Foreign Language Band Names and Slang

Every time you swipe your credit card, you're buying two things: whatever is in your cart, and a little something extra for the cash flush Wall Street executives. Every swipe comes with hidden fees paid by you to the tune of $1, 800 every year. Groceries, prescriptions, or even a cup of coffee. You pay more, and the rich guys get richer . Angry? Well, Congress has a chance to end the madness. The Credit Card Competition Act would break up the Visa and MasterCard Monopoly, lower hidden fees, and drive down costs, lower prices at the register, fewer sneaky fees. M powerore back in the hands of everyday people, not billion-dollar corporations. Join the fight. Call your member of Congress and tell them to put people ahead of profits. Support the Credit Card Competition Act. Paid for by the Merchants Payments Coalition, not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee. Morning people wake up for peace and quiet. McDonald's Breakfast people, we wake up for the sweet rush of getting that warm, delicious breakfast right before it ends. Hot cakes, sausage patty, hash browns, scrambled eggs, biscuit, real butter and syrup. You know how our big breakfast got its name McDonald's. Limited time only. Present participation may vary, cannot be combined with any other offer or combo meal. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba How did the Beatles choose their name? What's the juke in Jukebox? And how are you supposed to spell rock and roll? We'll jam with genres and bang on about band names as we riff about the etymology of rock, metal, blues music and more on this episode of Words Unravel ed . Welcome to another Words Unraveled. I'm Rob Watts from the YouTube channel Rob Words. And I'm Jess Seferis, author of Etymology Books, including Useless Etymology. And today we are rocking and rolling into music history. But don't worry, we won't get the blues. We'll dig into band nam es, we'll talk about genres. It'll be a good time. We're jamming. Yeah, we're gonna translate some foreign band names as well. I thought that might be a little bit too. We'll explore some of the genres that became rock and roll and where they got their names as well. But where do we start on this this highway to hell, this this stairway to heaven, perhaps? Well done. I suppose we should start with rock and roll and what it means. As you might imagine , rocking and rolling, the notion of that began far before it was a music genre. The earliest records we ever are like seas rocking and rolling, or ships rocking and rolling on the seas, which is not surprising. Um, but in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, African American communities began using rocking and rolling individually in gospel and blues and general slang. We have this early example from the 1930s that was documented by a folklorist from before the turn of the century. He he had this retired Welsh seaman who was named William Fender, who sang a traditional folk song, The Baffled Knight, and he had learned this during his years at sea, and he uses rock and roll as a sexual euphemism while describing an encounter. And and then it was that term also appears throughout kind of turn of the century slang. Yeah, there's something defin I mean in rocking rocking and rolling is definitely a a sexy sounding movement. I mean a lot of this is is uh definitely in that vein. You find when you look into the names of genres that a few of them have been descriptions of uh the beast of two backs, as well as uh you know, a less filthy movement. I've backed myself into a sexy corner now. One of the things that's kind of fun to talk about with this one as as word people is how to spell it. Because I think if you had the average person write down rock and roll, how do you like how do you think they would format it? You know, I I think it's everywhere. It's all over the place. Your options are to just write rock and roll. Mm-hmm. That's not how you say it. You write rock and roll, right, with an N, but you also might want to put an apostrophe either side of the N to show that you've removed those letters. But that has kind of a pleasant symmetry to it. So I think The OED agrees with you. It's it's rock space apostrophe and apostrophe roll as the main headword, but like it also there are variations with the empersand . There's there's the version with no spaces but the equal number of apostrophes. And then there's also just the like apostrophe N with no apostrophe afterward, which you see I I find that when somebody is saying like n as a as a word for and in most other contexts, it only has one apostrophe. An early use of rock and roll is obviously in song lyrics it c it it turns up and there's a song that was recorded by Ella Fitzgerald. It was written in nineteen thirty eight by these twins called Kay and Sue Werner. Uh this is what the OED has as is its first written