Rolling the Dice (2009)

Recently rediscovered this, an ancient column from The Fly magazine

Rolling the dice

Feb 05 2009 12:12 pm, Joe Shooman

We’ve all heard the furore surrounding Coldplay’s song ‘Viva La Vida’ and its alleged similarities to Joe Satriani’s ‘If I Could Fly’; there’s all sorts of ‘evidence’ all over the web and more than one person has knocked up megamixes of the two tracks played separately and together. And admittedly the phrasing of Chris Martin atop that chord progression and the rhythmic figure are pretty damn similar to Satch’s guitar break.

It’s also likely that members of Coldplay had at least heard ‘If I Could Fly’ on a jukebox somewhere, possibly thought, “that’s a good tune, that” and then gone on to order another horlicks n absinth cocktail, forgetting all about it til jamming out songs for the new album. This kinda stored creative memory is pretty common and quite often it’s not obvious until you play someone your brand new guitar song and they go “yeah that’s cool and it was also cool when Robbie Williams did it in ‘Angels’” and then I feel sick and have to go and listen to lots of Motörhead to clean myself out again. I mean, one does.

Regardless, Coldplay fans as you might expect are a bit peeved by Satriani suing the band and have gone on to find several other songs that share the same chord progression as ‘If I Could Fly’ with varying degrees of dubiousness. So far we’ve had tracks by Cat Stevens, Enanitos Verdes and – my favourite – a bizarre Europop track by someone called Günter*. It’s pretty much possible to relate anything to anything if you put your mind to it and whatever the results of the case, they’ve all got some pretty decent publicity out of it.

 

What it does go to show though is that there is always a case to be made for similarities in songs. The savvy thing to do, I think, is to go down the route where the original composer is long gone and the melodies and chords are therefore public domain.

I was reminded of this listening to a promo of the new Bell X1 album, Blue Lights On The Runway, which is out next month. As ever, it’s well-put-together guitar pop and without giving too much away, you pretty much know what it’s gonna sound like already. So I got toward the final track, ‘The Curtains Are Twitching’, had a sip of my amaretto & Bisto and realised that, yup, that was familiar too. In fact, very familiar. I couldn’t place it til a name popped into my head and that was Johannes Pachabel. Specifically, his 'Canon In D Major' which is a lovely piece of pastoral Baroque arranged for strings and is the sort of thing that cheap Hollywood movies put over sequences of weddings in slow motion. Not a bad thing to use as the basis of a pop song and it’s what’s on top of the chords that makes Bell X1’s track unique. Whether it’s purposefully half-inched is a moot point; possibly the Killdare lads had seen said film once, stored the music away as ‘Dead Good, That’ and when it came to getting the new LP out, bosh – out it comes again, unbeknownst to all concerned, least of all Pachabel who died in 1706, which is either 300 years ago or just after finishing work depending how you look at it.

 

It’s a technique in fact that the likes of Stock, Aitken And Waterman were rumoured to be much enamoured of back some twenty years ago when launching the careers of Kylie, Stefan Dennis, Jason Donovan and loads of other mostly Aussie nobheads with shit hair and weird painted-on smiles and clothes; great songwriters the team were, which is hardly surprising considering that they’ve admitted in interviews over the years that several of their chart hits were, uh, let's say inspired by a whole host of classical music composers.

Canny stuff, see? It works, let’s use it. Result = hit upon hit of original music = buckets of cash with no possibility of being taken to court cause the chords and melodies are public domain. Stick another shrimp on the barbie, ya hoon.

The most famous classical nick, though, has gotta be Procul Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’, which appears every few months on montages of, well, weddings gone a bit wrong in bad Hollywood movies. The keyboard part is incredibly close to Johann Sebastian Bach’s hit singles ‘Air On A G String’ and, possibly, ‘Sleepers Awake’. And why not: he’s popped it years back and it’s public domain**. It’s such an integral part of the song that without the organ in there it’d be a weedy piece of late 1960s nonsense rather than a bona fide psych/folk/rock classic. What’s most hilarious about the whole deal is that in 2005 Matthew Fisher, said organist, sued Procul Harum for back royalties and won 40% copyright from that day onwards. In a song where his organ part is patently and hugely similar to something J.S. Bach wrote sometime between 1717 and 1718. Good work old son.

 

That’s the way to do it, Coldplay chaps: keep a hundred or two years out of trouble and you can nick what you like.

I'm off to write my unfinished eighth symphony by Schubert now, with the words to God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen over the top.

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* Course, where this all falls down is, as the bloke that pointed it out in the first place freely admits, Günter 's track was released way after Satriani's which is a bit of a shame but we'll ignore that cause it's more fun

 

** Anyway Bach blatantly nicked it off Ug The Caveman’s seminal 12,000 BC opus for rock and cave, ‘Ug Uuuhh Ruh Ruh Ruhhh Mu Mu (Slight Return)’ so he's not exactly in any position to whinge about it.