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Band Names with a Literary Origin


Farin

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Early 80s synthpoppers from Sheffield, Yorkshire (UK), Heaven 17, whose classic "We Don't Need This Fascist Groove Thing" still gets an occasional airing at Fitter Mansions, took their name from a fictional pop group mentioned in Anthony Burgess's novel, "A Clockwork Orange",.

It's from the movie. There's a record at the shoppe that says "Heaven 17." If I started a band, I'd definitely consider naming it "Durango 95" (the name of the car they steal in the book and movie) :beatnik:

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Early 80s synthpoppers from Sheffield, Yorkshire (UK), Heaven 17, whose classic "We Don't Need This Fascist Groove Thing" still gets an occasional airing at Fitter Mansions, took their name from a fictional pop group mentioned in Anthony Burgess's novel, "A Clockwork Orange",.

from the same novel: Moloko, in the Nadsat slang in the book, is the word for 'milk' (from the Russian word for milk, молоко)

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Mott the Hoople: named after a Willard Manus novel of that name.

Joy Division: refers to groups of women imprisoned in a concentration camp and forced to prostitute themselves to Nazi soldiers in Yehiel De-Nur's 1955 novel The House of Dolls.

Art of Noise: taken from the 1913 essay "The Art of Noises" by Italian futurist Luigi Russolo.

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More on the Velvet Underground. This will appear in the "Femme Fatale" Songfacts soon:

The band's name itself came from journalist Michael Leigh's 1963 paperback The Velvet Underground, an exposé of the sexual revolution going on in the USA at the time. The book included hyperbole-laden examinations of S&m, polyamory, homosexuality, and other practices then seen as "deviant." Tony Conrad, a filmmaker friend of the band, accidentally dropped the book for Lou Reed to find, who pounced on it and adopted the title; he liked it less for the S&m aspect and more for the word "underground" which would associate them with the underground film and music scene. Lou Reed himself in a 1969 interview with Open City would later call the book "the funniest dirty book I've ever read."

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