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What’s in a name

We listen to music every day and each of us has our favourite bands and singers. We have to admit that some of the bands of today and of days past have some rather strange and weird names. Have you ever wondered how the band names originate?

Well, the Naked Surfer has unearthed the meaning behind the names of some popular bands. Here are a few:

Deep Purple
Guitarist Ritchie Blackmore suggested Deep Purple, which was his grandmother's favourite big band song.

Def Leppard
Inspired by a drawing Joe Elliot made of a leopard with no ear

Depeche Mode
Taken from a French magazine and it means "Fashion dispatch"

Foo Fighters
A World War II term used by pilots to describe strange flying fireballs, which flew alongside and sometimes circled their planes.

Green Day
"Green day" is a slang term for spending a day smoking pot.

Guns N’ Roses
Originally two bands, "L.A. Gunns" and "Hollywood Roses". Axl Rose headed Hollywood Roses; Tracii Guns headed the other band, which featured Slash.

Hoobastank
In an interview the band's vocalist, Doug Robb, said: "It's really cool, it's one of those old high school inside-joke words that didn't really mean anything."

Linkin Park
After a park (now known as Christine Reed Park) in Santa Monica, California. The spelling was changed from Lincoln to Linkin because the domain name lincolnpark.com was unavailable.

Limp Bizkit
From Fred Durst's dog Biscuit who has a limp. There's another story circulating out there but this is the more popular version.

Tears for Fears
The second band (see Primal Scream) to take their name from the book "Prisoners of Pain", which originally introduced scream therapy and promised to exchange "tears for fears."

UB40
Comes from Britain's "Unemployment Benefit Form 40", which the band was quite familiar with.

See the full list here