THE NAME CHANGERS

MARION MCMULLEN reveals the real monikers of some of music’s most famous stars

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A hearing aid shop in Dublin called Bono Vox – Latin for “good voice” – was responsible for U2 singer Paul David Hewson becoming known as Bono (right). The band’s guitarist The Edge (left), who was born David Howell Evans, earned his nickname because Bono said he was on the

edge of everything. 6

American music star and Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in New York in 1941. He chose the surname Dylan after Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and once said: “I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.” 1

International pop star The Weeknd, left, is ditching the name which has brought him fame around the world and is going back to his real moniker... Abel

Tesfaye. The Grammy Award winner has now changed the name on all his social media accounts and has said he is ready for the next chapter. 7 Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner is said to have been given the name Sting because of his fondness for wearing a striped top when he first started playing with a jazz group. They teased him that he looked like a bee or a wasp and the name stuck. He says even his wife calls him Sting. 2

Music legend Sir Elton John, below, was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight and grew up in a council house in Pinner. He legally changed his name in 1972. It came from saxophone player Elton Dean and singer Long John Baldry. Elton’s middle name is Hercules after the horse in the BBC comedy Steptoe And Son.

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It won’t surprise Lady Gaga fans to hear she wasn’t, as it happens, born that way. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was reportedly given a new name by one of her first producers Rob Fusari – he took his inspiration from the Queen song Radio Ga Ga. 3 David Bowie, right, changed his name from David Robert Haywood

Jones when he was 18 to avoid any confusion with singer Davy Jones from The Monkees pop group. The Alamo’s Jim Bowie, the inventor of the Bowie knife, is said to have inspired his surname.

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James Newell Osterberg Jr is the real name of Iggy Pop, right. He started calling himself Iggy when he began performing with his high school band The Iguanas and has said “If I don’t terrorise, I’m not Pop.” 4

Farrokh Bomi Bulsara is better known to one and all as Queen star Freddie Mercury. He was nicknamed Freddie at school and even his own family started calling him that. He announced he wanted to be known as Freddie Mercury during Queen’s first concert in 1970.

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Minister’s son Vincent Damon Furnier assumed the stage name of Alice Cooper early in his career and later changed it legally in 1975. He said in his book Golf Monster that the name “conjured up an image of little girl with a lollipop in one hand and a butcher knife in another”.