Plenty of band names come from careful brainstorming. Others come from something a musician happened to glance at, or from a word they got slightly wrong. A shop window, a piece of graffiti, or a muddled song lyric can end up on a record sleeve for decades.
The six bands below are a mix of those accidents. Some are tied to signs and street scenes, and others to mistakes of the ear. Each story is credited to the source it comes from, and band name legends do tend to get polished over the years.
Everything But The Girl and the Hull Furniture Shop
Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, both from Hull, formed Everything But The Girl in 1982. They found the name while walking past Turners furniture store on the city’s Beverley Road. It’s an ordinary shopfront phrase, the kind of line that promises a shopper a full range of goods.
Classic Pop magazine points out that this makes them likely the only band named after a sign on a Hull furniture store. A name like that is hard to plan. It only works because someone happened to be looking up at the right moment.
Spandau Ballet and the Berlin Graffiti
The group started out as The Makers. They changed their name after a visit to Berlin, where one of their roadies saw graffiti referring to Spandau Prison.
So the name came from writing on a wall, not from a plan. Nobody in the band had to coin anything. They borrowed a phrase from the street and let it stand in for their sound.
Buffalo Springfield and the Parked Steamroller
Buffalo Springfield may have the most literal story here. According to Classicbands.com, the band took their name from a brand of heavy asphalt roller that they saw parked on the street.
It’s a plain piece of road equipment with a name stamped on it. The band turned that industrial label into something that sounds like a frontier town.
Herman’s Hermits and a Mixed Up Cartoon Name
This one is a true mishearing. The band remarked on the singer’s resemblance to Sherman, a character in the TV cartoon The Bullwinkle Show, though he misheard the name as Herman.
The slip stuck. Soon after, the band changed their name to Herman and The Hermits. A small error of the ear became the name on the records.
Anberlin and the Radiohead Lyric
Anberlin’s name is often traced back to a misheard lyric. One list of band names says it comes from a misheard lyric in the Radiohead song “Everything in Its Right Place”.
It’s a reminder that lyrics are easy to hear wrong, especially in a song with processed vocals. Here the wrong version turned out more useful than the right one.
Tangerine Dream and a Beatles Mishearing
The German electronic pioneers are credited with a similar origin. The same list says their name is a misheard lyric from “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.
The Beatles song is full of dreamlike imagery, so it’s easy to see how a phrase could get twisted in the ear. The result sounded like a ready made name for an electronic band.
Where the Names Came From
Two of these bands took their names from shop and street signage, and one from graffiti. One took a name from machinery parked outdoors, and three came from misheard words or lyrics. Each origin comes from a published account, and as with many band name stories, details can shift depending on who is telling it.
