Nowadays, I imagine choosing a band name has a lot to do with SEO and your chances of appearing atop a Google search, but that wasn’t a factor for some of the world’s best-known acts.

Over the years, musicians have spoken about the difficulties of choosing a band name, and I’m sure many a classic hit has been left unrecorded following disputes of this nature.

Thankfully, that’s not the case with these bands, and thanks to the Telegraph, we can get a little insight into how they ended up with their names.

We’ll start with Oasis:

The band had its origins in another Manchester group called the Rain. When Liam Gallagher joined the band in 1991, he suggested they change their name to Oasis, inspired by the Oasis Leisure Centre in Swindon, which he  saw listed as a venue on a tour poster for Inspiral Carpets, for whom his brother Noel worked as a roadie.

Noel eventually joined his brother in Oasis, despite his opinion that “Oasis was a s— name for a band.” Oasis never played the Swindon Oasis before breaking up in 2009.

On the plus side, we now get to enjoy the ongoing feud between the two brothers.

The Police:

The Police were named by drummer Stewart Copeland in 1977 as an ironic reference to his father, who was chief of the CIA’s Political Action Staff – the agency’s dirty tricks department – in the Fifties and later left to form his own “private CIA”.

Copeland’s father boasted to Rolling Stone that his organisation was the largest private security service operating in Africa and the Middle East, and that “nobody knows more about changing governments, by force or otherwise, than me”.

The Rolling Stones:

According to lead guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards, the legendary band picked their name by “sheer accident.”

“We finally got a gig, all right? Our own night in a pub in London, you know? So we said, ‘Great, call them up, let out the news. How much money have we got? Call up the local magazine, What’s On, or whatever, and put an ad in. You do it. How much a word?’  “Brian [Jones] is doing the business on that. And, like, ‘Fine, OK, who’s appearing?’ – this is the chick on the other end. I mean, suddenly here it is, we didn’t have a name. And just lying on the floor was Muddy Waters’s The Best of Muddy Waters album, face-side down with the track list, you know. The first song is Rollin’ Stone Blues.’  “So right off the top of his head, Brian went, ‘Well…’  “‘What’s the name? This phone call’s costing money, man, you know? I mean, man, what’s the name of the band?’ “And he looked and went ‘Rollin’ Stones.’

“OK. Boom. That’s the way it happened. I mean, there’s no thought behind it. That’s the way the Stones operate, man.”

They’ve since done alright, so fair play to them.

Daft Punk (pictured up top):

Previously called Darlin’, after the title of a Beach Boys song, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter changed their name to Daft Punk after a review in Melody Maker in 1993 described their music as “a daft punky thrash”.

Now for one that many music lovers would happily have avoided altogether, given the chance – Nickelback:

Formed in Alberta, Canada, in 1995, the band settled on their name after it was suggested by bass player Mike Kroeger, who was working at a coffee shop at the time. “A lot of people would come into the coffee shop to purchase a coffee that cost $1.45 and would give me $1.50 and I would find myself saying, ‘Here’s your nickel back.’ After saying it probably hundreds of times, it occurred to me that it sounded interesting as one word.”

We’ve been suffering ever since.

Foo Fighters:

Former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl formed the band in 1994. The name, as explained in an official band biography, stems from his interest in unexplained phenomena: “Toward the end of the Second World War, US Air Force fliers patrolling the German skies would encounter a number of strange aerial phenomena in the area between Hagenau in Alsace-Lorraine and Neustadt an der Weinstrasse in the Rhine Valley.

Similar to modern reports of UFOs, or so-called ‘flying saucers,’ these objects would come to be referred to as ‘Foo Fighters’ (‘foo’ being slang for the French feu, fire) or, by those who believed the highly manoeuvrable balls of light to be a newly developed German weapon, ‘Kraut Balls.’”

Coldplay:

Chris Martin’s band adopted their name at the suggestion of Tim Crompton, a fellow student of Martin and guitarist Jonny Buckland at University College London. Crompton had previously called a band of his own the Coldplay, inspired by the title of a little-known book of poems called Child’s Reflections, Cold Play, published in 1997.

I consciously uncoupled from Coldplay a while back.

ABBA:

The name of the Swedish pop group, which formed in Stockholm in 1972, is not only an acronym formed from the members’ first initials: Agnetha, Björn, Benny, and Anni-Frid. Abba was also intended as a play on words, because it’s the name of a fish-canning company in Sweden, Abba Seafood, which sells products such as caviar and pickled herring.

Chumbawamba:

The band formed in Burnley, England, in 1982. Lead guitarist Allan Mark “Boff” Whalley explained: “There’s a theory that an infinite amount of chimpanzees sitting at an infinite amount of typewriters will eventually, hitting the keys at random, lead to one of them writing the entire works of Shakespeare. Several scientists have tested this logic…

There was an article in the late Seventies which printed a list of words which a chimpanzee had actually typed. Predictably enough, none made any sense whatsoever. So in the quest to avoid finding a name which had immediate pigeonhole possibilities, in 1982 Danbert [Nobacon, vocalist and keyboardist] was blindfolded and placed in front of a typewriter: an Olivetti Dora, in fact, with a green case. He typed a list of words, filling an A4-size piece of paper, and from that resulting list we found the word “chumbawamba”. Really. That’s it. Sounded good to say, looked weird, so we kept it.”

That’s actually pretty impressive.

To finish, the 10th band is Cranberries:

The band formed in Limerick, Ireland, in 1989. Their name was originally The Cranberry Saw Us, a play on “cranberry sauce.” After Dolores O’Riordan joined in 1990 as the lead singer, the new line-up shortened their name to the Cranberry.  The demo cassettes they mailed to British labels were marked “the Cranberry’s,” and when they received their first response, an otherwise encouraging rejection letter from Rough Trade, it was addressed to the Cranberries.

They clearly kept soldiering on (with their tanks, and their bombs, and their guns…).

There, that’s 10.

You can see the full list here.

[source:telegraph]