20 bands who took their names from classic books and literature

20 April 2025, 16:00

Need some inspiration for your band's name? Why not crack open the Kindle, head to the library or go browsing in your local bookstore... everyone from The Doors to The Stone Roses have picked their name from famous literature.

1. The Boo Radleys

   The Liverpool band, best known for their 1995 hit Wake Up Boo, were named after a character in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, first publiched in 1960. The story concerns lawyer Atticus Finch, who is called upon to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, on a charge of rape. Arthur "Boo" Radley is a local recluse who proves pivotal in the story.

   

   The Boo Radleys - Wake Up Boo!

2. The Stone Roses

   Ian Brown claimed that his artistic band mate had come up with the name for the iconic Manchester group in 1983, while searching for two words that clashed against each other. However, The Stone Roses is also the namd of a 1959 Cold War era spy novel by British writer Sarah Gainham. Her best-known book was the novel Night Falls On The City, about wartime Vienna.

   

   The Stone Roses - She Bangs the Drums (Official Video)

3. The Doors

   Jim Morrison's mystical rockers were named after Aldous Huxley's 1954 autobiographical account of taking the powerful psychedelic drug mescaline. The book was called The Doors Of Perception, which itself is a quote from the poet William Blake, who was, of course, also responsible for the line "Try to set the night on fireeeeee - YEAH".

   

   The Doors - Light My Fire

4. Veruca Salt

   The Chicago indie rockers from the 90s are named after the obnoxious child in Roald Dahl's Charlie & The Chocolate Factory - the one who ends up falling down a rubbish chute. Musicians Louise Post and Nina Gordon were slightly appalled to find out what a "verruca" actually was.

   

   Veruca Salt - Seether

5. The Velvet Underground

   The innovative New York art collective featuring Lou Reed and John Cale took its name from a mucky 1963 paperback about unusual sexual practices, written by Michael Leigh and with an introduction by "Louis Berg, MD". In the UK, the book was known as "Bizarre Sex Underground", which is an even better name for an arty garage rock group. The band's song Venus In Furs was titled after a novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, after whom the term "masochism" is named.

   

   velvet underground - venus in furs

6. Modest Mouse

   Isaac Brock's team of art rockers took their name from a line in a short story by Virginia Woolf called The Mark On The Wall. First published in 1917, the passage reads: "I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises."

   

   Modest Mouse - Float On (Official Music Video)

7. The Fall

   Mark E. Smith named his post-punk band after Albert Camus' 1956 existential novel, the last work of fiction by the French philosopher. The Cure were also big fans of Camus, referring to his works The Outsider and A Happy Death in their songs.

   

   The Fall - Hit The North

8. Heaven 17

   The Human League had taken their name from a role-playing sci-fi board game, so when Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh left to form their own group, they chose a similarly futuristic moniker. When Alex, the anti-hero of Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, heads to a record shop on the lookout for trouble, he meets a pair of girls browsing the vinyl. "Who you getten, bratty?" one asks the other in Burgess' futuristic slang, "The Heaven Seventeen? Luke Sterne? Goggly Gogol?" The image of a pop band with 17 members is an appealing one - and the reference was ported over to Stanley Kubrick's controversial 1971 movie adaptation, a work that had a huge influence on music and fashion across the decades. See also: Suffragette City, Moloko, Campag Velocet, Blur's video for The Universal, etc etc.

   

   Heaven 17 - Temptation

9. Joy Division

   The iconic Mancunian band had something of a disturbing story behind their name, in keeping with the shock antics of the punk era. The "joy divisions" were the wings of Nazi concentration camps where prisoners were forced into sexual slavery. The term came from a novella by the Holocaust survivor Yehiel De-Nur called House Of Dolls, published in 1953 under the name "Ka-tzetnik 135633". While the name was clearly intended to cause outrage, the band came under attack from all sides for the use of such imagery.

   

   Joy Division - Transmission [OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO]

10. Primal Scream

    In early 1980s Glasgow, Bobby Gillespie and Jim Beattie named their experimental rock band after primal therapy advocated by Arthur Janov. The therapist claimed repressed childhood trauma could be purged as an adult by experssing the pain vocally and he named his book on the subject The Primal Scream. Janov's most famous clients were John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with the Beatle's first solo work giving full vent to the idea, resulting in the album gaining the nickname "The Primal Scream Album".

    

    Primal Scream - Movin' on Up (Official Video)

11. My Chemical Romance

    Mikey Way of the New Jersey emo pioneers conjured up the name of his band after seeing the 1996 Irvine Welsh collection Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance.

