Giving music back to the musicians.
Monday Jan 05, 2009
Daily: How They Got Their Name
The Pet Shop Boys:
The long-running electro-pop duo of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. While the two met in an electronics shop in Chelsea, friends of theirs worked in a pet shop in Ealing, and it was suggested that the name Pet Shop Boys sounded like a polite English rap group.
Three Dog Night:
Three vocalists and some ace backing musicians rack up 13 gold albums and 18 Billboard Top 40 hits between 1969 and 1977. The name comes from the historic aboriginal practice of bringing the dogs in to sleep with the humans on cold nights. The colder the night, the more dogs required.
Bloodhound Gang:
Started out as Bang Chamber 8. The name Bloodhound Gang comes from the title of a segment on the PBS TV series 3-2-1 Contact that involves kids solving crimes with scientific techniques.
Cock Sparrer:
Meant to be Cocksparrow, the familiar male sparrow. "It's and old East End greeting, as in, 'Hellow, me ol' cocksparrer!' We changed [our name] from Cocksparrow to Cocksparrer because people weren't pronouncing it right. It sounded too posh, like you had a plum in your mouth when people said Cocksparrow."
Gov't Mule:
Following the Civil War, the US government awarded freed African-American slaves 40 acres of land and a mule to drag a plow. This Allman Brothers side project formed as a power trio with Warren Haynes on guitar, Matt Abts on drums and Allen Woody on bass. Woody was found dead in 2000. The unreleased cause of death remains a point of fan speculation. Warren Haynes says of the name Gov't Mule, "Jaimoe, who is one of the drummers for the Allman Brothers, kinda dubbed us Gov't Mule, and it just stuck. We thought it applied to us and liked all of the different meanings that it took on and the fact that everybody had a different idea of what it meant, so we kinda stuck with it."
Counting Crows:
Took their name from a diination rhyme heard by singer Adam Duritz in the 1989 film Signs of Life. This rhyme is used at the end of their song "A Murder of One": One crow for sorrow, Two crows for joy, Three crows for a girl, Founr crows for a boy, Five crows for silver, Six crows for gold, Seven crows for a secret never to be told.
