Random Stage Name Generator

A stage name is given, not chosen

Everybody assumes a stage name is an act of self-invention. You sit down, you consider who you want to be, and you write it on a poster.

Look at how the famous ones actually happened and the pattern is the opposite. They were handed over by other people, usually as a joke, and usually not a kind one.

Gordon Sumner played in a jazz band in the north east of England. His girlfriend had knitted him a sweater with black and yellow hoops, and he wore it constantly on stage. The band decided he looked like a bee.

They called him Sting. It was mockery. It stuck for fifty years.

The name that outlives you tends to be the one somebody else could not resist. You cannot manufacture that in a notebook, because the whole point of a nickname is that it is other people's opinion of you, arriving unasked.

Bono went through several drafts

The other great example is more absurd, and more instructive.

A Dublin teenager called Paul Hewson belonged to a surrealist street gang called Lypton Village, whose main ritual was giving each other names. He was called Steinhegvanhuysenolegbangbangbang. Then, mercifully, Huyseman. Then Houseman. Then Bon Murray. Then Bono Vox of O'Connell Street.

Then, finally, just Bono.

Bonavox was a hearing aid shop just off O'Connell Street in Dublin, and it is still there. In Latin the phrase means good voice. His friend Guggi gave him the name, and Hewson disliked it. He only accepted it once somebody told him what it meant.

Everything worth knowing about stage names is in that story. The name came from a shop sign. It was assigned by somebody else. It went through five drafts. The subject hated it. And it survived because it was funny, then true, and it has been his name since he was about fourteen. His family use it. His band use it.

Nobody sits down and invents Bono. Bono happens to you.

The stage name eats the old one

The part people underestimate is what happens next.

Sting has said, more or less, that shouting Gordon in the street would make him step aside so the real Gordon could get past. His wife calls him Sting. His children call him Sting. The original name is not a secret, it is simply not in use, the way a house you moved out of thirty years ago is not in use.

This is the actual function of a stage name, and it is not decoration. It is a container for a person who can do things the original could not. Some performers have gone as far as making it legal, which is a strange and very literal way of admitting that the invention has won.

So the useful question is not what sounds good. It is what you are willing to answer to for forty years, from strangers, in airports, at your own front door.

Because if it works, the other name is going somewhere quiet, and it may not come back.

The one word name

Look at the list and count the single words. Madonna. Cher. Prince. Sting. Bono. Slash. Flea.

The mononym is the most confident move in naming, and it is not available to everybody.

What it does is claim a word. Not the sound of a word, the word itself. After a certain point you cannot say prince in a sentence about music without a musician appearing in the listener's head. That is an extraordinary thing to take from a language, and the language does not give it up easily.

It works in two ways. Either the word is ordinary and the performer is famous enough to overwrite it, which requires a level of fame most people will not reach. Or the word is odd enough that nothing was there before. Slash. Buckethead. Flea. Nobody had to be dislodged.

For anybody starting out, the second route is the only route. Take a word nobody wanted.

When somebody else does the naming

There is a less charming version of all this, and it belongs on the page.

For much of the twentieth century, being renamed was not a joke among friends. It was a condition of employment. Labels and studios renamed performers on arrival, and a great many of those changes were about making a foreign name sound less foreign, or making a young man sound less like a young man from a particular street.

A child prodigy signed at eleven was given the name the label wanted, including a diminutive that had to be dropped once he grew up.

That is the same mechanism as the sweater and the hearing aid shop, running in a much colder direction. A name given by friends is affection. A name given by an employer is property.

Which is the last argument for choosing carefully. If you do not name yourself, and you become worth naming, somebody will do it for you.

Where this list came from

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, drawn from performers across popular music. One is chosen at random each time. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about stage names

Where did Sting get his name?

From a sweater. He wore a black and yellow striped one on stage with a jazz band, his bandmates thought he looked like a bee, and the name arrived as a joke and never left. His birth name is Gordon Sumner.

Is Bono named after a hearing aid shop?

Effectively, yes. Bonavox is a hearing aid shop near O'Connell Street in Dublin. His friends turned it into Bono Vox, which happens to mean good voice in Latin, and he shortened it. He disliked the name until he learned the translation.

Should I choose my own stage name?

You can, and many do. But the ones that last were usually given by other people, because a nickname is somebody else's view of you and that is what makes it convincing. If you must choose, choose something a friend could have called you.

Can I just use one word?

Only if the word is free. A common word means competing with the whole language, and that competition is won by fame rather than by choice. An odd word nobody wanted belongs to you immediately.

Do I have to change my name legally?

No. A stage name is just a name you perform under, and most performers never make it official. Some have, which tells you something about how completely a working name can take over.

References

1. Bono. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bono
2. Where these iconic rock stars got their stage names. Grunge. https://www.grunge.com/1154267/where-these-iconic-rock-stars-got-their-stage-names/