citation of the usage of rock and roll. The lyrics are Now it's true that once upon a time the opera was the thing, but today the rage is rhythm and rhyme, so won't you satisfy my soul with the rock and roll. Uh huh. In the lyrics, it's written uh despite opera being spelt O P apostrophe , uh a the rock and roll is written out in full. That's great. That's awesome. Yeah. But that's obviously before rock and roll as a as we know it comes into being. Because that's a thing that happens in the fifties, and this is nineteen thirty-eight. So what's Ella Fitzgerald singing about? Well, I was singing about sort of jaunty rhythmic music in that case, but could also be talking about the dance of rock and roll, which bizarrely predates the music genre as we know it. I don't know, that makes sense to me. Yeah, well it's done till swing music, isn't it really? It's not done to rock and roll. And it does make more sense. Rock and roll sounds like a movement more than a more than a singing. As you were saying, it's like Elvis' era that is the the big breakout for rock and roll as a genre. And it's also really the breakout of the rock and roll as a genre is the music being accepted by white people, right? Yes. That's a key thing. A guy called Alan Freed, a DJ, is is often credited with being the one that helped him make that crossover, because obviously it was touring groups, putting on big events of black artists, but also some white artists, and he was describing the music they were playing as rock and roll. I think today we would describe it as a lot of it as a rhythm and blues, but but he was calling it rock and roll, and this caught on with white audiences, and that's when rock and roll really takes off in the in the fifties. Yeah, it's like it's gospel influenced vocals, dance rhythms, blues based song structures. Got like Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Sister Rosetta Shar or Tharp and all of the the legends before that. Yeah, and uh Elvis Pres ley, of course, highly influenced by gospel music. We should mention, I don't know if we how much more we have to talk about about rock and roll, but we should mention rhythm and blues. Yeah. Blues in general, yeah. Yeah, well I cause rhythm and blues is i invented I you could say it's invented as a euphemism because i it's supposedly invented by Billboard magazine, who wants to stop referring to a certain genre as race Yeah. Uh so they start calling it rhythm and blues, but it is music of black origins still. There was a whole music industry term, race records, that was marketed specifically to black and African American audiences between the like 1920s and the 40s. The corresponding term for white targeted music, which tended to be more bluegrass in style, was called hillbilly records or hillbilly music. That was the other industry term that they were targeting in the South. And that that turned into more more country music. Aaron Ross Powell Rhythm and Blues speaks to the the origins of the style of music that becomes rock and roll. But we should talk about why we called it the blues, right? Yeah, tell us why we called it the blues, the blue, the blue devils. Yes. That dates back to the 1600s. It was this word for this term for harmful spirits and hallucinations and mental anguish. And then in the 1800s, it was called the blues originally. Though though as early as like 1741, we have playwrights recording that they they suffered from the blues and things like that as well. Um, but even like Thomas Jefferson and Lord Byron used blue devils for sadness or despair, and then I think the blues in some context as well. But the first printed musical use of blues, which had already existed in African American writing for a really long time, is in a diary entry by a free black teacher from Pennsylvania named Charlotte Fortin Grim ke. And she writes in her diary that during the Civil War, she came home with the blues after working with enslaved people in South Carolina, which is really cool. Um, in the same writing she describes the spirituals sung by enslaved people and freedmen and said that the songs can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit. The genre starts being called the blues, really after song titles that have the word blues in them. And they're usually like the something blues, like Memphis blues or Dallas blues, very early blues records, with the word blues in them, and then that sort of becomes the name for the style of music as well. Because they're generally singing about having the blues. Yeah, collectively it had been a little more i idiomatic in phrases like singing the blues or wailing the blues , and then it became the genre. We should mention juke joints because they were a big place where blues and rock and roll kind of became things that anybody could listen to. A juke joint was an African-American term originally for an informal establishment where you