Ban(ne)d Books
In a slight break with tradition, today I thought I'd write about something a little different. I was scrolling through Spotify recently when I came across a band called The Boo Radleys. Now, no prizes for guessing where they got their name from... I had heard of them, but never actually looked into how many bands and artists took their names from literature. So, I present a list of every band or artist I could find with novel-inspired titles:
(Also, I apologise for the terrible pun I made in the title of this post. Please forgive me).
1. The Boo Radleys - named after the reclusive in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.
2. Modest Mouse - from a passage in The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf.
3. Veruca Salt - the famously spoilt little girl in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
4. My Chemical Romance - after the Irvine Welsh novel Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance, which bassist Mikey Way came upon when he worked at Barnes & Noble.
5. Titus Andronicus - Shakespeare's earliest tragedy.
6. The Doors - taken from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, which itself comes from a William Blake poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
7. Rainer Maria - named after the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
8. Of Mice & Men - John Steinbeck's most famous novel, which itself is named after a line from Robert Burns' To a Mouse.
9. Of Monsters & Men - probably from the same root, though this is not certain.
10. Joy Division - from the novella House of Dolls by Jewish writer Yehiel Feiner. The term describes the women used as sex slaves by Nazi soldiers.
11. Clem Snide - named after the character created by William S. Burroughs.
12. As I Lay Dying - a William Faulkner novel.
13. Belle and Sebastian - named after Cécile Aubry's children's book, Belle et Sébastien.
14. Silverchair - The Silver Chair is the fourth novel in the Chronicles of Narnia.
15. Josef K - the protagonist of two of Franz Kafka's novels.
16. The Artful Dodger - named after Dickens' character in Oliver Twist.
17. Sixpence None the Richer - from a passage in CS Lewis's book Mere Christianity, in which a boy asks his father for a sixpence in order to buy him a gift.
18. Okkervil River - named after a short story by Russian novelist Tatyana Tolstaya.
19. The Airborne Toxic Event - from White Noise by Don DeLillo.
20. Moby - supposedly the originator of the band (whose middle name is Melville) is the great-great-great-nephew of Herman Melville. (I really hope that's enough of a clue as to the novel I'm talking about?)
21. Steely Dan - taken from William S. Burroughs's The Naked Lunch.
22. Der Plan - from The Biological Time Bomb
23. Heaven 17 - I love this one, because the name is actually a fictional band. A woman in A Clockwork Orange is browsing records when she mentions them.
24. Marillion - based on Silmarillion, a Tolkein novel.
25. The Velvet Underground - the name of the novel by Michael Leigh.
26. Billy Talent - a character in Michael Turner's Hard Core Logo.
27. Opeth - in Sunbird by Wilbur Smith, Opeth is the name of a Phoenician city in South Africa.
28. Oryx and Crake - a post-apocalyptic novel by Margaret Atwood.
29. The Romany Rye - a novel by George Borrow.
30. Gogol Bordello - after the Russian author Nicolai Gogol.
31. Nine Stories - inspired by the 1953 J.D. Salinger book.
32. Pylon - another Faulkner novel.
33. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - probably based on the 1954 novel The Bad Seed by William March, but it could be from the film of the same name.
35. Supertramp - taken from the 1908 book The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by W.H. Davies.
36. Manhattan Transfer - a 1925 Jon Dos novel.
37. New Riders of the Purple Sage - named after Zane Grey's Grey Riders of the Purple Sage.
38. Paradise Lost - I hope this one is obvious... if not, just Google it and I'm sure all will become clear.
39. The Brave New World - Aldous Huxley's novel of the same name, which itself derived its name from a line in The Tempest.
40. A Confederacy of Dunces - a novel by John Kennedy Toole.
41. The Grapes of Wrath - again, this is pretty straightforward! What is interesting is that, when they chose the name, none of the members had actually read the book.
42. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - title of Hunter S. Thompson's novel.
