"We were racking our brains for a suitable name," Creme says, "one that really captured our style and image, and Jonathan King, who'd signed us to his U.K. label, said, '10cc - because it's the average amount of semen ejaculated by a healthy male!' Well, naturally, we thought it was perfect."

The truth is, Jonathan had a dream about seeing a sign above the Hammersmith Odeon the night before he came to meet us. The sign said, '10cc The Best Band In The World'. The ejaculate theory makes better dinner conversation though.

"P-Nut and some friends went skinny dipping in a public pool. They were apprehended by police. One of P-Nut's friends (Jim Watson) was arrested, cuffed (naked) and taken home to his parents. He was issued a citation for a code 311 (indecent exposure). We thought this was funny, so we took it as our band name."

"The band was first called A Silver Mt. Zion, that was based on a misheard song lyric so we used that at the beginning then decided that we liked Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band better as a name and that coincided with us adding new people to the band and that's what we are. That's what we are were the Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band and that's our name."

"We got our first gig at CBGB's before we had a name for the band, so we were driving around after rehearsing and we made a list: the Lipstick Barber Poles, the Buffalo Flesh Batons - millions of bad names that we were all arguing over. Then we got home and turned on the TV and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore was on so we compromised and named the band Alice Donut Liver Henry Moore. The management at CBGB's said it was too long [to fit in a ad in the Village Voice] and shortened it to Alice Donut."

"I was daydreaming at my dull desk job with my feet up, and I thought to myself, 'Wouldn't it be cool if the human species were placed on earth and cultivated by an alien intelligence?' Maybe the aliens added us to an atmosphere that was suitable for us, and they've been watching us develop and colonize, kind of like what a kid does with an ant farm".

Sever for us all ties
Between the now and what is to be
We will act as your sword, oh Great Itzamna
And you will know us by the trail of dead.

"Every time we play a show we're basically auditioning for like all the kids that are seeing us, trying to win them over as fans."

"The name itself comes from Mao Tse-tung and his philosophy of the Chinese revolution that says that revolutions move for the people like fish through the sea. I became Country Joe because I was the only Joe in the group."

"On the way home,
this car hears my confessions.
I think tonight I'll take the long way."

"First 'dead presidents' is a slang for money. You see faces of dead presidents on dollar bill notes and on coins too. The other meaning refers to the condemning of corrupt presidents, they aint working for us, the people . So we need trustworthy and righteous leaders to become our leaders in the first place."

"if the doors of perception are cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite.

"We had this mate who kept suggesting all these names like The Daz Men or Glisserol and the Fan Extractors. Echo and the Bunnymen was one of them. I thought it was just as stupid as the rest.

"A typical porno movie but about baseball. It's like a really raunchy Bull Durham."

"It's a book of reflections of Vietnam veterans and at one point, this guy said everything was 'Fugazi.' I looked it up in the glossary and it said, 'fucked up situation.' It was right at the point when we were getting ready to do our first show and I was desperately trying to come up with a name, anything other than Ian's New Band."

"What's that smell like fish pretty baby, I really would like to know
Tell me What's that smell like fish oh mama, I really would like to know
That ain't puddin' baby ain't no pie, it's the stuff that I got you by
So keep on truckin' mama, truckin' my blues away"

"I had this friend up in Berkeley, Steve Talbot, and he came up with funny names for people. His name for me was Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane (for blues pioneer Blind Lemon Jefferson). When the guys were looking for band names and nobody could come up with something, I remember saying, 'You want a silly band name? I got a silly band name for you!'"

'I love my baby by the lovin' spoonful'

"I think we sort of just named it because, um, the town we came from there was nothing really much going on there and there was a bunch of like people who just all started getting in bands and some one said they though there might be like a muse hanging around our town which kind of inspired us to want to make music so that was when we heard the word first and we though well, why not eh? Why not? And we took the name"

Sylvain, "I said to Billy, 'Man, that would be a great name for a band, the New York Dolls.'"

"We chose Paramore because well; for one, we liked the way it sounded. It seemed real up, a little cool 'vibey' name, but we didn't really didn't stick with it until right before our first show because we were so nervous about trying to find the right name that would be so cool and 'rock star'. So we just started looking up different words and researching meanings behind them and when we were looking up paramore we found that it had a couple of really cool meanings. One is 'secret love' and another is 'for love'. I thought that was something good to stand for."