could go for music and dancing and gambling. And it's where a lot of this music spread through black workers and sharecroppers during the Jim Crow era and whatnot. Is that where we get juke box from? Yes, yes indeed. Uh so I didn't know this. I did not know this. It's originally from uh probably a gullah term meaning rowdy or disorderly, which looks or sounds a lot like juke, which is cool. I've got lots more genres, but I feel like we might overdo the genres too early. Maybe we should get we've promised some band name origins. Let's do a few of those and we'll come back to some more more genres because I expect we'll we'll encounter some more genres as we talk about these band name origins. You know one that I uh I that th I was embarrassed to only realize far too late in life is that the Beatles and I don't know who else needs to hear this, the Beatles is a pun, right? Yeah. And and I think it's I don't know, I think I found for the good first good tw twenty five years of my life I just didn't even spot it. But it is a cross between the word Beatles B E E T L E S and obviously beat B E A T L E S. So I don't know if anyone else needs to hear that and have that pointed out to them. But it is a pub. That's probably because there were a lot of other like band names with animals at the time, right? Well, yeah, so John Lennon specifically pointed to the crickets, Buddy Holly's band, the crickets, etc Very nice. Very nice. Please don't stop. to how they came to be to be known as that. They had various names beforehand that that people would know. But the name The Beatles was one that John Lennon came up with with a guy called Stuart Sutcliffe, who was in the band at the time but wasn't afterwards. He was he he played the bass for them. But um as we know, we know Paul McCartney is the bassist. He was Paul McCartney was also in the band at the time. But anyway, uh they came up with it in a sort of late night session. They thought this was great. The band were really into it. But they were advised by uh a guy called Casey Jones, who was in a band called Cass and the Casanovas, which was at the time a more successful band than The Beatles. They were just starting out. And he's like, no, you this this name the Beatles, it doesn't have enough syllables to it. And so he told them to call themselves Long John and the Silver Beatles because occasionally John Leonard had been going by the name Long John . Um so they did this. They called themselves Long John and the Silver Beatles. Then they reduced it to just the Silver Beatles, but John Lennon was still going calling himself as a stage name Long John Silver and um what was Paul calling us? Paul was calling himself Paul Ramon. They dropped these names anyway, and eventually they got the confidence to drop the silver bit and to re-spell the word Beatles to have that A in it again. And by the time they reached Hamburg, they were just the Beatles and the rest is the rest is history. But yeah, it's a pun. I think it's m is it the most high profile pun in the world, potentially. You mentioned Casey Jones. Is that Casey Jones actually named Casey Jones or was that name drawn from the the ballad of Casey Jones? His real name was Brian Cassar. It wasn't. And then he borrowed it. It is so interesting how rock and roll across the Atlantic has been borrowed and reborrowed and names inspired one another. And you hear it you hear it in accents as well, like uh British rock and rollers put on American accents. And some American rock and rollers are obviously putting on a sort of British accent. Yeah. I mean it helps things rhyme too to be able to either use or drop a hard R at the end of a word and things like that. This is true. And Elton John always said that he wouldn't be able to hit the notes he could hit if he wasn't putting on that American accent. So it's a it's a means of getting you there. What's funny to me is he still sounds so British in many many of his songs. Yeah, okay. I mean yeah he's very clearly putting on an accent to me but uh big fan of his. I could have won. I've got a I've an Elton John t-shirt. Oh by the way, we're both starting up in our sort of rock and roll. Mine's actually a punk punk band called Cock Sparrow. I'm not very punk, but I do actually quite enjoy punk gig. They're very loving places to be. A lot of uh good feeling in the air at punk gig. It's so punk to be accepting and I love that. Um but this is the this is a t-shirt dedicated to the legendary Kingston Mines in Chicago, which is a blues club. Very cool. More bands. We've done the Beatles there. Well, they were they were also known as the Quarrymen, I think, at one point, and they were known as Johnny and the Moondogs. That was it. That was one of their early names. Johnny and the Moondog . Uh, which is yeah. The Beatles is is the Beatles better? I don't know. I think if they came to me pitching the name the Beatles, I go, that