Bittersweet Symphony is fucking shit

[madhair60]

That's it

[Sin Agog]

This from the guy who walks all over CAB with his shit opinions.

(Naw, you're great.  Just wanted to make a lame reference to dat vid).

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

Bittersweet Symphony is THE fucking shit.

Correct.

(Also, phat.)

[gilbertharding]

Did anyone ever find out what the Staples thought of (the) Verve ripping off The Last Time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1jGF-6bFpI

[Norton Canes]

That it is. The lowest point of Britpop. Lower than Gay Dad.

[wosl]

Not worth the bother.  And yet you've bothered.  And now I have.  This is exactly what Ashcroft wants.

[DrGreggles]

Makes me think of dull England friendlies on ITV.

FUCK YOU, ASHCROFT JAGGER/RICHARDS!

[PaulTMA]

Are Carter USM going to get ownership of After The Watershed back now?  This is all that matters.

[purlieu]

It's alright. It does its euphoric anthemic post-britpop plod pretty well. A shame that it's the best-known song on an album with some genuinely incredible songs, but I can't deny it does it job very well.

Also, much as Richard Ashcroft is an obnoxious piece of smegma who deserves to be smudged out of reality, the decision from Jagger and Richards to give him back the rights to the song is a genuinely positive moment in modern copyright law.

[Brundle-Fly]

I bought it at the time and liked it. No 'baggage handling' purchase here.

[Quote]

They had absolutely raked it in for twenty plus years on that tune, during a time when people actually paid for music as well.

I quite like it really, got overplayed though which made me hate it for a while.

[buzby]

Makes me think of dull England friendlies on ITV.

FUCK YOU, ASHCROFT JAGGER/RICHARDS!

A pair of chancers called Rest Assured also did a piss-poor rave version after The Verve song was a hit called Treat Infamy

Vauxhall then used a slowed-down remix of the Rest Assured track for their 1998 Astra ad campaign. They also replaced thier use of Layla as a logo sting with the string intro from Papa Don't Preach around that time too. Vauxhall sponsored the England team and their coverage on ITV, hence ITV using the version form the Astra advert for England games.

It should be remembered that The Verve's use of the Loog Oldham Orchestra sample was overlaid with multiple tracks of additional strings during the production of the track, as the original is far less lush and more tinny than it appears on Bittersweet Symphony. Regarding the subsequent legal drama, it's just another instance of Allen Klein being an all-round twat.

[grassbath]

I really like it. Of course there's rarely cause to listen to it but it can really take me places if it catches me in the right mood. Probably because it would have been ubiquitous on the radio when I was a nipper.

[the]

Mince-strutting wobbly-lipped self-justifying 1D grey shat. Meaningless hole niff.

[BlodwynPig]

It gave beige lads a reasons to love themselves after decades in the wilderness.

[imitationleather]

The Limp Bizkit cover version is far superior.

[Chriddof]

The Drugs Don't Work was way worse, I think.

[blackcockerel]

The string arrangement was written by a guy called David Whitaker anyway.

[steveh]

A pair of chancers called Rest Assured also did a piss-poor rave version after The Verve song was a hit called Treat Infamy

Not really rave, more the commercial house sound of the time which Faithless' Rollo had a lot to do with setting the sound of. To be honest, I still prefer the 12" of that to the Verve's dirge, but then I've always had a terrible soft spot for the cheesetastic throw in everything but the kitchen sink productions of that period.

[a duncandisorderly]

The string arrangement was written by a guy called David Whitaker anyway.

exactly. jagger, richards, oldham, ashcroft, klein.... none of them should've had a penny from the use of that sample. they didn't write it & they didn't perform it.

also, ashcroft, if the sample's so central & important to the song that you "fucking wrote", a) don't claim you wrote the song, b) check the attribution assiduously, & c) have a fucking word with yourself.

if you'd done the right thing & insisted that some of the money went to the actual composer, I might have some grain of respect for you.

in a similar situation (sample essential to the vibe of a song) several years earlier, a mate of mine wanted to quote an ennio morricone theme in a song, but we were worried about clearing the sample. so I said

"how about we change the order of the notes, so that it's a different tune with the same vibe, & I'll re-record it using instrument samples rather than using the riff wholesale?"

& so that's what we did & it worked. everyone thought it was a sample but it wasn't. not brain-surgery. & if it had gone to court, I would've done the full vangelis, showed them my work.

so why else do I dislike ashcroft, besides this dirge?

