Musical 'F*** my Hat, I didn't know that!'

[famethrowa]

So musically speaking, what does Back For Good have more in common with I Started A Joke than it does with Love Is All Around? (All three use the same chord progression.)

(Incidentally, The Troggs original of Love Is All Around predates I Started A Joke.)

If I may clarify this chord business:

Back For Good:  G   Am   C    D
Love Is All Around:   G   Am   C   D
I Started A Joke: G   Bm    C   D

[buzby]

Curve

You get bands where they are a great idea half formed.
Mind blowing musicianship, great vocalists, great production, you can hear something amazing in there, it just needs to be more coherent.
if they got their sound together they would be one of the best bands in the world. 
Curve's first album Public Fruit from 1991 is a collection of their first few EPs, you hear so many ideas and flashes of greatness, a couple of awesome tracks, really great album, you get the vibe this band have the potential to sell out stadiums,  but it never really comes together in the way it should, John Peel played it loads.
Garbage ripped them off formed a sort of commercial form of Curve,
they are the most early 90s bands ever, shoegaze, industrial, with hip hop influences. Alan Moulder and Flood producing.
I love some of their tracks, just always want to readjust things a bit.

I'n not sure I quite agree about the lack of coherency. Their albums can be a little bit patchy, but their best tracks when they were firing on all cylinders always hit the spot for me. One thing I will say is that their early records (up to the first breakup after Cuckoo, at least) need to be listened to on vinyl, CD or FLAC/lossless as the sound is so dense and layered it does not take well to compresson, even at high bitrates. Garcia did say in an interview around the time of Come Clean's release though that after they decided to get back together, they resolved to try a less dense and opaque sound - "We wanted it to be more open and expose the songs more, and not be so scared and camouflaged in 500 layers of guitars,".

Their EPs & albums were self-produced, with assistance from Steve Osborne (all albums up to Gift), Flood (Doppelganger and Cuckoo), Tim Simenon (Come Clean) and Ben Grosse (Gift). Alan Moulder was their regular choice as mixer and was basically a member of the band (he has a few co-write credits on thier songs), due to being Toni's husband (I think they met when he engineered State Of Play's album). Moulder was a key influence in their early sound, through his work on MBV's Glider and Tremolo EPs and Loveless, JAMC's Psychocandy and Automatic and Ride's Nowhere (they even had Kevin Shields on guitar on Perish and Want More Need Less from Gift)

Osborne and Flood's involvement presumably also came about through them being friends and colleagues of Moulder from when he was a house engineer at Trident Studios. Moulder and Flood have co-owned a few studios over the years, the latest one being their Assault & Battery Studios in Willesden Green.

If you read interviews with Toni Halliday, they never wanted to sell out stadiums or top the charts. They were both industry veterans by that point and had been though the major label pop grinder with their previous project State Of Play that left them disillusioned and £100k in debt with nothing to show for it other than a record they hated. One of the reasons for their first split was the stress of touring, in paticularly on the tour to support Cuckoo in 1994 where they had a major falling out  and decided to put the band on hiatus to preserve their friendship. The music press had also turned on them pretty quickly after those first few EPs too, bringing up their past lives in State Of Play and accusing them of being a couple of industry has-beens who were cashing in on Shoegaze.

They turned down loads of opportunities that would have got them more exposure (and what exposure they did get, particularly in their second phase, was mostly due to their tracks being licenced for film and TV soundtracks).

After they reformed for Come Clean (for which the moved from Dave Stewart's Anxious label to Universal) and started getting some traction again (though again falling foul of the press, who now accused them of trying to cash in on Garbage's success), they then fell victim to major label politics - Gift was recorded a year after Come Clean, but a series of mergers and reorganisations at UMG pushed it's release to the bottom of the list and it ended up coming out 4 years later. After the internet-only self-released The New Adventures Of Curve in 2003 Halliday decided she'd had enough and called it a day.

[Glitch King]

Glitch King!

[The Culture Bunker]

Re Curve - I'll always rep for 'Doppelganger', which I think is a very good album, and I like what I've heard of those early EPs. 'Coast is Clear' may be my favourite song of theirs.

The follow up album had it's moments, but I've never got my head into anything beyond that point. When I play Curve to people unaware of them, it's true that most spot the Garbage connection right away, but I think Garbage took the template and made it a lot more commercial. Curve made some brilliant songs, but I'm not sure I hear anything and think "yeah, I could see that crossing over into mainstream American radio or MTV (as it was then, not now)".