43. Fear of Flying - named after Erica Jong's 1973 novel.
44. Ubik - a sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick.
45. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel.
46. The Tommyknockers - a novel by Stephen King.
47. The Devil Wears Prada - formed only two years after the novel was published in 2003.
48. Hot Water Music - a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski.
49. Wreck of Hesperus - a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
50. Big Brother and the Holding Company - of course, the infamous dictatorial figure in Orwell's 1984.
51. Uriah Heep - a character from David Copperfield.
52. Holden Caulfield - the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye.
53. Dorian Gray - do I really need to explain this one? Apparently two bands use this name.
54. Augie March - named after Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.
55. Billy Pilgrim - the anti-hero in Slaughterhouse-five.
56. Steppenwolf - the name of the novel by Herman Hesse.
57. Weena Morloch - in H.G. Wells’s Time Machine, Weena is a love interest in the future, and the Morlocks are cannibalistic hominids
58. The Dead Milkmen - Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon featured a character known as Macon “Milkman” Dead III.
59. Grace Pool - a minor character in Jane Eyre.
60. Benny Profane - In Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel V, Profane is a discharged U.S. sailor with a sidekick named Pig Bodine. The band’s first song was called Where is Pig?
61. Fiver - a character in the late Richard Adams's Watership Down.
62. The Ophelias - the ill-fated Danish noblewoman in Hamlet gave her name to this '80s band.
63. Oberon - another Shakespeare!
64. Frumnious Bandersnatch - good old Lewis Carroll. From his poem Jabberwocky.
65. The Mugwumps - it's interesting how many bands have taken their names from The Naked Lunch.
66. Forty Nine Hudson - Jack Kerouac drove a 1949 Hudson cross country in his journey for On the Road.
67. Gatsby's American Dream - frankly, this one isn't especially cryptic, so I'm sure you can figure it out.
68. Ministry of Love - another band who derived its name from 1984.
69. This Mortal Coil - for we will all shuffle off it eventually, according to Hamlet.
70. Pooh Sticks - named for the classic dropping-sticks-off-a-bridge game from A.A. Milne's Pooh Bear stories.
71. Mott the Hoople - based on Willard Manus's novel of the same name.
72. Love Craft - named for the horror fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft.
73. Esben and the Witch - the name the Danish fairy tale about a boy’s encounters with a murderous witch.
74. The Fall - title of a novel by Albert Camus.
75. Campag Velocet - a brand of opiate-laced milk in A Clockwork Orange.
76. Moloko - also from Burgess's novel, the name is Nadsat for 'milk' (but is also the same as the Russian word).
77. Art of Noise - an allusion to noted futurist Luigi Russolo’s essay The Art of Noises.
78. Atreyu - a character from Michael Ende's novel The Neverending Story.
79. Good Charlotte - the title of a children’s book in a series called The Girls Of The Good Day Orphanage.
80. Tears for Fears - The Primal Scream, a book on psychotherapy by Arthur Janov, reveals the principle of 'tears instead of fear'.
81. Primal Scream - see above for a heavy implication of this one.
82. The Fugs - based on The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailler.
83. The Birthday Party - after the play of the same name by Harold Pinter.
84. Catch 22 - PLEASE tell me you understand this one?
85. Amon Amarth - based on The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
86. The House of Love - after Anais Nin's A Spy in the House of Love.
87. Jonas Sees in Colour - based on the 1993 novel, Lois Lowry's The Giver, in which the main character lives in a monochromatic world, until the Giver shows him a rainbow.
88. The Blue Nile - after the novel by the same name by Alan Moorehead.
89. Silverstein - named for the American poet, Shel Silverstein.
90. Shai Hulud - based on Dune by Frank Herbert.
... well, there you have it. On my extensive (and thoroughly time-wasting) search in the internet, I have found at least ninety names. But I'm sure there are hundreds more.