is incredibly tacky. You can't call yourself the maybe through today's lens. Yeah, exactly. Not a ton. Come on. Classier than that, John. There were many animal names that were uh popular at the time as we've already addressed, but like even the kinks were originally the ravens, so we've got that too. Do you know why they were called the Kinks? One suggestion is that they needed a gimmick, so they adopted the name Kinks in order to address, like in order to to allude kinkiness. Um, another one is just that it was just a good way of getting publicity. It was meant to be a little subversive and horrifying. Uh, and and some of them originally didn't like the idea and then they then they went for it. I actually didn't go straight to the sexual with that name, which is more fool me. But presumably also like the the radio execs that were allowing their music on air also didn't go straight to the sexual with the name. Otherwise they wouldn't have played them. I mean, they they did famously have their song that mentioned Coca-Cola banned from the BBC until they changed it to C Cherry Cola. Right, which is which is very funny funny because that's not the most subversive thing about that song. No, very much. That song is a fantastic song. Song's great. But yeah, there there are plenty of band names that have been intentionally subversive. The band name Butthole Surfers That's not a bat. That's a bat. But yeah. You haven't heard the you haven't heard the butthole . That's good music. They've been around since the name since like the 80s, they originally had a bunch of different band names. They used a bunch of different names at every single gig they played, and then the announcer forgot what they were called because of this and used the song title Butthole Surfer, which was one of their songs, as the name of the band, and then it stuck, but it was a little bit spicy. Like a number of TV stations and radio stations refused to print or mention their name for a while I sort of get it. I mean I I know I'm a little bit s square by saying it, but I maybe people don't want to be saying butth ole ever again. There's way worse than that though. Like Seely Dan is significantly worse than that. I know, like, not on its surface, but uh but the origin of that one is very spicy. Steely Dan is named after a dildo in the 1959 novel Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, because they were big fans of beat generation literature. It is pure shock value, satirical surrealism, super adult themes, very subversive. It was the it was part of a landmark uh obscenity case in the US where, it was not allowed to be printed for a while, and then ultimately it that decision was overturned, and it was. Anyway, but in a lot of writings about the band, it's said that the dildo, whose full name is Steeley Jan the Third from Yokohama, is a steam powered or hydraulic dildo, but I looked up the passage in the book and it doesn't mention steam power. It just says it's a strap-on made of rubber, though it does spurt milk. Okay . Wow, that's a neat little function. Okay, that well actually that does bring me to I arguably I think um an even more subversive name, if true. The band ten C C supposedly ten C C are named for the average amount that a man ejaculates in a uh at climax. Yeah. Or the amount of the average amount of the of of milk squirted by a hydraulic dildo. Yeah, you know. Hydraulic remote. How have we ended up here? This is supposed to be nice about music. How have we ended up here? Don't worry, I feel like we've probably peaked in terms of in terms of we can talk about subversion. There are bands that are subversive, at least in how they choose to spell their names. Yeah. Quite a few of these, aren't there? Lead Zephilin, obviously perhaps the most obvious example of this, because that is not how you spell lead. And it is just meant to be a a lead Zeppelin, right? Like, yeah. Yeah, but it a ste a session that Jimmy Page? I'm trying to remember who it was. I think yeah, I think it was Jimmy Page, was having with among others, Keith Moon from the The Who, drummer from The Who, they talked about putting together a s a supergroup. And one of them said, we don't know which one, usually Keith Moon is quoted, but but I don't think we actually know which one of them? So that the idea would go down like a lead balloon. Paige liked this idea, ran with it, but turned it into a Zeppelin instead instead. And then for some reason thought that well, no and quite reasonably I suppose thought people would think it was lead Zeppelin , so changed the spelling. What I understand is a lot of the sources say that they changed it 'cause they didn't want American audiences to read it as a lead, but I don't understand why Americans would be more likely to read it as lead than anyone else. Do you use the phrase go down like a lead balloon in the States? I mean it's definitely not