I guess their past as backing musicians for Eurythmics was always going to get them slagged by the press at that time, while Garbage could at least say their drummer produced a Nirvana album, which is a lot more 'credible'.

[buzby]

Re Curve - I'll always rep for 'Doppelganger', which I think is a very good album, and I like what I've heard of those early EPs. 'Coast is Clear' may be my favourite song of theirs.

The follow up album had it's moments, but I've never got my head into anything beyond that point. When I play Curve to people unaware of them, it's true that most spot the Garbage connection right away, but I think Garbage took the template and made it a lot more commercial. Curve made some brilliant songs, but I'm not sure I hear anything and think "yeah, I could see that crossing over into mainstream American radio or MTV (as it was then, not now)".

The singles off the post-first split Come Clean did well on College radio in the US, but never crossed over to the mainstream (the same was true over here as well), mostly due to their reluctance to tour there after what had happened in 1994. As I said, people will have heard the songs from their use on TV and film (Chinese Burn was used on a high profile Sony Minidisc ad, and in the famous 'Bad Girls' episode of Buffy, for example), but wouldn't have known it was them. It wasn't helped by the fact that UMG released it in the UK as the lead single to promote the album, but as a 7-track maxi single with a load of remixes instead of 2 separate CDs, which made it ineligible for the chart.

I guess their past as backing musicians for Eurythmics was always going to get them slagged by the press at that time, while Garbage could at least say their drummer produced a Nirvana album, which is a lot more 'credible'.

And Manson was the keyboard player for Goodbye Mr Mackenzie and singer in Angelfish (where she was poached from to join Garbage). Doug Erikson, had been the bassist with Vig in Spooner (in 1974!) and Fire Town, and Steve Marker had been a producer since the mid-80s and was Vig's business partner in Smart Studios. They were even more industry veterans than Garcia and Halliday had been. As you say though, Vig's Nirvana connection seemed to get them an easier ride in the press, despite their records being more commercially-oriented than Curve's were.

[Glitch King]

Strike two!

[popcorn]

Apparently there are quite a few uncredited samples on Kid A/Amnesiac-era songs, including a bit of Miles Davis on Pyramid Song CD2 track Kinetic and some Paul Lansky and Arthur Krieger snippets in Idioteque.

EDIT: Ah...sorry. Lansky and Krieger are listed as songwriters on Idioteque.

Does anyone know why samples of famous acts like Miles Davis and Isaac Hayes would not be credited on a Radiohead song but obscure 1960s electronic composers would?

[Fr.Bigley]

Does anyone know why samples of famous acts like Miles Davis and Isaac Hayes would not be credited on a Radiohead song but obscure 1960s electronic composers would?

Because Thom Yorke doesn't need to credit anyone. He is musical Shaft innit

[buzby]

Does anyone know why samples of famous acts like Miles Davis and Isaac Hayes would not be credited on a Radiohead song but obscure 1960s electronic composers would?

In the case of Idioteque's samples of Mild Und Leise by Paul Lansky and Short Piece by Arthur Kreiger, Johnny Greenwood had sampled them both off the same 1976 experimental electronic music LP First Recordings – Electronic Music Winners to use as a temp track over a sequenced drum pattern from his analogue drum synth. He the sent the piece to Thom, who looped a section of it to use as the basis for the song and it grew from there. As the song developed, he remembered he had sampled the 4 chord loop from the sampled melody from Lansky's piece, so he wrote a letter to Lansky with a copy of the track, asking if they could have permission to use it (and as it was a melodic element, presumably offering a writing credit).

In the case of the Miles Davis drum sample on Kinetic, it's a rhythmic element, so no writing credit is needed (they only cover words and melody). They may have cleared it, but we will never really know. The Isaac Hayes sample on Like Spinning Plates is probably uncleared ,as from this 6 Music interview (warning - contains Shaun Keaveny) it seems Thom did not know it was a sample:

I've been looking back a bit at the sort of Kid A stuff, because the anniversary is coming up, going through the tapes a bit with Nigel. That's pretty crazy. Mostly it's crazy because you're like, how? How did we get that? How? I was listening to Spinning Plates going, "How did we get there?" and then I remember, oh yeah I know, I recorded something on a little sequencer, and then Nigel was spinning it backwards on the tape, and I went, "Wait, wait that's it!" So we turned the tape over, then I remember Colin just put in this weird Rhodes thing on it, and then deciding to record the vocal backwards then spin 'em forwards and then learn it, blah blah blah. How? Why? How? How did we get there? Mental.