"We didn't have mike stands, just hockey sticks with mikes duct-tapes to a table. No name, nothing. "Phish" just kind of got thrown in there because of Fish's name. Anyway, we went to the gig with about 35 cover songs, like "Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress," "Heard it through the grapevine," stuff like that. They hated us. [Michael Jackson's] Thriller had just been released; they cranked it up on the turntable, and we couldn't compete. So we selected the name for that gig, and it just stuck."

It’s a complex question to answer, really. As musicians you try to find a name for your band that represents you and you never really do, because, basically, names for bands lose their meaning after awhile. They become a series of sounds that you associate with people in music. The most important thing for a name is that you can imagine forty-thousand people screaming it in unison

Steven and his friend Malcolm Stocks developed an almost entirely fictional history of a legendary seventies group, complete with non-existent band members and an absurd discography - this was The Porcupine Tree. To back up the story, Steven recorded several hours worth of music supposedly by this imaginary band. This was all done as pure self-indulgence, but by early 1989, Steven rated some of the music highly enough to compile a cassette, entitled "Tarquin's Seaweed Farm," and sent out copies to people that he felt might be interested. One of them went to the underground UK magazine Freakbeat, run by Richard Allen and Ivor Trueman. Unknown to Steven at the time, they were in the process of setting up their own record company. Despite the fact that they gave the tape a rather lukewarm review in the magazine, they invited Porcupine Tree to contribute a track to their first release, a compilation album of the best underground psychedelic groups.

"It just fell out of the sky. We struggled for a long time. We had to show up every day with five names and say them and one of them was that."

"Kings of the Stone Age would have been too much, or in his words, “lopsided.” On the other hand, Queens of the Stone Age just sounded better. “Rock should be heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls.”

"'We sat up one night,' says Michael, 'and we just got completely drunk and rolled around the floor. We had all this chalk, and we took every name anyone could think of and we wrote it on the wall in the living room. When morning rolled around, we pointed and erased, and it was between R.E.M. and Negro Eyes, and we thought that probably wouldn't go over too well outside our immediate circle of friends!"

"We started going through these huge laundry lists of idiotic, meaningless, boring names. To this day both Tree and Flea claim they came up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's a derivation of a classic old-school American blues or jazz name. There was Louis Armstrong with his Hot Five, and also other bands that had "Red Hot" this or "Chili" that. There was even an English band that was called Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers, who later thought we had stolen their name. But no one had ever been the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a name that would forever be a blessing and a curse."

"They considered calling themselves the New Beatles for a while, but prudence told them this was not a wise choice. In the meantime, they shrugged their shoulders a lot and plotted how to break into the biz. They finally got their name, as the legend goes, from Hal Haverstadt, an exec at Warner Brothers Records. Haverstadt worked with Captain Beefheart, and the nameless quintet figured that anyone who could relate to Beefheart might possibly understand what they were up to. So off they mailed an album’s worth of material, replete with title–The Warner Bros. Album–cover art, and wacko liner notes. They signed no name, just a return address. Haverstadt mailed the tape back weeks later, addressed to “Residents” and thus began the most significant pop music ensemble of the 20th century."

"The world is both a beutiful and savage garden."

"in part after the '60s group Silver Apples and slang for blonde-haired Jewish people."

Mr. Berman insists that choice was a fluke: "When I was working at the Whitney I stared out the window and a sign said 'Silver Jewelry' but from my angle you couldn't see the end." ... "If I believed in fate I'd be very curious why I picked the name Silver Jews."

"You know, I don't think about it much now. For a long time I really regretted it, I felt saddled with it and it's really weird because in every other aspect of my life I choose my words carefully and I just don't know how I wound up with it. I mean, there's a million band names I could think of that would be better but I wound up with it and I finally decided that okay, what I'm gonna do, maybe the only way I can look at this in a positive light, is to normalise the word and it is a word, it's a proper noun for a group of people and it’s a group of people that I'm a member of and it’s a problematic word because it's a proper noun that if said with a certain, depending on how you pronounce the word, it can turn into a slur."