There are also loads of good ones that don't exist yet - The Watchmen would be a good Harper Lee inspired one, or maybe Atticus. 1984, The Bennets, Brideshead and The Madding Crowd are just a few that I like.
Do you have any suggestions?
(Also, I apologise for the terrible pun I made in the title of this post. Please forgive me).
1. The Boo Radleys - named after the reclusive in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.
2. Modest Mouse - from a passage in The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf.
3. Veruca Salt - the famously spoilt little girl in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
4. My Chemical Romance - after the Irvine Welsh novel Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance, which bassist Mikey Way came upon when he worked at Barnes & Noble.
5. Titus Andronicus - Shakespeare's earliest tragedy.
6. The Doors - taken from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, which itself comes from a William Blake poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
7. Rainer Maria - named after the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
8. Of Mice & Men - John Steinbeck's most famous novel, which itself is named after a line from Robert Burns' To a Mouse.
9. Of Monsters & Men - probably from the same root, though this is not certain.
10. Joy Division - from the novella House of Dolls by Jewish writer Yehiel Feiner. The term describes the women used as sex slaves by Nazi soldiers.
11. Clem Snide - named after the character created by William S. Burroughs.
12. As I Lay Dying - a William Faulkner novel.
13. Belle and Sebastian - named after Cécile Aubry's children's book, Belle et Sébastien.
14. Silverchair - The Silver Chair is the fourth novel in the Chronicles of Narnia.
15. Josef K - the protagonist of two of Franz Kafka's novels.
16. The Artful Dodger - named after Dickens' character in Oliver Twist.
17. Sixpence None the Richer - from a passage in CS Lewis's book Mere Christianity, in which a boy asks his father for a sixpence in order to buy him a gift.
18. Okkervil River - named after a short story by Russian novelist Tatyana Tolstaya.
19. The Airborne Toxic Event - from White Noise by Don DeLillo.
20. Moby - supposedly the originator of the band (whose middle name is Melville) is the great-great-great-nephew of Herman Melville. (I really hope that's enough of a clue as to the novel I'm talking about?)
21. Steely Dan - taken from William S. Burroughs's The Naked Lunch.
22. Der Plan - from The Biological Time Bomb
23. Heaven 17 - I love this one, because the name is actually a fictional band. A woman in A Clockwork Orange is browsing records when she mentions them.
24. Marillion - based on Silmarillion, a Tolkein novel.
25. The Velvet Underground - the name of the novel by Michael Leigh.
26. Billy Talent - a character in Michael Turner's Hard Core Logo.
27. Opeth - in Sunbird by Wilbur Smith, Opeth is the name of a Phoenician city in South Africa.
28. Oryx and Crake - a post-apocalyptic novel by Margaret Atwood.
29. The Romany Rye - a novel by George Borrow.
30. Gogol Bordello - after the Russian author Nicolai Gogol.
31. Nine Stories - inspired by the 1953 J.D. Salinger book.
32. Pylon - another Faulkner novel.
33. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - probably based on the 1954 novel The Bad Seed by William March, but it could be from the film of the same name.
35. Supertramp - taken from the 1908 book The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by W.H. Davies.
36. Manhattan Transfer - a 1925 Jon Dos novel.
37. New Riders of the Purple Sage - named after Zane Grey's Grey Riders of the Purple Sage.
38. Paradise Lost - I hope this one is obvious... if not, just Google it and I'm sure all will become clear.
39. The Brave New World - Aldous Huxley's novel of the same name, which itself derived its name from a line in The Tempest.
40. A Confederacy of Dunces - a novel by John Kennedy Toole.
41. The Grapes of Wrath - again, this is pretty straightforward! What is interesting is that, when they chose the name, none of the members had actually read the book.
42. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - title of Hunter S. Thompson's novel.
43. Fear of Flying - named after Erica Jong's 1973 novel.
44. Ubik - a sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick.
45. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel.