unknown. But there's a spin-off of that spelling lead zeppelin, because we get deaf leopard. So they come up with their name Def Leopard as in D-E-A-F-L-E-O-P-A-R-D in uh school art lesson in Sheffield in England? And they think, oh, let's let's change the spelling. They just decide because they're playing around with it, they change it to D E F and then they change the O in Leopards to a another P and it's Leopard. And then they don't notice the oh hold on, this is kind of this is kind of reflecting what Led Zephylin did, 'cause you even got the double P now in the in the the leopard. And they went, Yeah, I think we're okay with that. In fact, uh they said we'd rather look like them than the flying lizards. According to that's what uh Joe Elliott said later. Basically, they they thought it was cooler to have a misspelt name than to have a name that just described an odd animal. And another deliberately lit misspelt one would be Leonard Skinnard or Leonard Skinn ard. I think you are actually supposed to pronounce it Leonard Skinnard. Are you? Right. Even though it's spelled spell even though it's spelt Leonard Skinnard. I think they're on record as saying you should still pronounce it Leonard Skinnard. It's named after Leonard Skinner, who was a gym teacher at their school. Hey, I'll tell you what, I've got a thing. Uh huh. I've got it in in here. Ooh, chumbo. I've got a a musical instrument. It's a ukulele, don't worry, I'm not gonna play it. It's not it's not tuned. But I bought this twenty years ago. It's a banjo ukulele. It's banjo ukulele or a banjo lele. Uh I bought it off uh on eBay back in the day, twenty years ago. Uh from an account called Survivor Guitars. Ooh. And Survivor was spelt S Y R V Y V R. That hurts a little. Why R there? I didn't survive the spell. No, but but it so it the this is guitar shop set up by one of the former roadies of Leonard Skinnard who was in the air crash that killed members of the band. He survived it. So he set up survivor guitars and he spelt it using Y's instead of the instead of the vowels. But uh yeah interesting uh story with the the leathered skinnet. It's named after a person, but they just wanted to spell it a fun way. That's very metal, actually. This is our opportunity, isn't it, to talk about another deliberate misspelling that a lot of metal bands and heavy metal bands have engaged in down the years, which is the the metal umlaut. Oh yeah. Spitting two dots over over letters in their names that aren't actually spelt out. Like Motley Crew and blue oyster cult and things like that. Blue oyster cult, Martley Crew, yeah, who who were surprised that when they heard German fans calling them Murtley Crew when they were chatting. Motorhead is another one that has them. A band that I used to really like called Maximo Park. They for some reason just had an umlaut over the eye for for no reason. And one that I hadn't noticed until researching this is that spinal tap have an umlaut over the N , which is not a letter that you could put an umlaut over fantastic And there was also there was this American industrial rock band called Grot us that had an umlaut over every consonant in their name, so over the the G, R antastic T uh and the S. Yeah, but this is this is just a thing. Makes your ba your band name look a bit sort of Germanic and a bit dark. I guess that's where it originally comes from, but it also is just like a a sign that you're part of the fraternity sticking these two dots above letters that that don't need them. Morning people wake up for peace and quiet. McDonald's breakfast people, we wake up for the sweet rush of getting that warm, delicious breakfast right before it ends. Hot cakes, sausage patty, hash browns, scrambled eggs, biscuit, real butter and syrup. You know how our big breakfast got its name, and you know where your whole family can share one for just six dollars. McDonald's. Limited time only, price and participation may vary, cannot be combined with any either offer or combo meal. Oregavatta zona? Is that a word? In the 2026 Kia Sportage Turbo Hybrid, it might as well be, because it can be one road trip. It's all about turbocharged power and hybrid efficiency working together so you get the thrill of quick acceleration and the satisfaction of fuel efficiency. Book a test drive and keep the adventure going. Kia . Movement that inspires. Call 800-3334-KIA for details. Always drive safely. You mentioned metal bands. I have a bunch of literary band names because I am more a literary nerd than a than a music nerd, but um so this is what I brought to the equation. Uriah Heap was originally called Spice and they changed their name to the sycophantic David Copperfield antagonist Uriah Heap, apparently, because it was the 100th anniversary of Dickens' death, and his name was everywhere around Christmas that year. They were really selling the Christmas Carol very hard. Um, but their