HAVE you ever thought of a tune or a lyric and convinced yourself you had come up with something unique? Are you, like me, someone who has musical ditties in their head that meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox?
As pleasurable as composing tunes can be – whether professionally or as an amateur – the fear of song plagiarism is never far away. In fact, any Beatles fans reading my opening paragraph would have instantly recognised my “borrowing” of the famous line from Across The Universe.
But it proves just how easily it happens – a great phrase or melody you thought was all your own turns out to be someone else’s instead. For any tunesmith worth his or her salt it must be their biggest dread… and highly embarrassing. Not only have you nicked the idea – whether by accident or by design – you weren’t even smart enough to either notice it or hide it.
As the old saying goes “where there’s a hit there’s a writ” – an industry term Ed Sheeran, who is currently embroiled in a legal tussle over his song Shape of You, will know all too well. The Halifax-born star isn’t the first and won’t be the last musician forced to defend himself against accusations of theft, or to use the proper legal parlance, breaching copyright rules, which he denies.
Probably the most famous case of copyright infringement involved George Harrison when he was sued for the similarity of My Sweet Lord to the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine. The judge ruled the former Beatle had copied the song through the process of cryptomnesia – a form of subconscious recollection.
But there’s a thin line between legitimate borrowing, reworking and reimagining – all tenets of the creative process – and outright theft. Examples where inspiration has been drawn from those before them aren’t difficult to find – The Beatles’ “Taxman /The Jams’ “Start” or The Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”/Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” to name but a few.
Indeed, rock behemoths Led Zeppelin made a career out of blatant musical swipes. However, what those bands brought to the songs mentioned above was their own mood and spirit that a simple examination of the sheet music wouldn’t convey. Harrison’s song, although melodically similar, had entirely different words and feel. Different enough, in my opinion.
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This raises the question: is there such thing as a truly original thought? Is there a little bit of magpie in all of us? I mean, how many different ways can someone sing about “love”? And there must be millions of occasions where “heart” and “apart” are rhymed.
The 1-4-5 chord progression is the bedrock of western popular music and as Noel Gallagher – who himself would admit his debt to the Fab Four – said: “There’s 12 notes in a scale and 36 chords and that’s the end of it. All the configurations have been done before.”
But there are two sides to every vinyl record. On the one hand, for any songwriter whose work has clearly fallen prey to the sticky fingers of rock gods, hip-hop samplers, pop acts or whoever the courts may be the only recourse. On the other, there is also a danger a money-driven litigious culture will stifle creativity. Indeed, so traumatised was Harrison by the experience that he lived in fear of accidentally copying another artist.
There’s no hard and fast rule. A writer must be true to their talent and follow the muse wherever it takes them, while acknowledging the source of that inspiration. As a certain Liverpudlian once sang: “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better.”
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