Which is exactly what they are not.

They are the lift block in a multi storey car park in the middle of a shopping centre full of garish identikit retail outlets blaring piped muzak.

And a good slap around the ears too.

Are they anything to do with Ben & Jason? I always thought that was the most middle-class, least rock 'n roll moniker ever. Not that there's anything wrong with being middle-class, but Ben & Jason? Hardly conjures up images of teenage rebellion, does it?

"Mum, I'm going out to see Ben & Jason."

"Have a lovely time, dear. Say hello to the Vicar if he's there."

the worst name around is The Ting Tings; it sounds like a euphemism for cystitis and gets more annoying with every repetition.
The worst of it is that I really like the single!

How lame is that? The title of a wonky old novelty record for an act whose sole claim to fame was to be a wonky old nov. . . .

Brilliant!

For the entire winter. Please.

You don't have to be mad to play in this band...but it helps!!!

I went to see the NME Cibs show last friday and "Does It Offend You, Yeah?" where also on. I was prepared to hate them because it's a truly rubbish/annoying name but I quite liked them they where what i thought Nu rave should sound like ie an updated version of EMF!
how about !!! (or chick chick chick apparently )that's just rubbish. Joe lean and jing jang jong where disappointing and have a tedious name.
Current media faves vampire weekend should really be called weekend vampire which is miles better.
Sadly two of my favourite bands have the worst names going, Elbow and Hem.

It's all a bit sixth form..

Panic At The Disco
Bullet For My Valentine
My Chemical Romance
Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly
Bat For Lashes

One word dafties..

Elbow, Lamb, Unkle

Do band members count?

3D
The Edge
Jez (the Howard Jones gimp)

I gather they're in the jangly-guitar-driven indie sort of area these days, but they've been around for years.

John Peel used to admit sheepishly that he quite liked Kick The Pregnant.

POSTSCRIPT: Just done some back-up research and found that Kick The Pregnant was the name of a Death Metal track that Peel liked, not a band. Very unusually, he didn't play it on air for reasons of taste.

To compensate for this mistake, here's a list of Death Metal bands:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_death_metal_bands

To cherry pick a couple, how about these (brace yourself):
Agoraphobic Nosebleed
Goatwhore
Mincing Fury and Guttural Clamour of Queer Decay

All available for childrens' parties...

Use to be called 'On A Friday'. Would they have been as successful had they kept this name? I doubt it.

Name-checked by another music mag as one to watch in 2008. For all I know their music may be awesome; the moniker conjures images of the kind of act whose work might appear as filler on a Ministry of Sound compilation.

I was mortified when Concrete Blonde lead singer - Johnette Napolitano - found new creative voice in a collaboration with Holly Beth Vincent (the inspiration for the Dire Straits song Romeo & Juilet - now you know who to blame) that went by the name of Vowel Movement. I regard this as the worst band name in the history of music.

WTF?

Is there any logic to this? Did they stick pins in a dictionary at random?

Clik Clik
The Wombats
Envy and Other Sins

Is it cos all the good names are taken or is it just lack of imagination, falling standards in english in our schools, young people today, the general decline of western civilisation etc etc?

There's a nice round up of recent bad names at the AV Club.

stuck pins in a dictionary at random apparently. I think it kinda shows. Good tunes though.

Does he? How does he feel about bollocks like Shattered Dreams, then?

...Anal C*** are probably the worst. Scouting For Girls is a really poor one too (and God help me, I never want to hear their twee mumblings like 'You Are Beautiful', or that thing about Elvis not being dead, again!!) Most of the recent NME brigade- Wombats, Joe Lean..., The Ting Tings, Does It Offend You Yeah? (I read Stuart Maconie's great comment on Elbow in Word magazine that he'd have loved them even if they'd have had a name like Does It Offend You Yeah?) are as awful as many here have said.

Toad The Wet Sprocket did indeed originate from that fabulously funny parody of OGWT. It had Eric Idle doing his best Bob Harris impression and doing it brilliantly. If I recall there was a 'performance' by a dead singer songwriter with the camera panning in and out on his slumped body.

I always cringe a bit at some of the bands from the NWOBHM era, like Witchfynde, Angel Witch and Tygers Of Pan Tang.

I always found Piss In A Dead Boy's Mouth a little off-colour

The only band to name themselves after an episode of the Goon Show.
Not sure what Eccles would have to say about it.

are all names that when I was in a band in the 80s/90s if one of us had suggested any of them, we'd have said:

Radiohead - 'nah...boring'
Blur - 'too obvious, bound to have been someone with that name'
Coldplay - 'too much like Coldcut'
Oasis - 'it's a bloody shop!'
The Stone Roses - 'Guns n Roses, Rolling Stones...durrrr!'

As premiered in the "Van Morrison Gob Irons" HORA...or perhaps

THE DRASTIC HAIRCUTS (college days)?

BROKEN PELVIS (from Herefordshire)?

As a musician who is currently frantically trying to come up with a decent band name that hasn't already been used for something, I can say how very difficult a process it is. Some of those mentioned are very silly, I agree. But you can grow into any name, and if it's a decent band, a silly name is easily forgotten. Quite the opposite, it can start to sound cool. Here are some band names that if you were sitting around with your band mates suggesting, you would probably get laughed out of the room:

Creedence Clearwater Revival
Derek & The Dominos
The Band
Booker T & The MGs

I can't be bothered to think of anymore, but you catch my drift. These are some of my favourite bands and their names don't matter anymore.

I wonder what you´d get if you crossed
My Chemical Romance with That Petrol Emotion ?
Stiff Little Fingers with The Sunburnt Hand of Man ?