debut album is called Very Evie and Very Umble, which is a reference to one of Uriah Heap's lines, which you know he's a scheming little nasty fellow. I like that. Modest Mouse is from a passage from a Virginia Wolf story called The Mark on the Wall, and 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 colored people who genuinely believe that they dislike to hear their own praises. Another fun one is They Might Be Giants, which was originally called El Grupo de Rock and Roll. I like that. I like that more. But they got they might be giants from the name of a film and the play it's based on, in which George C. Scott plays Justin Playfair, who's an aptly named and well-respected eminent judge who retreats into fantasy after his wife's death and he imagines himself to be Sherlock Holmes. And the title of the film is about Don Quixote. So we've got like several levels of literary inspiration here. But Judge Playfair says, well, he Don Quixote had a point. Of course, he carried it a bit too far. He thought that every windmill was a giant. That's insane. But thinking that they might be, well, all the best minds used to think the world was flat, but what if it isn't? It might be round and bread and mold might be medicine. If we never looked at things and thought of what they might be, why we'd all still be out there in the tall grass with the apes. That is very good. Can I can I chip in with a really big one of these? Um and that's The Doors, the band The Doors. Ooh. Yeah, named after Aldous Huxley essay called The Doors of Perception, which is in a about uh I know it's really being on um or after he was tripping. Yeah, yeah, it was mescaline he was on. Yes, it's psychotropic monograph I I saw it referred to as but that in turn is is from a quotation from um William Blake, who said, If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is infinite. For man has closed himself up, he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. Which it sounds very deep, uh and and so do the doors. So there you go. The word psychedelic was originally suggested by a psychiatrist in a letter to Aldous Huxley too. And it was it was about their experiments with with Bescaline. Fantastic. Any more literary ones? Uh The Velvet Underground, which is well it',s not literature exactly, but it's after a nineteen sixty three nonfiction book about non standard, non heterosexual sex. It's basically a report or like an expose on swinging swinging and orgies and BDSM and things and you get the idea from the text that the author thinks he's being objective, but he obviously deeply morally disagrees with the behavior. So it's kind of cool that it's been reappropriated by, or rather it's been appropriated by queer culture and and um other things. You get a lot of references to the Velvet Underground. I got it into my head that there was a shop called the Velvet Underground. I think it might have been a shop that Stevie Nicks would frequent. And that's why there are one or two Fleetwood Mac lines that mention the Velvet Underground. Maybe there's only the one. I would be willing to bet that there are a lot of queer shops that are called the Velvet Underground as a matter of fact. And so that doesn't surprise me at all. Speaking of queer culture and stuff too, this isn't exactly this is not literary at all, but the village people is kind of fun as far as origins go. They're named after Greenwich Village in New York City, which is usually it's basically the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ rights movement because it's the location of the Stonewall uprising. Ultimately, it turned Greenwich Village into this safe haven for queer people. The village people originally were meant to be this sort of like they they were meant to target the gay disco market. And they were so they modeled the band members around American macho and gay fantasy archetypes like the GI and the Native American and the the construction worker and the leather biker man and the cowboy. Um and they my favorite is the I found this little ad in a a theater trade paper that said it was looking for members for the band and it said macho types wanted must dance and have a musta che. Yeah, that's it, isn't it? They're dancing matotypes with mustaches. Did everyone always get the the sort of campness of the US Navy considered using their song in the Navy as it's like one of its songs. One of the founding members came out like a couple years ago and was like, the YMCAA is not a gay anthem . And I was like, it isn't? Like a lot of people were were confused by that claim. At least one of them said he's not gay as well. Yeah. The person I was just referencing is not. He's completely heterosexual. But but that was kind of the whole purpose of the band was to target gay listeners. If we're talking about bands named after other things, we could talk about Black Sabbath. Black Sabbath is actually named