Colin was probably behind the Miles Davis sample too, as he was using samples of old jazz and soul records on their work around the Kid A period. In a 2001 interview with Jazz Times, Jonny said Colin did the same thing with an Alice Coltrane record (Journey In Satchindananda) on Dollars and Cents, which inspired him to write the string section.

Colin will come in with a Coltrane album, and say: 'lsn't this amazing?' And he'll play it alongside what we've recorded. For 'Dollars & Cents' he brought an Alice Coltrane with strings album into the studio, He played it alongside what we'd recorded. And we kept turning down what we'd done, and kept turning up the Coltrane album, until that was all you could hear. We wanted strings and harps, but we didn't have a harp and I don't play double bass.

So I had to put electrical tape strips where the notes I needed to play are. It was a rough attempt to copy what Coltrane did on her Journey in Sotchidananda and Ptah, the El Daoud albums. There's something great about aiming to get the same effect on our songs.

[the]

Does anyone know why samples of famous acts like Miles Davis and Isaac Hayes would not be credited on a Radiohead song but obscure 1960s electronic composers would?

Broadly speaking, you can clear a sample yet not have to credit it. Whether it must be credited as a sample will be a stipulation in the licencing agreement (along with any other legal agreements - whether the originators of the sampled work get a writing credit, whether they get a percentage royalty cut, what the publisher's terms are etc etc).

And he certainly is a shaft.

[buzby]

Broadly speaking, you can clear a sample yet not have to credit it. Whether it must be credited as a sample will be a stipulation in the licencing agreement (along with any other legal agreements - whether the originators of the sampled work get a writing credit, whether they get a percentage royalty cut, what the publisher's terms are etc etc).

See above. In the Idioteque case it was a melodic element which Johnny sought to get cleared, and as a result Lansky got a writing credit. In the Kinetic case, it's a drum loop which meant even if it was cleared with the recording copyright holder there's no writing credit required.

[popcorn]

Didn't know that about rhythm samples, ta.

[the]

See above. In the Idioteque case it was a melodic element which Johnny sought to get cleared, and as a result Lansky got a writing credit. In the Kinetic case, it's a drum loop which meant even if it was cleared with the recording copyright holder there's no writing credit required.

We're talking at cross purposes slightly - there's one issue of an individual receiving a writing credit (effectively making them a co-writer of the track that sampled them), and there's another issue of whether the sampled track must be credited/declared in the sleevenotes, which was what popcorn was asking about. (That's how I interpreted it when I replied anyway.)

[buzby]

We're talking at cross purposes slightly - there's one issue of an individual receiving a writing credit (effectively making them a co-writer of the track that sampled them), and there's another issue of whether the sampled track must be credited/declared in the sleevenotes, which was what popcorn was asking about. (That's how I interpreted it when I replied anyway.)

Ah, right -  I was talking purely from the songwriting credit perspective.

Idioteque ticks both boxes - on the original release of Kid A the Lansky and Krieger samples are fully credited, but there are no songwriting credits at all in the booklet. In the rights databases Lansky is credited as a co-writer though. Krieger's brief sample (which is only used once, as a sound effect at the beginning of the track) presumably wasn't enough to get him a full songwriting credit.

For the sleevenotes on the I Might Be Wrong live album there is no sample attribution but there are songwriting credits and Lansky is credited for that track. For live performances the Lansky sample is replaced with a similar-sounding synth patch (played by Colin) and the sample from Krieger's track isn't used. There is no attribution for the Hayes or Davis samples on the other tracks, which leads me to think they are probably uncleared.

[popcorn]

Thanks both of youse, the legal wranglings about sampling is very interesting to me.

There is no attribution for the Hayes or Davis samples on the other tracks, which leads me to think they are probably uncleared.

Why do you think that? As I have now learnt, you can use samples (particularly rhythmic ones) without crediting the owners but still clearing them. So why do you reckon they're probably uncleared? It seems a weird thing to do for such a high-profile act, at least in the 21st century.

[buzby]

Thanks both of youse, the legal wranglings about sampling is very interesting to me.

Why do you think that? As I have now learnt, you can use samples (particularly rhythmic ones) without crediting the owners but still clearing them. So why do you reckon they're probably uncleared? It seems a weird thing to do for such a high-profile act, at least in the 21st century.

As the said, you still usually have to attribute that the track contains someone else's sample in the sleevenotes, even if it doesn't necessitate a writing credit - Art Krieger's sample was credited alongside Lansky's in Idioteque, but it wasn't enough to warrant a writing credit.