46. The Tommyknockers - a novel by Stephen King.
47. The Devil Wears Prada - formed only two years after the novel was published in 2003.
48. Hot Water Music - a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski.
49. Wreck of Hesperus - a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
50. Big Brother and the Holding Company - of course, the infamous dictatorial figure in Orwell's 1984.
51. Uriah Heep - a character from David Copperfield.
52. Holden Caulfield - the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye.
53. Dorian Gray - do I really need to explain this one? Apparently two bands use this name.
54. Augie March - named after Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.
55. Billy Pilgrim - the anti-hero in Slaughterhouse-five.
56. Steppenwolf - the name of the novel by Herman Hesse.
57. Weena Morloch - in H.G. Wells’s Time Machine, Weena is a love interest in the future, and the Morlocks are cannibalistic hominids
58. The Dead Milkmen - Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon featured a character known as Macon “Milkman” Dead III.
59. Grace Pool - a minor character in Jane Eyre.
60. Benny Profane - In Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel V, Profane is a discharged U.S. sailor with a sidekick named Pig Bodine. The band’s first song was called Where is Pig?
61. Fiver - a character in the late Richard Adams's Watership Down.
62. The Ophelias - the ill-fated Danish noblewoman in Hamlet gave her name to this '80s band.
63. Oberon - another Shakespeare!
64. Frumnious Bandersnatch - good old Lewis Carroll. From his poem Jabberwocky.
65. The Mugwumps - it's interesting how many bands have taken their names from The Naked Lunch.
66. Forty Nine Hudson - Jack Kerouac drove a 1949 Hudson cross country in his journey for On the Road.
67. Gatsby's American Dream - frankly, this one isn't especially cryptic, so I'm sure you can figure it out.
68. Ministry of Love - another band who derived its name from 1984.
69. This Mortal Coil - for we will all shuffle off it eventually, according to Hamlet.
70. Pooh Sticks - named for the classic dropping-sticks-off-a-bridge game from A.A. Milne's Pooh Bear stories.
71. Mott the Hoople - based on Willard Manus's novel of the same name.
72. Love Craft - named for the horror fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft.
73. Esben and the Witch - the name the Danish fairy tale about a boy’s encounters with a murderous witch.
74. The Fall - title of a novel by Albert Camus.
75. Campag Velocet - a brand of opiate-laced milk in A Clockwork Orange.
76. Moloko - also from Burgess's novel, the name is Nadsat for 'milk' (but is also the same as the Russian word).
77. Art of Noise - an allusion to noted futurist Luigi Russolo’s essay The Art of Noises.
78. Atreyu - a character from Michael Ende's novel The Neverending Story.
79. Good Charlotte - the title of a children’s book in a series called The Girls Of The Good Day Orphanage.
80. Tears for Fears - The Primal Scream, a book on psychotherapy by Arthur Janov, reveals the principle of 'tears instead of fear'.
81. Primal Scream - see above for a heavy implication of this one.
82. The Fugs - based on The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailler.
83. The Birthday Party - after the play of the same name by Harold Pinter.
84. Catch 22 - PLEASE tell me you understand this one?
85. Amon Amarth - based on The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
86. The House of Love - after Anais Nin's A Spy in the House of Love.
87. Jonas Sees in Colour - based on the 1993 novel, Lois Lowry's The Giver, in which the main character lives in a monochromatic world, until the Giver shows him a rainbow.
88. The Blue Nile - after the novel by the same name by Alan Moorehead.
89. Silverstein - named for the American poet, Shel Silverstein.
90. Shai Hulud - based on Dune by Frank Herbert.
... well, there you have it. On my extensive (and thoroughly time-wasting) search in the internet, I have found at least ninety names. But I'm sure there are hundreds more.
There are also loads of good ones that don't exist yet - The Watchmen would be a good Harper Lee inspired one, or maybe Atticus. 1984, The Bennets, Brideshead and The Madding Crowd are just a few that I like.
Do you have any suggestions?
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