after a film Boris Karloff horror film that was showing you know at the the cinema across the street when they were trying to come up with with a name. Uh before that they had some really sort of lame names like the Polka Tulk Blues band and birth two names that they they went by. I mean I I guess they they probably didn't seem lame when this was the music that was coming out of them, but they sound lame in comparison with Black Sabbath, given you know their role in generating this heavy metal gen re. Supposedly one of the members said , Isn't it amazing how people will spend all this money to go and see a horror movie? And then they thought, oh, maybe would people spend a load of money to come and see us if we were called Black Sabbath . And so they will they change their name. I always thought the the name of the band sticks went really hard. Kind of harder than the music does. Yeah, it's a good name. It's a good um classical reference. Nirvana as well, a word from Sanskrit. There we go. That's a nice words unraveledy one. Yes. It means uh means to blow away or to sort of to to wipe out in Sanskrit. I'll read what the OED says as the definition of it, because it'll be better than my attempt at explaining Buddhism. The realization of the non existence of self leading to cessation of all entanglement and attachment in life, the state of being released from the effects of karma and the psycholog So achieving nirvana is having blown away basically all the complications of of life. Sounds wonderful. Yeah. Grunge. There's a a genre named by people who didn't like it. Yeah. Uh like punk as well. Punk is just a word meaning horrible, uh not up to scratch. Inferior. Gets applied to the music, but adopted by the people who make the music because they're kind of into that idea that that that they're making something a bit raw. Ditto with grunge. This is sort of literary. Coldplay had a couple of names before it was Coldplay. They called themselves the big fat noises , which I don't think lands quite as well. And then they went for Starfish, which also doesn't land quite as well. Oh god. They also created a joke band name for themselves. I don't understand why. Someone else may be able to explain That's a phenomenon we must have talked about before, the the the sort of marketing phenomenon of replacing S's with Z's and Cs with Ks'. But ultimately cold play came from a a poetry collection in from nineteen ninety-seven call uh by Philip Horky, which is called Child's Reflections Cold Play, and it's in this surreal and ambiguous style that explores psychological themes and has a very fluid tone, which that makes a lot more sense with what they create. Speaking of bands that originally had worse names, Creed was originally known as Naked Todd ler. Oh dear God. This isn't that bad, but Daft Punk was heavily influenced by the Beach Boys. They originally recorded names under the name Darlin, which was a Beach Boys single from 196 7. Uh, but they got a uh they got a negative review in the Melody Maker, the publication from the UK, that described their efforts as a daft punky thrash. So they got that there. So they're a French band and I was looking up names of foreign bands and that's just reminded me of there's a German band called Fetters Broth, which people may or may not have heard of. You've got to be pretty deep into your German hip hop to know who they are. But their name means fat bread. But it comes from a fan describing their music as fetters brought. Fat meant actually, as it kind of does in English now, it meant something great. Brought was a uh slang for hash. So describing them as as fet as brought meant really good hash. It was like a it was praise. And then they went, We like that. We're gonna call ourselves fetters brought. I do have a big list of foreign band names. Let's do it. Do we do it now? Or do it now? I w I mean probably the most famous German band is Kraftwerk, uh which simply means power station. If you perhaps already know that, but it makes a lot of sense. They're very into industry and that is why they they chose the name Kraftwak. There's a band called Die Erster as well . That some people might have heard of. Uh the Torton Hors en is a another band that's very popular over here, which means uh the dead trousers. Excellent. I love it . Uh it's from an idiom. Torta horse means to have nothing going on. To have dead trousers means you've just got That's fair. You're either bored , you're you're time wasting, you you have nothing on. You've got dead trousers. Your trousers are dead. I said Kraftjag were perhaps the most famous, but I guess Rammstein might actually be the most famous German band, certainly German band name, but their name is really awful because it is taken from the name of a an air disaster. So Rams Ramstein is a US airbase in Germany. Yeah, I was gonna say that sounds loose familiar And it's it's quite possible