In the Kinetic/Miles Davis case, even though sampling drum loop doesn't (usually) warrant a songwriting credit, I would probably have expected a major label like Sony/CBS (the copyright holder of Davis' recording) to ask for an attribute in the sleeve notes as part of the clearance agreement. However, the fact that it was used on a track left over from the Kid A sessions that resurfaced as a B-side that was only released on the second CD of the Pyramid Song single a year later means they probably either forgot to clear it or thought nobody would notice.

In that same 2001 Jazz Times interview with Johnny Greenwood I quoted earlier, he does make reference to stealing from Miles Davis:

Discussing Miles makes you feel like a dimestore novelist talking about Shakespeare. We feel uncomfortable talking about Miles as any kind of influence, because what he did is so much greater and different than anything we do. We've taken and stolen from him shamelessly, not just musically, but in terms of his attitude of moving things forward."

The use of samples on Kinetic was also mentioned in Ed O'Brien's diary entry on their website during the recording of Kid A:

thursday, february 3rd 2000
bits and pieces are added to 'kinetic' - phil sets up his electric kit triggering samples, it works well and could be the basis of an interesting backing track. most of the day is spent preparing for tomorrow's string day.

In the Like Spinning Plates/Isaac Hayes case, Thom's comments from that 6 Music interview does sound more like they either forgot it was a sample, or they didnt' know because Colin forgot to tell them. The Fender Rhodes riff from the intro to Windows Of The World that was sampled isn't part of Bacharach & David's song, it was part of Hayes' arrangment that was recorded for the Live At The Sahara Tahoe album so it should have been attributed to him in the sleevenotes, even if Bacharach & David didn't warrant a writing credit.

The mechanical copyright of the Live At The Sahara Tahoe album originally belonged to Enterprise, Stax's Jazz & Soul sublabel. Stax went bust in 1975 and their post-1968 catalogue was bought by the US independent jazz label Fantasy Records, who owned it at the time Amnesiac was released. If the band hadn't notified EMI that the track contained a sample, then EMI would not have sent a sample clearance request to Fantasy so they probably wouldn't be any the wiser.

[popcorn]

All fascinating and informative as ever, cheers.

Regarding this Greenwood quote though:

Discussing Miles makes you feel like a dimestore novelist talking about Shakespeare. We feel uncomfortable talking about Miles as any kind of influence, because what he did is so much greater and different than anything we do. We've taken and stolen from him shamelessly, not just musically, but in terms of his attitude of moving things forward.

The "in terms of his attitude" is presumably what he meant about stealing from him, not sampling.

[buzby]

All fascinating and informative as ever, cheers.

Regarding this Greenwood quote though:

The "in terms of his attitude" is presumably what he meant about stealing from him, not sampling.

He says they have "stolen from him not just musically, but in terms of attitude", which I would take to mean in both senses. That interview dates from just after the release of Amnesiac, so Phil's use of Miles Davis samples on Kinetic may have still been in his mind.

The "in terms of his attitude" part has also been brought up by Thom, who said the feel of OK Computer was partly inspired by listening to Bitches Brew.

[the]

As the said, you still usually have to attribute that the track contains someone else's sample in the sleevenotes, even if it doesn't necessitate a writing credit

Ha, no, that's what I was de-emphasising. Whether you have to credit the sample or not is purely based on the legal agreement drawn up in the process of getting the sample cleared. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't.

There's often a misconception that no credit = it's uncleared, that's what I was trying to clarify. A sample could be uncredited yet cleared.

Clearing a sample isn't like phoning someone up and they say 'yeah OK' or 'no', it goes through lawyers who are obviously trying to get an agreeable deal for their respective clients (both corporate and individual - writers, publishers, master rights holders), so the final terms and conditions agreed on are specific to each individual clearance. Every clearance is a new legal transaction.

[Better Midlands]

Every clearance is a new legal transaction.

This is the main thing, a sampled artist/label etc can ask for sole writing credit just for using a snare hit if they wish or alternatively let you use quite an extensive musical sample for free - it's all negotiable as you have no right to sample.

[popcorn]

He says they have "stolen from him not just musically, but in terms of attitude", which I would take to mean in both senses. That interview dates from just after the release of Amnesiac, so Phil's use of Miles Davis samples on Kinetic may have still been in his mind.

