Many years ago, I worked with a musician who named his band One Large Banana after opening a recipe book and pointing blindly at a line. I guess some of the bands below chose their names that way too.
My favourite band names are Soundgarden and Orchestal Manoeuvres in the Dark. But I also like:
- 10cc
- Alice in Chains
- Anthrax
- Audioslave
- Awol Nation
- Bachmann Turner Overdrive
- Bad Company
- Bat for Lashes
- Big Audio Dynamite
- Blue Oyster Cult
- Death Cab for Cutie
- Deep Purple
- Def Leppard
- Deftones
- Dire Straits
- Echo & The Bunnymen
- Electric Light Orchestra
- Fine Young Cannibals
- Grand Funk Railroad
- Grateful Dead
- Guns N’ Roses
- Iron Maiden
- Judas Priest
- Led Zeppelin
- Lynyrd Skynyrd
- Metallica
- Mothers of Invention
- Nine Inch Nails
- Primal Scream
- Procul Harem
- Queen
- Quiet Riot
- Radiohead
- Rage Against the Machine
- REM
- Screaming Trees
- Smashing Pumpkins
- Sonic Youth
- Steppenwolf
- Stone Roses
- Stone Temple Pilots
- Supertramp
- System of a Down
- Talking Heads
- The Art of Noise
- The Black Keys
- The Cure
- The Kinks
- The Mothers of Invention
- The Psychedelic Furs
- The The
- The Tragically Hip
- Thin Lizzie
- World Party
I like most of the bands you mentioned, I also like AC/DC (a euphemism if ever there was one before the Sex Pistols). Also Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Damned, The Outlaws (a country group containing one erstwhile Cricket) Bill Hailey and his Comets, The Blue Caps and The E. Street Band. The list goes on and on
I like quite a few of the names you listed, but for some reason I’m partial towards some band names that are simple possibly to the point of dumb. 🙂 Black Sabbath, New Order or Sex Pistols. Also, where I’m from, there’s a punk rock band named E!E. I like that.
I like The Thompson Twins because there were three of them!
One of my favourites is Half Man Half Biscuit.
I love that!
I agree with your list. Although I think that 10CC was a bit cheeky but why not.
Don’t forget Steely Dan
Excellent post! I agree with all the names you mentioned, especially all the grunge bands! 😉
I love the name Soundgarden because to me that is what beautiful music is – a garden of sound 🙂
Actually, I have a friend who used to live in Seattle and he once went to a park there, which was called The Sound Garden. They had various “objects” (for lack of a better word) and they reacted to wind. They were not all wind chimes, but they just made noise somehow and it was beautiful. The band took the name of the park as their band name.
In some old pictures, you might see the band members wearing t-shirts that say: Nude Dragons, which is an anagram of Soundgarden!