How did Cocteau Twins get their name?
Cocteau Twins has always been quite a striking name for a band. It suggests some form of artistic indulgence, a creative proclivity, and it also makes no sense.
If you were to take the name in its most literal form, Cocteau Twins is a title that just did not suit the band and who they became in the slightest, not just because none of them were biologically related, but because at the height of their fame, there were three of them. If anything, it should have been the Cocteau Triplets.
Nitpicking aside, Cocteau Twins is just one example of many band names that people just accept without really thinking about it. After all, where did The Smashing Pumpkins come from, and what the hell does King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard really mean? No one truly knows, but that’s the beauty of music—sometimes you just have to go along for the ride.
Nonetheless, Cocteau Twins can still be a confusing title for anyone coming up against the complex genius of their dream pop mastery, so it warrants some level of dissemination. The more artistically savvy among you will have invariably clocked the overt reference to the prolific French poet and playwright Jean Cocteau, but although this is technically where the band gleaned their name from, it wasn’t the entire truth.
This was because the homage to Cocteau was just in name alone, as the real inspiration came from the Simple Minds song paying tribute to the French literary giant. But there were some striking similarities. Like Cocteau Twins, Simple Minds were a fellow Scottish band, and with the song rumoured to be about two Glaswegian men with a slight over-pretentiousness and a penchant for Cocteau, the resemblance was too much not to indulge in.
How did Cocteau Twins get away with copying Simple Minds?
Despite the band taking inspiration from this artistic template, the traces of this didn’t stay clear for long. Indeed, ‘Cocteau Twins’ was an early version of the song that later was renamed ‘No Cure’, and at that time, the original group were rather savagely called Johnny and the Self-Abusers, only later going on to rebrand themselves as the much more palatable Simple Minds.
In this sense, although Cocteau Twins could have been accused of direct plagiarism for lifting their band name from a title already coined by Simple Minds, by some magic luck of the draw, they managed to get away with it for the rest of time. Maybe that’s why they stuck with the title, even if they realised it didn’t really suit them at the peak of their fame—they wouldn’t be able to get away with much else.
Of course, no one is advocating that you should kickstart your music career by pinching names from the bands around you, even if they are your heroes. Sure, it worked out for Cocteau Twins, but everyone knows that nowadays the music industry is a much nastier beast, and any hint of copying could very well land you with a lawsuit. At the least, try to be sly about it, and with any luck, like Cocteau Twins, people may not even realise until much later down the line.
