We will be called The Seminal Quintessentialists and our debut album will be entitled "Going Seminal".

Our second album will be called "The Sophomore Outing".

We will then split up only to be re-discovered in 2030 by Uncut magazine as a great lost band of the 2010's.

Apart from the inevitable confusion when someone refers just to "Elvis", I remember a Punch article suggesting that someone born with the name Elvis Costello is just as likely to want to change it to Declan McManus, as the other way round.

There's also been recent discussion on a Jimmy Pursey thread about the decision to changne his stage name to James Pursey, and similarly Pete Murphy becoming Peter Murphy - both highly ill-advised, IMHO.

Not a lot - so why change to Englebert Humperdink

Eddie Izzard considers how the stage name was chosen

Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus* was called Elvis simply because it caught your eye in 1977\6 - "he can't be called that - oh he is" so you stop and take notice more than you would for plain old Declan MacManus which is a unwieldy name.

He has also been billed as

Eammon Singer
The Little Hands Of Concrete
The Imposter
Napoleon Dynamite
D P Costello
The Pope Of Pop

Nick Lowe tells a possibly not true story about being with Jake Riviera on the night that Elvis P died and Jake saying that he's have to change Elvis to Elton as he thought the name was now commercial suicide

*it is thought he added the Aloysius as a tribute to Tony Hancock when he changed back to Declan Macmanus in 1986.

I like the thought oif Jimmy Pursey changing to James so he would be taken seriously as an artist.

The almost but never was name for New Order was The Witchdoctors Of Zimbabwe. All but Hooky wanted that and because he vetoed it they sullenly went with New Order. That could be a way of getting round his current legal attempt to stop the rest of em using 'New Order'

I had thought this was a terrible stage name, until I just had a butchers at her wiki entry and found that it's in tribute to her old piano teacher, which is rather sweet.

However, she apparently performs these days as Naan. Huh??? [cue cury jokes]

Who was never unleashed on the music world, but was what Larry Parnes wanted to call Joe Brown.

Brown fortunately dug his heels in.

pop star character Twit Conway (real name Cyril Rumbold)

...at a "proper gig" was at McGonagles in Dublin in 1983, supporting Aztec Camera - still one of my favourite gigs ever. They introduced themselves...

two blokes in blouses with a drum machine (or even a tape machine) I'm not sure...

"The name of this band is...(Talking Heads reference presumably)...Ambition in Glass".

Cue spontaneous laughter from the assembled fans of the Sound of Young Scotland.

Pop stars made themselves more interesting by slightly changing their names. Even people who weren't pop stars did it. Andrew Collins in one of his books confirms this trend by his brief adoption of the enigmatic alternative persona, Andrew Kollins.

The examples are many, but the saddest, most try-hard one was Russell Bell, of Dramatis. His name was written as rRussell Bell.

To which category we can add Nik Kershaw, Amii Stewart and Leee John.