Yeah, but it seems more likely that he meant "we steal musical ideas from him (stealing musically) and we also steal from his attitude (musical approach)". Of course he might have been thinking "tee hee we also literally sampled him" in the back of his mind but that doesn't seem to be the most obvious interpretation of what he was saying in that quote.

[buzby]

Clearing a sample isn't like phoning someone up and they say 'yeah OK' or 'no', it goes through lawyers who are obviously trying to get an agreeable deal for their respective clients (both corporate and individual - writers, publishers, master rights holders), so the final terms and conditions agreed on are specific to each individual clearance. Every clearance is a new legal transaction.

I appreciate that. It is unusual these days for an artist to get a sample cleared without having an attribution clause such as 'Contains portions of <song> by <artist> used by permission of <copyright holder>' in the contract though. It's become part of the boilerplate of the 'standard' sample clearance agreements used by major labels for their recordings, at least. This DJ Shadow box set from 2012 being an extreme example.

The fact you don't see it as much as you would think these days is probably more to do with the use of replays as substitutes for samples, to reduce the amount of royalty loss by avoiding having to get clearance from the owner of the master recording (though obviously you still have to get clearance from the publisher).

This is the main thing, a sampled artist/label etc can ask for sole writing credit just for using a snare hit if they wish or alternatively let you use quite an extensive musical sample for free - it's all negotiable as you have no right to sample.

The original artist and their publisher might be happy to let you use their work without wanting writing credit (or even a one-off fee), but the label/owner of the master recording you sampled might still want their slice and the artist usually has no control over that aspect.

[the]

I appreciate that. It is unusual these days for an artist to get a sample cleared without having an attribution clause such as 'Contains portions of <song> by <artist> used by permission of <copyright holder>' in the contract though.

I expect you see sample attribution a lot more nowadays as it's probably regarded as a form of publicity, which is ever more important in the fragmented dispersed internetland of music.

Also it effectively acts as a citation, and things like search engine algorithms will form an association between the sampling artist and the sampled artist. Again, more notoriety, more publicity for the sampled artist.

[ollyboro]

Celine Dion won the Eurovision song contest. I don't know much about Celine Dion, or have much interest in the Eurovision song contest, but I feel I should have known this.

[Pseudopath]

Celine Dion won the Eurovision song contest. I don't know much about Celine Dion, or have much interest in the Eurovision song contest, but I feel I should have known this.

Just wait until you find out who represented the UK in 1974.

If that doesn't work, your hat will be well-and-truly fricked when you find out which two multimillion-selling songwriting partnerships had their songs rejected as the UK entry in 1969. Good job we went on to win.

[popcorn]

I didn't know how much I loved Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust (aka one half of Daft Punk + some mates). It's taken me 20 years to disassociate the track from the memory of being driven to school on a crap drizzly morning - but it's dreamy.

[Better Midlands]

I didn't know how much I loved Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust (aka one half of Daft Punk + some mates). It's taken me 20 years to disassociate the track from the memory of being driven to school on a crap drizzly morning - but it's dreamy.

It's simple, timeless genius produced with such a light touch, better than any Daft Punk release (IMHO) closely followed by Together- Together (Thomas Bangalter & DJ Falcon).

[Jockice]

I didn't know how much I loved Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust (aka one half of Daft Punk + some mates). It's taken me 20 years to disassociate the track from the memory of being driven to school on a crap drizzly morning - but it's dreamy.

It's okay for you. I'm In Love With A German Filmstar by The Passions is a cracking single. Which will always be connected in my head with looking out of the window in sheer boredom during an art lesson on a freezing day. I don't even know why. It's not as if Mr Gledhill or Miss Tricker played it during the lessons. I might have taken the slightest bit of interest if they had.

[DJ Bob Hoskins]

It's simple, timeless genius produced with such a light touch

A light touch? It's crammed full of all those flashy tricks that French producers became famous for - the pumping side-chain compression, the breakdown bit where it goes all bassy and then a slow filter sweep brings the treble back in, the treated vocals (autotune or possibly vocoder?).

Personally I loved the first Daft Punk album but can't stand this sort of Gallic disco house stuff, a few Justice tracks aside. It all sounds so flashy and samey to me.

[Pseudopath]

I didn't know how much I loved Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust (aka one half of Daft Punk + some mates). It's taken me 20 years to disassociate the track from the memory of being driven to school on a crap drizzly morning - but it's dreamy.

There's a reason why Daft Punk ended their Alive 2007 set with it even though it's not a Daft Punk song. Because it's fucking brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQibjGnn6TE