Bandnames of famous progressive rock bands

I'm trying to look up how ELP got their name but I couldn't find anything. Can it be a lost species of albatross? 

BaldJean wrote: CPicard wrote: PFM = Premata Forneria Marconi. "Forneria" means "Bakery" and Marconi is a family name (but I don't find translation for "Premata": could some Italian fellows help us here?) according to Tibor Kneif, author of a German rock lexicon, Premiata Forneria Marconi were actually named after an Italian sweets shop

I believe that "premiata" translates as "prize"

Dies Irae-which translates as "Wrath of God"

CPicard wrote: PFM = Premata Forneria Marconi. "Forneria" means "Bakery" and Marconi is a family name (but I don't find translation for "Premata": could some Italian fellows help us here?)

according to Tibor Kneif, author of a German rock lexicon, Premiata Forneria Marconi were actually named after an Italian sweets shop

FLASH - Ray Bennett:  "The Flash name was picked on a night out with the boys.  Peter Banks and Colin Carter and a journalist (Chris Welch) threw around ideas -- though I wasn't there. I think the idea was something short, easy to spell and remember. No great meaning involved."

OT Räihälä wrote: 10cc is ten centilitres = one decilitre = one tenth of a litre = 1,75 pints

That's incorrect; 10 cc is ten cubic centimeters = 10 mililiters = one hundredth of a litre = 0,0175 Imperial pints (0.021 US pints).

Cool picture, though!!

Hawkwind were so named because Nik Turner had a nose like a hawk's beak and was obnoxiously flatulent.

Between the Buried And Me took their name from the lyrics of "Ghost Train" by the Counting Crows.

Hatfield & the North took their name from a highway sign going out of London.

Meshuggah took their name - Yiddish for "crazy" - from a dictionary of American slang.

The Mars Volta are named after a film technique used by director Federico Fellini.

The Moody Blues started out as the house band at a pub owned by the Mitchell & Butler brewery.  At first called the M&B Five, they renamed themselves based on the initials - at the time they were trying to project a dark, moody image and were playing mainly blues-based material.




Edited by zappaholic - August 19 2011 at 21:07

Black Sabbath- originally Earth.....changed their name off of a movie marquee to be something "dark". Barclay James Harvest......random words literally pulled from a hat

someone_else wrote: Andyman1125 wrote: ExittheLemming wrote: STEELY DAN - Named after a dildo in the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch. According to Burroughs, the Steely Dan was a metal dildo that an evil German bulldyke prostitute crushed using her nether regions Throbbing Gristle, which is a slang term, from Hull, meaning erection. Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) is distantly related to Wallis Simpson, the wife of Edward VIII - his maternal grandmother was Simpson's 2nd cousin. Van Vliet's stage name came from a term used by his Uncle Alan. Alan had a habit of exposing himself to Don's erstwhile girlfriend, Laurie. Alan would urinate with the bathroom door open and, if she was walking by, mumble about his penis, saying "Ahh, what a beauty! It looks just like a big, fine beef heart." Erm...you see a pattern here Someone once told me that PFM were named after an Italian bakery...surely not? Dick prog?    I'd rather associate the term "Dick prog" with the guy known as Fish (former Marillion singer), whose proper name is Derek William Dick. Both Derek W. Dick and Chris Squire are named 'Fish' because they have a peculiar preference for spending an unusually long time in the bath tub. The album title 'Fish Out of Water' was apparently well chosen.

interestingly enough, there is something that dicks like very much that smells like fish. Coincidence?

10cc is ten centilitres = one decilitre = one tenth of a litre = 1,75 pints

refugee wrote: Btw, great thread!  A couple of questions: Not a band name, but was Selling England by the Pound a slogan for the Labour party in the 1970s? And now a band name: Is 10 cc the average amount of sperm in a man’s ejaculation?

Jonathan King takes credit for naming both Genesis and 10cc.

According to him, when he started as a producer, a band called the Garden Wall came to his attention, and he took them on as a client, renaming them Genesis because they were his first "serious" client and the start of his production career.  After their first album tanked, they kicked him to the curb but kept the name.

From an interview with King, re 10cc:
"I started my own label in the early '70s called UK Records, and I picked up this master called "Donna" by this group that was put together by a guy that I knew from Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders a long while back [guitarist Eric Stewart].  I had to give them a name there and then because I'd signed the record, and I went to sleep that night and had this dream that a band of mine on my label made number one on the album and singles charts simultaneously in America, and the band was called 10cc.  So I gave them that name the next morning.  Everybody then decided that this was apparently meant to be the amount of an average male ejaculation.  Which was absolutely far from the truth; it had not been a wet dream, I can promise."  (from the book Rock Names)