A band name has to do a lot of work. It sits on posters, record sleeves and streaming pages, and it usually gets chosen long before anyone knows whether the music will last. Some groups invent something from scratch. Others take a shortcut and borrow from the shelf.
The bookish route has produced some of rock’s best known names, and a few of the stories behind them are stranger than you’d expect. Here are eight bands whose names trace back to novels, memoirs and other printed pages.
Steppenwolf
The Canadian American rock group Steppenwolf took its name from Hermann Hesse’s 1927 novel of the same title. The book follows a lonely, restless intellectual who feels caught between his human side and a wolfish, outsider side. It became a favorite of the counterculture in the 1960s.
The band formed in Los Angeles in 1967 around singer John Kay, who was born in Germany. Producer Gabriel Mekler is generally credited with suggesting the name after reading Hesse. It suited a group best known for the biker anthem “Born to Be Wild.”
Joy Division
Few band names carry a heavier source than this one. The Manchester group first called itself Warsaw, then changed to Joy Division in 1978 to avoid confusion with another band. The new name came from House of Dolls, a novel published under the pen name Ka-Tzetnik 135633.
In that book, the Joy Divisions were units of women forced into sexual slavery in Nazi concentration camps. The choice drew criticism at the time and has been debated ever since. Band members have said they were fascinated by the book’s subject and did not mean to glorify it.
Heaven 17
Heaven 17 came out of Sheffield in 1980, formed by former members of the Human League. Their name comes from Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. In the book, Heaven Seventeen is the name of a fictional pop group advertised in a record shop.
It’s a neat bit of borrowing, since the band was a synth driven pop act with a sharp political streak. The name nods to a novel that was already famous through Stanley Kubrick’s film. Their debut album, Penthouse and Pavement, arrived in 1981.
The Doors
Jim Morrison and his bandmates took their name from Aldous Huxley’s 1954 essay The Doors of Perception. Huxley wrote about his experience taking mescaline, and he in turn borrowed his title from a line by the poet William Blake. So the name has a double literary pedigree.
The band formed in Los Angeles in 1965. Morrison was a keen reader of poetry and philosophy, and the name fit his taste for the mystical and the dangerous. It has outlasted nearly every other band name from that era in sheer recognition.
Uriah Heep
The British hard rock band Uriah Heep formed in London in 1969. They named themselves after a character in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, published in 1850. Uriah Heep is the humble, fawning clerk who hides a scheming, treacherous nature.
It’s an odd choice for a loud, organ driven rock band, and that oddness probably helped it stick. The group is still active decades later and has toured under the name for more than fifty years. Few Dickens characters have been pressed onto so many vinyl records.
Soft Machine
The Canterbury group Soft Machine formed in 1966 and borrowed its name from William S. Burroughs’s 1961 novel The Soft Machine. Burroughs was known for his experimental cut up technique, and the book is one of the more challenging works of postwar American fiction. Burroughs himself reportedly gave the young band his blessing.
The group became a central name in British psychedelic music and later in jazz rock. Their name signaled early on that they cared about avant garde ideas as much as pop hooks. Band members have changed many times over the years, but the Burroughs connection has remained part of the story.
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground got its name from a 1963 paperback by Michael Leigh, which looked at hidden sexual subcultures in America. The book was reportedly found by Tony Conrad, a filmmaker and musician who was linked to the group in its earliest days. The band took to the title straight away.
Lou Reed and John Cale formed the group in New York in the mid 1960s. The name suited their dark, unpolished sound and their connection to Andy Warhol’s circle. The paperback itself is now remembered mainly because of the band that borrowed from it.
Belle and Sebastian
The Scottish indie band Belle and Sebastian formed in Glasgow in 1996. Their name comes from a French children’s story by Cécile Aubry, which was later adapted into a popular television series. It tells of a young boy and his large white dog in the Alps.
The gentle, nostalgic title matched the group’s soft spoken songwriting, led by Stuart Murdoch. It also stood out in a decade crowded with louder, tougher sounding band names. The group has kept the name for nearly three decades and continues to record and tour.
