I didn't see this at the time it came out in 2019, but:
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones have ended one of the most acrimonious copyright disputes in British pop history, by granting Richard Ashcroft all future royalties from his 1997 song Bitter Sweet Symphony, performed by the Verve.
Ashcroft announced the news on the same day he won an Ivor Novello award for outstanding contribution to British music. In a statement he said:
This remarkable and life-affirming turn of events was made possible by a kind and magnanimous gesture from Mick and Keith, who have also agreed that they are happy for the writing credit to exclude their names and all their royalties derived from the song they will now pass to me.
Was never a fan of the Verve, or Ashcroft, but the song itself was pretty good and never quite understood why the Stones would feel quite so possessive of the sample.
Anyhow, compare and contrast the songs.
Here's the original song.
This is the orchestral version (Andrew Oldham Orchestra) from which the sample was taken:
And here's the finished piece:
Apparently the Andrew Oldham Orchestra - Oldham being the Stones manager at the time, had put together various musicians to record orchestral interpretations of their songs.
The Andrew Oldham Orchestra was a musical side project in the mid-1960s created by Andrew Loog Oldham, the original manager and record producer of the Rolling Stones. There was no actual orchestra per se. The name was applied to recordings made by Loog Oldham using a multitude of session musicians, including members of the Rolling Stones.
The Rolling Stones Songbook included an orchestral version of the Rolling Stones song "The Last Time",[1] which was sampled by The Verve for their track "Bitter Sweet Symphony". The threat of litigation over the licence for the sample led to the entire copyright to the composition, belonging to Richard Ashcroft, the Verve's frontman, being taken by ABKCO Records, and the assignation of the songwriting credit to Jagger and Richards.[2] At the 2019 Ivor Novello Awards Ashcroft announced that Jagger and Richards had "signed over all their publishing for Bittersweet Symphony", ending the dispute.[3]
Whoever came up with the arrangement under the AOO moniker was pretty much a genius. That said the Verve version is still a pretty solid track.
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