25 of the Strangest Band Names and Where They Came From

The band took this seemingly unpronounceable name from the way clicking sounds in the southern African Jul’hoan language were represented in the subtitles for the 1980 international hit film from South Africa, “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” The group also sometimes calls itself Chk Chk Chk, only slightly easier to pronounce.

Actor Russell Crowe was the lead singer and vocalist of this Aussie band, which apparently drew its name from the collective height of its members and the earthy enthusiasm with which they performed. In 2005, the group evolved into another one with the same initials, The Ordinary Fear of God. When that folded, Crowe formed a band with the disappointingly bland name Indoor Garden Party, which released one album in 2017.

According to this band’s website, its cumbersome and ominous name is drawn from a passage in a Mayan New Year ceremony, which eerily echoes a line found in an ancient Egyptian burial text. However, band co-founder Conrad Keely told an interviewer in 2005 that the “Mayan thing” was a lie, explaining, “We used to really enjoy just any lie that we could really think of.” The name’s real origins remain unknown.

When asked about the meaning of his band’s name by Clash Music, co-founder Eric Bachmann replied, “It’s a riddle. It means something in Russian, but we intentionally mistranslated it. Work it out.”

Steve Martin did a sketch on his 1978 comedy album, “Wild and Crazy Guy,” called “Bowling for (expletive)” — a parody of the TV game show “Bowling for Dollars.” This band formed originally as Rubberneck, but after a few months, it adopted the name of the sketch as its own, bowdlerizing the final word of Martin’s title into something more, shall we say, palatable.

Apparently, members of this politically and socially outspoken band used to delight in making up stories about where their name came from. One version was that it was based on a chant from a troupe of African drummers who played next to band members when they were busking in Paris. Another explanation is that co-founder Danbert Nobacon had a dream about being in a club where the restrooms were labeled “Chumba” and “Wamba” instead of “Men” and “Women.”

David Longstreth, founder and only consistent member of Dirty Projectors, started using this band name in 2003. He claims to have no recollection of why he chose it or what it means.

Sam Quinn, co-founder of this Tennessee band, christened it after his childhood nickname for his rural backyard.

This group borrowed its name from soft-core porn producer and director Russ Meyer’s 1965 sexploitation cult film “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!,” about three go-go dancers on a killing spree through California.

This Canadian collective borrowed its name, which it sometimes renders as GY!BE, from a 1976 documentary by director Mitsuo Yanagimachi about a Japanese motorcycle gang, the Black Emperors.

Performing in both English and Welsh, this band was part of the so-called Cool Cymru arts movement in the late 1990s (“Cymru” is the Welsh name for Wales). In various interviews, band members have said that they couldn’t think of a name so decided to just put a bunch of silly words together. “Gorky’s” was based on “gork” — Welsh school slang for “dimwit.” “Zygotic” referenced a zygote, or fertilized egg, and “mynci” was not a translation but a phonetic transcription of “monkey” using Welsh spelling.

The group’s lead singer and co-founder, M.C. Taylor, has said that the name just came to him from “a mysterious sort of universe” while he was living in San Francisco. He admits that he’s often asked about it and says that, other than that, he doesn’t have a good answer.

This mysterious name is said to have come from a mispronunciation of a German street name by co-founder Chris Hesse. What the original could have been is hard to imagine.

“Pressing any member of [this] Austin-based quintet … on the origins of their proper-sentence band name,” according to Spin, “only leads to cheeky responses.” The phrase is also the title of a recent novel by award-winning author Claire Vaye Watkins.

Famed University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant earned his nickname as a young man by wrestling a bear in a ring on a bet. When Gary Busey played Bryant in the 1984 movie “The Bear,” he insisted on reproducing the challenge literally. In later years, on “Late Night with David Letterman” and elsewhere, he’d sometimes brag, “I wrestled a bear once.” Band members heard this at some point and decided it would be a good group name.

The name of this Australian group was made up at the last minute. They were just friends who used to get together to play when another friend asked the as-yet-unnamed ensemble to perform at a show. One of the founders wanted to call the band Gizzard Gizzard for their public debut, while another one thought they should borrow the Doors’ Jim Morrison’s nickname, the Lizard King. They compromised.

The leader of this group, not surprisingly, is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist named Mike Adams. When he was about to release his first solo album (the band coalesced later), he and a friend came up with the “Honest Weight” part because he wanted to bill himself as something more than just “Mike Adams.” It wasn’t about his physique, he has said. As he told the arts and culture publication The Arts Fuse, “‘Honest weight’ has more to do with, like, karats of gold, maybe. The ‘weight’ being the value of something.”

This imaginative name was in reference to Israeli-born actress Natalie Portman’s appearance in the 2005 sci-fi film “V for Vendetta.” Disappointingly, the band changed its name to Brite Futures before breaking up in 2012.

This lo-fi cult band was born out of a series of home recordings by singer-songwriter and guitarist Jeff Mangum. When he got together with friends to form a band, he originally dubbed it Milk. There was another band by that name, though, so he added “Neutral” and “Hotel.” Why? When he’s been asked, Mangum has replied that he prefers to keep that private. According to the music blog Stereogum, the name was actually coined by one of Mangum’s bandmates in an earlier group.

The inspiration for this band’s name was a 1964 episode of “The Twilight Zone” called “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” — an eerie tale about a future society in which all 19-year-olds undergo a procedure to make them resemble one of a selection of physically attractive models.

Originally a street band in Hawaii before moving on to Austin and later to Chicago, this ensemble — whose changing personnel has always numbered about 10 or 12 members — was named by co-founder Frank Orrall. “Poi dog” is Hawaiian slang for “mutt,” and Orrall apparently liked the contradictions implied by the image of such a canine having serious thoughts.

One of this Melbourne band’s early songs was called “Rolling Blackouts,” and they eventually adopted it as the group name, too. That there were several other bands with the same name, though, didn’t matter at first because, as co-founder Fran Keaney told Bandcamp, “we were pretty much a bedroom kind of band.” When they gained a larger audience, they appended “Coastal Fever” to their name — a reference to a bout with a virus that kept their guitarist confined to a Cambodian hostel for a time.

Eric Idle of Monty Python came up with the silliest possible band name he could imagine for a sketch about rock musicians (“Rex Stardust, lead electric triangle with Toad the Wet Sprocket, has had to have an elbow removed…”). To Idle’s eventual surprise when he first heard the band on the radio, members of a real group thought it would be funny to adopt the name.

Actor Tony Danza (“Who’s the Boss?”) was a tap dancer early in his career, and this now-defunct group borrowed his name and profession as a joke. Apparently, when they played live shows, at least some of the audience — mainly an older demographic — came expecting to see Danza himself tap dancing on stage.

Only one of this band’s founding members, bassist John Cyr, is still with the group — often referred to as TWIABP — and he hasn’t revealed anything about its pollyannaish name. However, last year, as COVID-19 took hold, the punk-focused satirical site The Hard Times quoted band members as saying they were supposedly considering changing it to something more appropriate to the situation. The keyboardist was quoted as suggesting “The World (expletive) Sucks but Maybe If We All Start Going to Church Again God Will Fix This.”