there's been activity there recently as as the US has been pulling its people out of Germany. There was a ri really horrible crash to an air show there, the Rammstein air show, and two uh acrobatic planes hit crashed into one another and one of them fell into the crowd and killed nearly uh around around seventy people. And the band named themselves after this. Well, firstly they wrote a song about it, and then they named themselves after their own song. But Ramstein the Place has got one less M in it. The extra M is basically, because they misspelt Rammstein on their equipment. So we now have Ramstein with two M's. But really dark story to the band name. A few more foreign ones I'll just reel off. I guess I don't know if everyone knows that Bjork or Bjork as she tends to get called in in English is Icelandic for birch and sig os as well is another Icelandic name, which means victory rose. It's also the name of the lead singer's younger sister who was born just as they were starting the band up. Her name is Sigor Ross. Well as one word, but the band's name is Sigor Ross, two words. Anyone who likes your revision will have heard of Maniskin or Mon iskin, which is an Italian band that won Eurovision a few years back. But their name is actually Danish and it means Moonlight in Danish, because the bassist is a Dane, or she's half Danish, and she said, let's call ourselves that. She suggested it. They're like, Yeah, we like that. We like that. Uh okay. Looking at some Spanish ones. And I don't know that I so I'm not really into my Latino music particularly. So the So the but the ones that I came up with were the singers of um the Macarena, who were called Los del Rio , which you could probably work out what it means, but it means them from the river.. That's cool And uh Los Lobos, I did not know what that meant. The ones that did La Bamba. La Bamba. That would that be wolf? Yes the wolves. Yeah. The wolves. Hmm. BTS. Do you actually know what BTS, the Korean band, means? We're not I know we're not into rock and roll here. My co-author is a huge K-pop fan, and she has told me, but I forgot. So I was watching an interview with them and they said in English that their name stands for beyond the scene, which is rubbish. Um actually no, I can't say that, because they'll find us. The the BTS people will find us and they will shut us down. Okay, so no, I r I think it's a really clever initialism for beyond the scene. But what it actually stands for in Korean is bang tan son yondan , which means bulletproof boy scouts. Oh, that's cool. That's that's super cool. That's pretty good. Yeah, and that's like perfect for a boy band. That's way better than beyond the scene. Yeah. Yeah, just g just leave leave leave it at that. It's fine. That's awesome. I I think They're very well packaged for the w for for Western audiences. So I can see why they've done that. I'm actually really enjoying the rise of K-pop. I feel like I'm seeing things in the music scene that I I I don't know. They are more exciting than I've seen in a while. I don't know. I think it's just feels like a replay of like 90s pop culture and go back to the book but it's like way better. Is it way better? I don't know. It seems like it's even more factory than than literally the hit factories. I have never been okay, that's not true. I was about to say I've never been a big boy band person, but like the second album I ever bought was the Backstreet Boys Millennium album. But not since then. My first one was Abbey Road, so I defend myself with that. Another boy band. Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah. So maybe maybe I do have something there. Um but no, I I actually don't I don't know very much about K pop at all, but I do love learning about it from my friends who are very into it. It's a fascinating ph social phenomenon and something that we're going to have to get very, very used to. I think I was saying this about while while we were hanging out together in England. I think I I said too, I also don't know very much about Taylor Swift, but I have a lot of Swifty friends and some of my grad students were also Swifties. I didn't realize that I had started picking up on some idioms that were from her songs and I didn't realize they were Yeah. I think you I remember you telling me about this. You'd said uh I'm the problem, it's me, right? Without realizing Oops. Because it had become a meme and that's where I got it and I didn't which I should have. I had heard that song and I just it didn't it didn't stick. You're you're so good at tracing things back, but that one that slipped that slipped under the radar. Can I mention just one more foreign act? Because it just introduces a phenomenon that I think is really fascinating. So there's a a French uh no, he sings in French, he's Belgian, and he goes by the name Stromae, big fan of Stromae. But what I did not know was that his name