Toronto Mike

The 100 Best Band Names of All Time

Music

There's a link going around that lists the 100 best band names of all time.

Here's their top 10:

1. Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem (Leave it to The Muppets to come up with the BEST BAND NAME OF ALL TIME.)
2. Guided By Voices (This always seemed like the secret to Robert Pollard’s prolific and bizarre output.)
3. Joy Division (The name came from the 1955 novel House of Dolls in which a Nazi concentration camp had a prostitution arm.)
4. Led Zeppelin
5. A Tribe Called Quest
6. 13th Floor Elevators
7. Godspeed You! Black Emperor (Like Lemmy and the umlaut, we’d have retired random punctuation after these post-rock legends used it best.)
8. Public Enemy
9. Man… or Astro-Man? (After seeing them live, you still wonder.)
10. We Were Promised Jetpacks! (Yes, Scottish frontman Adam Thompson, we sure were.)

I like #3, #4, #5 and #8, but I'm not sure of the others.  I don't even think #1 should count.

Without giving it a great deal of thought, here are my ten favourite band names.

  1. Joy Division
  2. Velvet Underground
  3. Soundgarden
  4. A Tribe Called Quest
  5. The Flaming Lips
  6. Revolting Cocks
  7. Rage Against the Machine
  8. Sex Pistols
  9. Sonic Youth
  10. The Psychedelic Furs
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