No, I can't do names either. People, streets, towns - proper nouns, in fact; I can deal with them in songs, but then they become lyrics, which I can remember. I read somewhere years ago that there's a particular part of the brain that deals with names, and in some people, it isn't very well developed. I'd thought it was just me. It tallies with what I said about writing things down; different bits of brain deal with different subjects, so if you can somehow involve more than one bit, it helps. I noticed a long time ago that when I was singing certain songs, I'd get some mental vision that often had nothing to do with the song, but that happened to come into my head once while I was singing that song, so singing the song became a trigger for the image. This mental association of images is the process used by 'memory men'. (I know that 'cos I've seen it on the telly).
John Kelly.