I’m a bit peeved this morning. Someone has nicked the riff from one of the songs I wrote back when I was young and turned it into a very good pop tune. I am tempted to sue, like Marvin Gaye’s estate did when Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams were accused of plagiarising Gaye’s Got To Give It Up with their Blurred Lines. The court judgement declared that Thicke and Williams were both guilty and had for fork out over $5 million by way of compensation. I am wondering if I should try the same thing, but there is one small problem. The riff is in my head and nowhere else. I didn’t really ‘write’ anything down.
The song that has clearly ripped me off is called Thick Of The Honey by the New Zealand indie musician Fazerdaze and I have to say I really like it. And if the rest of her work is as good as this, I suspect I could be investing some cash by buying it. But how did she come to find my riff?
Somewhere in the loft, I have volumes of song lyrics, poems and vivid descriptions of the goals I scored in my less than stellar football ‘career’. If I could be bothered to search for and find them, doubtless I could entertain myself by singing them. Titles like Meet Me On The Island, Lost Horizons and Gonna Be The President are among my better songs and the lyrics are in my volumes, although the music is stored in what’s left of my brain. Quite how I expected to make my fortune when I couldn’t write a note of music nor play an instrument, I may never know. I did actually buy an electric guitar and an amp in the 1970s, assuming that I’d be able to start playing straight away. Imagine my shock when I couldn’t?
My best song, Meet Me On The Island, actually has, in my view, a decent tune, even though the lyrics are quite clunky. Have a look at the chorus:
“Won’t you meet me on the island, where we can both be free. Won’t you meet me on the island, it’s just across the sea.”
Were you singing along? They don’t write ’em like that anymore, do they?
My big fear is that Fazerdaze might now rip off my lyrics now that she has gotten away with nicking my riff. It’s not that I have the first idea to copyright something and, it’s fair to say, the odds of me achieving fame as a singer/songwriter are more remote than they ever were.
At least I can have the pleasure of hearing my riff played on the radio and pretend my bank account is bursting with royalties. It’s a bloody good riff, even though I say so myself.