    

    My Chemical Romance - I'm Not Okay (I Promise) [Dialogue/MTV Version]

12. The Libertines

    According to legend, Pete Doherty and Carl Barat's band name was inspired by a controversial erotic work by the Marquis de Sade called The Lust of the Libertines, which was first published as part of his novel The 120 Days of Sodom, written in 1785.

    

    The Libertines - Don't Look Back Into The Sun (Official Video)

13. Supertramp

    The British prog outfit - who made it big with the 1979 album Breakfast In America - were named after the 1908 novel The Autobiography Of A Super-Tramp by W H Davies. It details the author's experience as a homeless person at the end of the 19th century.

    

    Supertramp - Breakfast In America (Official Video)

14. Steely Dan

    William Burroughs'non-linear 1969 masterpiece The Naked Lunch has been a favourite of musicians and lyricists over the past sixty-plus years. "Steely Dan III from Yokohama" is the name of a dildo that appears in a pornographic "stag film" in one of the book's scenes.

    

    STEELY DAN - Reeling in the Years (live)

15. Uriah Heep

    When the London R&B band Spice were signed up to new management at the end of 1969, they expanded their sound and changed their name to Uriah Heep, a devious character from Charles Dickens' 1850 novel David Copperfield. When the band's debut album, ...Very 'Eavy ...Very 'Umble arrived in June 1970, it neatly coincided with the 100th anniversary of Dickens' death.

    

16. Steppenwolf

    Best known for their rocking classic Born To Be Wild, this American band adopted the title of Herman Hesse's 1927 existential novel Der Steppenwolf for their name.

    

    Steppenwolf - Born To Be Wild (1969)

17. Marillion

    Best known for their hit Kayleigh and having a frontman called Fish, the British neo-proggers adapted the name of J R R Tolkein's posthumous collection of short stories, The Silmarillion. The Silmarils are three jewels of pure light that concern the tales in the book.

    

    Marillion - Kayleigh

18. Idlewild

    The Scottish indie band fronted by Roddy Woomble was named, not after the New York airfield that was later given the moniker John F. Kennedy Airport, but from a quiet meeting place in the 1908 novel Anne Of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

    

    Idlewild - You Held The World In Your Arms (Official Video) HD

19. Pere Ubu

    The Cleveland, Ohio art rock group took their name from the main character in Alfred Jarry's 1896 absurdist play Ubu Roi.

    

20. Mott The Hoople

    The Bowie-sponsored glam rock band fronted by Ian Hunter took their name from a satrirical 1966 paperback novel by Willard Manus. Island Records producer had been reading the book when he came across a rock band called Silence - he suggested they change their name. The character Martha Hoople had been in the long-running newspaper comic strip Our Boarding House.

    

    Mott the Hoople - All The Young Dudes

21. Thin Lizzy

    Are comics classed as literature? Of course they are. In early 1970 Phil Lynott and Eric Bell named their Dublin-based heavy rock act after a character from the long-running kids' comic The Dandy. Tin Lizzie first appeared in the paper in 1953 as an old-fashioned text story, but was given a reboot as a picture strip two years later and the adventures of the robot maid, drawn by Jack Prout, continued until 1959. A decade later, Bell recalled the character when trying to think up a name for the new group, and thought the Irish pronounciaton of the word "thin" would make for a nice pun.

    

    Thin Lizzy - Don't Believe A Word (Official Music Video)

22. Good Charlotte

    Joel and Benji Madden named their pop punk band after Good Charlotte: Girls of the Good Day Orphanage, written by Carol Beach York in 1969.

    

    Good Charlotte - Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous (Official Video)

23. The Art Of Noise

    Producer Trevor Horn and musicians and arrangers Anne Dudley and JJ Jeczalik looked after the music side in this avant garde synth pop outfit who emerged in the mid 1980s. Meanwhile, former NME journalist Paul Morley came up with the concepts and the press releases and named the band after a 1913 Futurist manifesto The Art Of Noises, by one Luigi Russolo. The piece explores the meaning of man-made sounds, which linked nicely with the band's love of sampling "real" noises.

    

    Art of Noise - Close (To The Edit) - Version 2

24. The House Of Love

    Guy Chadwick's indie heroes were one of the key signings to Alan McGee's Creation label in the late 1980s; they were named after the 1954 erotic novel A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin. Creation were later to sign Oasis, and Noel would name his daughter Anaïs. Coincidence? Probably.

    

    House Of Love • Destroy The Heart (Official Video)

25. Twenty One Pilots

    Tyler Joseph named the Columbus, Ohio duo after a plot point in Arthur Miller's 1946 play All My Sons, which he'd read at college. The character Joe Keller is known as being "the guy who made 21 P-40s crash in Australia" - he knowingly sent out defective airplane parts from his factory during the war, which resulted in the deaths of... you guessed it. A film version arrived in 1948 starring Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster.

    

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