Eiffel 65

Eiffel 65 is an Italian pop music and dance music group consisting of Jeffrey Jey, Maurizio Lobina and Gabry Ponte. They are mainly known for their 1999 studio album Europop, in particular its two high-charting singles “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” and “Move Your Body.” Their following two albums, 2001’s Contact! and their 2003 self-titled album, did not have significant international success, but charted in Italy.

Randone, Ponte and Lobina met at Bliss Corporation, which was founded in 1992 in Turin by Massimo Gabutti. Speaking on the origin of the name Eiffel 65, in a 2014 Vice interview Jeffrey Jey explained it was partly a random selection from a spreadsheet, and partly their producer and graphic artist’s mistake:

[W]e were wasting a lot of time trying to find names for the new projects so what we did was we took a week or so to create as many new possible names as we could. We made a database on Excel that we were fetching from time to time and when “Blue” came out we fetched Eiffel from the list and that was it. Then what happened was we had the label copy [of “Blue”] on our producer’s desk and he was writing a phone number that went over the paper he was using and ended up on the label copy. The last two digits of the phone number were six and five so the graphic artist thought we put that in our name afterwards […]