Some of you know that I have an insatiable appetite for 1990s BritPop. I love it. Can't get enough. I can still give you the tracklisting for Kula Shaker's fantastic "K" album. And one of the biggest hits of 1997 was "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by The Verve.
The Verve formed in Wigan, England in 1990 and released a couple of middling albums prior to their breakout album "Urban Hymns." Those albums are okay. "Urban Hymns" goes hard, and it was all driven by "Bitter Sweet Symphony."
Perhaps you remember the iconic video. If not, here's a refresher:
The video has over 456 million plays on YouTube, the song has over 346 million streams on Spotify. The album reached #1 in the UK and #12 in the USA.
But there was a problem:
This is the Andrew Oldham Orchestra's version of "The Last Time," released in 1965. There was actually no real Andrew Oldham Orchestra - it was a side project headed up by Andrew Loog Oldham, the original manager and producer of the Rolling Stones, and some session musicians, as well as members of the Rolling Stones themselves. David Whitaker, who would go on to record several sessions with the BBC Radio Orchestra, arranged the strings, though he received no credit for the composition.
Andrew Loog Oldham - whose father was a Texan shot down over the English Channel in World War 2 - had set up Immediate Records, one of the first independent record labels in the UK. Some of the artists that Oldham signed/produced through Immeditate: Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, the Small Faces, Humble Pie. Not a bad little stable.
That said, the original song released by the Rolling Stones in January 1965 was problematic at best. Here it is:
Notice that the orchestral version doesn't really sound anything like the Stones' version. "The Last Time" was the first song written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Phil Spector helped produce it, but it was AWFULLY SIMILAR to "This May Be The Last Time," released by The Staple Singers:
Keith Richards, in According to the Rolling Stones, acknowledged how close the two songs were, saying:
We came up with "The Last Time," which was basically re-adapting a traditional gospel song that had been sung by The Staple Singers, but luckily the song itself goes back into the mists of time.
The album was released by Decca Records and "The Last Time" went to #1 on the UK Singles Chart, and topped out at #9 in the USA. Anyhow, when Bitter Sweet Symphony dropped, it led to legal issues.
Namely, Allen Klein - the business manager from the Rolling Stones - sued The Verve for plagiarism of the orchestral version of "The Last Time." Decca Records and the Rolling Stones (led by Klein) agreed to let The Verve use the five-note sequence in exchange for 50% of the royalties. Klein said The Verve used more than that. Klein's company, ABKCO Records, filed a lawsuit. Then Andrew Loog Oldham filed his own lawsuit against The Verve. Bassist Simon Jones:
We were told it was going to be a 50/50 split. Then [when] they saw how well the record was doing, they rung up and said, "We want 100 percent or take it out of the shops," you don't have much choice.
EMI Records - who were about to release "Urban Hymns" - met with Klein hoping that he would grant the license. The result was that, while there was an agreement to sample "The Last Time," it used too much of it. Ashcroft had to sell his rights to the song for $1,000. Oldham, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards got songwriting credits for Bitter Sweet Symphony, and Oldham got $1.7 million. Richard Ashcroft and The Verve received no royalties for one of the biggest hits of the last 25 years. After the meeting with EMI, Klein told photographer Mick Rock:
I was very bad today.
Oldham told Uncut in 2008:
As for Richard Ashcroft, well, I don't know how an artist can be severely damaged by that experience. Songwriters have learned to call songs their children, and he thinks he wrote something. He didn't. I hope he's got over it. It takes a while.
Ashcroft hadn't. Back in November, Richard Ashcroft - the lead singer of The Verve - appeared on a Consequence of Sound podcast and was still salty about it:
I'm coming for that money. Someone stole God-knows-how-many million dollars off me in 1997, and they've still got it.
Yesterday the songwriting credit was given back to Ashcroft. The Rolling Stones, in a statement:
Of course there was a huge financial cost but any songwriter will know that there is a huge emotional price greater than the money in having to surrender the composition of one of your own songs. Richard has endured that loss for many years.
And there's the story about how Allen Klein, Andrew Loog Oldham, and the Stones made a ton of money off of a Verve song sampling a fairly-unrelated orchestral version of a song (without giving proper credit to the arranger) that could have possibly been plagiarized from a Staple Singers song.