"Yeah. So now, I'm really relaxed with the name actually. It doesn't mean anything and the only time that I ever really think about it was when I got into Nashville and everyone asked ‘so, what do you do?’ and I said ‘I'm in a band, the Silver Jews’, and they're like ‘Silver Juice? Dews?’ And then I don't ever apologise for it or say anything about it but I don't think it’s a great band name but it's problematic and everything we've done's been problematic and in a sense I feel it's appropriate for us."

"The name of the band is a stupid name, a dumb bad joke, and a bad idea. Okay? Bill [Corgan] named the band even before there was a band. He was like, 'I'm going to have a band and it's going to be called this.' Smashing is not a verb, it's an adjective. It's not like we like to smash pumpkins or anything. And we are not amused by pumpkin jokes anymore!"

"It comes from a poem our guitarist, Daron, had written called, Victims of a Down. He brought it to us and 'System' was chosen as a better, stronger word because it makes it into the 'whole' instead of the people in particular; it's the society. Take your own meaning out of our name. It means different things to different people. That's the beauty of it. It's like putting art up on a wall and going, 'What do you think of it?' It's many different things on a personal or political level. We leave it open to interpretation."

"A friend had found the name in the TV Guide, which explained the term used by TV studios to describe a head-and-shoulder shot of a person talking as 'all content, no action.' It fit."

"All the best minds used to think the world was flat. But what if it isn't? It might be round. And bread mold might be medicine. If we never looked at things and thought of what might be, why we'd all still be out there in the tall grass with the apes."

"I loved Camper Van Beethoven and I loved that they had a smart ass name. So I wanted to have some play on words name as well. Third Eye Blind, blind like, doink, like stuffing your thumb in the eye of phoney spirituality"

"Tool is exactly what it sounds like: It's a big dick. It's a wrench.... we are... your tool; use us as a catalyst in your process of finding out whatever it is you need to find out, or whatever it is you're trying to achieve."

"In the summer of 1948, Ronald P. Vincent, a crop-spray contractor, moved from Kansas to Hollywood after his wife had been dismembered in a bizarre snow plough accident. Inspired by the unrelenting pain he felt, Vincent penned his first and only book, 'A Joyful Guide to Lachrymology.'"(Joy of Crying?)

"They [the initials] can be interpreted a number of ways. Originally, the name didn't have any punctuation marks, and we viewed it as the ferocious insect that’ll keep stinging you until you die. Then, we put the punctuation in to take advantage of the religious aspect of it. The bottom line, though, is that WASP has always stood for "We Are Sexual Perverts."

"I've always thought that The Wedding Present was an inappropriate name for a pop group--more like a poem, or a book or something--and therefore quite attractive (to me!). I've also always been fascinated by Weddings...those surreal performances where the audience plays an integral part--the joy, the sadness, the passion...all unfolding firstly in a house where God is served and ultimately in a house where beer is served...the knife inserted ritually into the virginal white cake to reveal the dark fruity interior...that ugly pagan concept of the father handing over his daughter to her new master...the mothers crying because they're losing a daughter, the page boys crying because they have to wear such stupid clothes...those embarrassing speeches and drunken uncles on the dance floor...I could go on and on!

   "I used to be a huge Birthday Party fan and although I'd thought of 'The Wedding Present' about ten or eleven years ago, I decided it was a bit too similar and hence called the band I was in The Lost Pandas. By the time our first single came out in 1985, TBP were dead and gone so I felt more comfortable reverting to my original idea."

Billy:If you work hard, maybe, in a couple of years time, you might be something… different. At the moment, you’re just two white stripes.

"Why Black and White? High Contrast Colors are STILL the best. Newborns can see from birth, just not as clearly as an older child or adult. Until your child is about six months of age, he will respond best to bold, contrasting colors and graphics. That’s why it’s important to provide your baby with toys that feature the visual extremes of black, white and red. These high-contrast colors will captivate and hold baby’s attention, encouraging visual development as well as physical activity – like wiggling, kicking, and arm waving."

"Totally. Probably if I was from Asia it would be a different colour. But being a Yorkshire lad and all..."