At my Uni, I was present at the debut of a group who went by the of the MT Bottles. Puntastic !
An Emotional Fish, a what now ....?
Prince....I know it´s his real name, but I had a dog of that name
Coldplay....can´t make head nor tail of it.
Keane......So boring. Why not Murphy, Doyle, Murray
The Meat Puppets...I just find the image quite repulsive...it gives me the heebie-jeebies

I mean, just grow up. Is that really the best they came up with or did they ask the lead singer's 12 year old brother?

Scandinavian groups come up with the best names and English is their 2nd/3rd language. eg The Hives, Concretes et al

Rejected by Giles Smith in favour of 'Pony'. Students of rhyming slang will understand why they didn't get terribly many bookings within the sound of Bow Bells.

I think The Celibate Rifles were probably trying too hard.

The Courteeners is a particularly crap name... scared of being sued by Ford perhaps?

Gay Dad
We Start Fires
Brother Beyond

1. Test Icicles - do you see what they did there....

2. Death Cab for Cutie - oh dear

3. Cut Off Your Hands - how are you supposed to play your instruments?

4. The Earaches - a headline-makers dream for a bad review

5. Forward Russia! - where to?

6. The F***ing Eagles - swear words in a band name is not big and its not clever (see Anal C*nt)

7. I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness - ok then.

8. A Sunny Day in Glasgow - as a Scotsman this is too far out there to be true

9. The Tallest Man on Earth - are they trying to get in the Guiness Book of Records?

10. We All Have Hooks for Hands - see No. 3

11. +/- (see !!!)

Tonight I heard tell of a band called The Get Down, Stay Down, which almost made up for Coldplay.

When I was a lad at Exeter University in the mid 80s I was in a band called No Great Sheikhs - is that great or appalling? The jury's still out on that, but returned a speedy verdict of guilty as charged about another band on our little circuit: Jackson Penis.

I've always thought Dogs Die In Hot Cars is an atrocious band name. What next?

Value of Investments may go up as Well as Down?
If You See A Suspicious Package, Please Alert A Member Of Staff?
May Contain Nuts? (actually, maybe that's not so bad)

On the could-be-wacky-but-somehow-great side, The Entire Population Of China is bloody marvellous.

...who had a minor hit and a funny squiggle for a name?

God Speed You Black Emperor !
or is it
God Speed ! You Black Emperor

Don't get me wrong - good band but daft name

A Flux of Pink Indians
I always thought that Take That was and indeed are ridiculous !!!!
And Boyzone which sounds like an invitaton to a gay disco (oh hold on)

'did you see diedre'

Let's not forget:
hear'say
B*witched
Oh and this ones bobbin's too.

"NO USE FOR A NAME" they're a "punk" band apparently

The band names are the titles and the titles are the bands.

Have you heard Making Plans for Nigel's new record, "XTC"?

It's such painful and disturbing memory that I've tried to suppress it, but to no avail. The Cranberries originally went about their business as The Cranberry Saw Us.

I remember John Peel bemoaning the loss of a record by a Japanese band called Piss. I've no idea whether the above clip is in any way connected.

Ken Dodd's Dad's Dog's Dead

It's fun to say, anyway.

also:

Electric Dog Sex
Ludicrous Lollypops
The Mossbacks
Blab Happy
Basin Of Sick
Jukebox the Ghost
Tittsworth
Support (get it..? Mar 21 LA2 The Beatles, plus support. Cunning, yet stupid)

Who thinks Look! There's a bi-plane! Where? Over there! is a really good name for a band?

I think there's fertile ground for really stupidly cryptic band names to be found in computer manuals. Let's see what my trusty Oracle 8i Error Messages Volume 1 can yield in a quick flick through...

Check Constraint Violated (an obvious death-metal band)
Invalid Shrink Option
Missing Logfile
Fatal LogMiner
X25 Driver
Lock Named Pipe
Unexpected Return (the comeback kings?)
Cannot Generate Diana

Come to think of it, I suspect bands have already discovered this.

sounds like a band the Daily Express would dissaprove of.

Not in itself too bad, but several years before Prince changed his name to a symbol, they used some spirally-type design rather than proudly come out and say "we're Freur and we're proud". Interestingly, 'Freur' means 'pretentious' in Norwegian.

Trust me, I love David Sylvian's work and all he's done in the past (i.e. Japan, etc) but by god does he come up with a couple of right humdingers for so called 'side-projects':

Rain Tree Crow - is this based on what he saw outside the studio window that day?
Nine Horses - why only nine, and why horse, and where are these nine horses?

At least he never came up with Princes old symbol moniker - what did that mean again, was he called 'Alan or "Derek' at some point?

Bands that make unlistenable arty rubbish seem to be particularly prone to give themselves crap names. I give you:

Boards Of Canada
And You Shall Know Them By The Trail Of Dead
Autechre

The latter particularly winds me up, as I've no idea how to pronounce it. Is it Ort-eeker? O-tech-r? Out-ekra? Why are you trying to make me work so hard, you bastards?

Oh, and there was someone on a recent Word CD called something like Tiggs The Boy Explorer. That's a bad name (and not even memorably bad, as evidenced by the fact that I can't remember it).

Daft name but Aftermath was a half decent single.

...Neutral Milk Hotel.

Apart from the afore-mentioned Ting Tings and Does it Offend You, Yeah? I must raise you the truly dismal Glasvegas - a band with as much style as their name suggests - and Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong.

Nobody has had a good name since Strawberry Alarm Clock. Still wish I'd got that one.

AKA Ocean's Tartan Army

Vaginal Jesus is by far the best/worst/mentalist band name I've ever heard. No idea if they ever got anywhere.

'Nuff said.

... the winner will always be 'Grab Grab The Haddock.'

It's not funny, it's not ironic, it's not edgy, it's just... crap.