and famous. Cher was first off the mark, giving birth to Elijah Blue; actress Alicia Silverstone called her baby Bear Blu Jarecki and U2’s The Edge called his daughter Blue Angel.

Is there something I’m missing about the significance of the word blue or did they have one two many glasses of Moët before filling out the birth certificate and think, ‘Go on, put down Blue for the laugh’?

So come on Irish expectant parents — you have to shake things up a little. Did you discover your big news while in a coastal Kerry seaside resort perchance? Then why not christen your firstborn Ballybunion? Or maybe you are a fan of Jane Austen? But don’t think I am referring to names like Austen’s eponymous Emma … you need to start thinking like a celebrity. It should be Bennet, Knightley, Dashwood or Darcy.

If you are still struggling to pick a true celeb-style name I have created a Celebrity Baby Name-athron™, which will automatically churn out excellent and original names worthy of any famous offspring to help. All you need to do is throw in some of the things celebs love to name their kids (wild animals, dead musicians, planets colours, weekdays … whatever), pull the lever and out come some random suggestions. How about Leopard Aristotle Paris Thetan? Or what about cranking the settings to ‘Irish-literary-sounding names’? Keats Tiernan Eitleán Ennistymon has a nice ring to it.

Titillating as they are now, when these celeb kids grow up, they are going to be mad. Satisfyingly, despite their parents deep-seated wishes for them to bloom into nudist sculptors who use only recycled fabrics to make art in praise of L Ron Hubbard, many of them go to law school and change their names to resoundingly dull names. A classic example being David Bowie’s grown filmmaker son, who spurned Zowie Bowie for the Duncan Jones.

And there is, thankfully, one light of common sense in the celebrity world. Lily Allen, (who of course has Irish links), has named her first-born the quaint, gentle Ethel.