A BAND sparked a Wild West showdown by naming themselves after a legendary stagecoach company.

The group felt the full might of an international team of lawyers when they decided Wills Fargo would be a neat name for a western swing band.

But they hadn’t reckoned on the former stagecoach company Wells Fargo, now an international bank, sending a posse after them.

Dave Bronze, bass player and vocalist, said the Leigh group had renamed itself Fargo to avoid a courtroom gunfight.

He added: “We set up a website and then we got a letter from powerful international lawyers working for Wells Fargo. They said we should desist from infringing the copyright of the bank. I thought it was someone having a laugh at first. It is a stupid thing to happen.

“When we are in the middle of the worst banking crisis for 90 years you would think they would have something better to do.

“We got together a couple of years ago as a western swing group. We are all fans of the legendary Bob Wills, the king of western swing, and we thought our name should reflect that and we chose Wills Fargo.”

The Wells Fargo stagecoach company was the brain child of two innovative business men, Henry Wells and William Fargo. In the early 1800s, during the time of the goldrush, they founded the express service on the western frontier of the USA.

On March 18, 2002, Wells Fargo & Company celebrated its 150th anniversary as one of the leading financial institutions in the world.

Mr Bronze, 57, from Leigh added: “There wasn’t much we could do to fight them. The name isn’t exactly the same and copyright laws say if a business isn’t in the same sector then it’s all right, but the lawyers said Wells Fargo was protected in music as well.”

Kathleen Von Bergen, spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, was unapolagetic that one of the biggest companies in the world was targeting a band used to playing in tiny venues across Essex.

She said: “Like all brand owners, Wells Fargo has an obligation to protect its brand against the proliferation of unlicensed uses of confusingly similar trade names, trademarks and service marks.

“Such uses tend to dilute or weaken the distinctive quality of a famous brand.

“In fact, the more famous the mark, the greater is the obligation to pursue users not only in categories directly related to the brand owner’s core business activities, but also in unrelated areas of commercial activity.

“This is true for famous brand owners around the world.”

  • Fargo will play at the Southend’s Riga Music Bar on December 13.