h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Inspiration can strike at any moment: today I was having a p*ss and thinking about Tears For Fears when I started pondering the origins of the name Tears For Fears. It would be interesting to have a (collaborative?) entry on the origins of groups names. Most people know where Duran Duran came from (Barberella) and Heaven 17 (one of the groups in Clockwork Orange). Any takers?

10cc?

Lovin' Spoonful?

I know the 10CC is an urban myth. Possibly.

http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/10cc.htm

B*gg*r. Of course if Johnathan King says there is no sexual connotation, then I believe him.

Sure I do.

Oh, it came to him (as it were) in a dream. Oh well, that's alright then.

This could be an interesting project - there are plenty of bands with names taken from works of literature. Uriah Heep, Velvet Underground, Steely Dan, Soft Machine...

And a good number of bands who have taken their names from the songs of other bands and artists.

Level 42, anyone?

"Radiohead" got there name from the Talking Heads song entitled "Radiohead"

The Bay City Rollers stuck a pin in a map, as did Yes I believe. I think Yes were named after Yes Tor on Dartmoor, of course this also gave them the name of one of their albums, Yes Tor Days

Uriah Heep?

from where, or from which book?

Uriah Heep is a fictional character created by Charles Dickens in his novel David Copperfield

http://members.home.nl/uriahheep/index4.htm

Took their name from a charactor out of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

I was quite surprised to see they're still going strong!

Ooops - simulpost

Ah well, great minds think alike.... or is that something I should've said in another thread?

I can provide Dexy's Midnight Runners and The Jam.

Also The Clash, come to think about it.

Klaatu got their name from some alien language used to instruct the robot in "The Day The Earth Stood Still".

Genesis got their name from the bible, but at the end the band members managed to avoid an Exodus, by leaving one at at time.

Dexy's - from the laxative side-effects of the amphetamine Dexedrine, popular at Northern Soul all-nighters, that tended to kick in at a certain point of the evening.

The Jam - from a comment made over breakfast by Paul Weller's younger sister over breakfast. His band had been nameless for a while and she thought of bands named after food. "We've had Bread, we've had Marmalade, so now let's have The Jam".

The Clash - two reasons. Firstly, because the word 'Clash' seemed to be the most common word in newspaper headlines when the band got together in 1976, and secondly because of the Rastafarian prophecy that the world would end in 1977, the year when 'Two Sevens Clashed'.

I'm sure I know some more, I'll have a think.

Megadeth got their name from the term referring to numbers of casualties caused by a nuclear explosion (Incidentally, Pink Floyd were briefly called "The Megadeaths").

Can't think of any more although I can tell you that the story about how the Beatles were named in a dream by a man on a flaming pie is 100% apocryphal.

This is looking like a good project.

What it needs now, I suggest, is a home page organising it, so people can start with some definitions and suggest others, and then some draft pages with the band names and their origins.

I would do it alphabetically, with one sentence to one para per band, dividing pages if when they get too long. So ABC to Kraftwerk, and then Loving Spoonful to ZZ Top, for example.

I would discount 'the' for purposes of classification, and ignore any really boring ones. It's an open question as to whether you include individual artists who have changed their name in an interesting way?

What do you reckon GRJ?

sprout

U2 was from the spyplane which was caught by the Russians around the time when they were all born.

The Rolling Stones was from the Muddy Waters song.

Led Zeppelin were meant to go down like a lead balloon.

The joy division was a nickname for female POW's in WW2, who were raped by whichever soldiers had captured them.

The Boo Radleys are from the character in 'To Kill a Mockingbird'.

The Levellers were some kinda radical proto-socialists from Cromwellian times.

Now, can anyone help with the Jackson 5?

Then here's the origin of Steely Dan's name - they named the band after a dildo (can I write that here?) in William Burrough's cult novel The Naked Lunch


And Reg Dwight called himself Elton John, the "John" bit being a nod toward Long John Baldry whom he admired.