I had to hear the thing several times a day while I was working at viacom's european HQ; it became a playlist staple not long after the launch of MtvUK & stayed playlisted for far too long, even after the various piss-takes (fat les being the notable one, with my mate paul kaye taking the ashcroft role & falling off the front of a car with perfect comedy timing).

but later, during a post-verve solo career, ashcroft was due to perform in the studio. I don't even think it was for a viacom channel- I think we'd rented out the big studio to C4.
anyway, the story is that ashcroft's limo arrived at 8.30 am, & one of his people went into our reception area to make sure that no-one would bother poor richard on his way to the green room.
(echos of the 'larry sanders' elvis costello episode)

8.30 am. Mtv. have a guess how many people are in the building at that time of day. in the reception area.

three. the security guys & the bloke who ran the post-room, who right at that moment was shifting boxes out of the reception area & into his domain precisely because of this edict from ashcroft's people.

but this isn't good enough for ashcroft's minder- not a big woman, by all accounts, but vicious, & she took it upon herself to manhandle the post-room guy into his own office & out of the reception area, ashcroft's flight-path, as it were, when he had the temerity to tell her that he was just going to finish moving these boxes out of the way.

actual assault. now I know ashcroft didn't do this himself- he was nowhere in sight when this happened. still in the limo. I talked to the post-room guy later, to see if he wanted to press charges, but he just wanted to forget about the whole thing. but I blame ashcroft for creating & nurturing this toxic rock-star vibe about himself, & encouraging his people to behave like this.

so fuck him, & fuck his dreadful dirge, & his ivor novello award. big deal, rich- they gave one to gary glitter as well, you know. 'lifetime achievement'? what?

fucking smack-head piece of shit.

[a duncandisorderly]

the decision from Jagger and Richards to give him back the rights to the song is a genuinely positive moment in modern copyright law.

is it fuck. is it fucking fuck as like.

[Johnny Textface]

Is Richard getting it all or "The Verve"? If it's just Richard then that's horrific.

[buzby]

The string arrangement was written by a guy called David Whitaker anyway.

it's the old argument about whether session work should get a writing credit, isn't it?
I'm pretty sure Whitaker knew what the deal was at the time - arrangers get a session fee and no royalty unless it's an arrangement of a public domain composition. I'm not saying it's right, but that's the way it's been forever and despite efforts from some arrangers to get the royalty rules changed (Richard Niles in particular, with his book The Invisible Artist) there's no sign of it changing any time soon.

Whitaker's own comments on the use of his arrangement on Bittersweet Symphony, from an 2001 interview with Sound On Sound:

I did a set of arrangements with Andrew Oldham of the Rolling Stones' songbook, and it was my high string line from the arrangment of a song called 'The Last Time' that was pinched by The Verve for 'Bittersweet Symphony'. I've worked quite a lot recently with Youth, who was responsible for the session at Olympic Studios at which my arrangement was used. They had a string arranger, called Wil Malone, there with them and Youth said that he liked that tune, which Wil jotted down and used in the arrangement.

They didn't like it at first, but it was just as well for them that they came around to liking it in the end. At least, it was just as well for Jagger and Richards that they did, seeing as they've copped all the royalties from it, but there is still a long court case going on and on about it now with Andrew Oldham. The whole thing just makes one a bit sick, really.

It's funny how any story that involves Youth normally contains elements of artistic theft as well....
Also, if Youth is to be believed (which is a big IF) it wasn't even Ashcroft's idea.

Whitaker was working constantly at that time. he had started off as a songwriter in Denmark Street in the early 60s, but as The Beatles and Merseybeat sound killed off his style of writing he moved into doing arrangements for the BBC's orchestras as a sideline. This let to a call from Loog Oldham to do the arrangement for Marianne Failthfull's Plaisir D'Amour, which then led to the work on Oldham's orchestral pop covers albums (he was actually credited as arranger on the rear sleeve of the record in question, The Rolling Stones Songbook, but  no royalty comes with that).

He did lots more work for artists on Decca Immediate and Columbia but was most in demand for arrangements on French poo records (lfor the likes of Serge Gainsbourg, Johnny Hallyday and Claude François, whose song Comme d'habitude that Whitaker arranged eventually had new English lyrics written and became My Way) and also had a successful career as a composer of B-movie soundtracks (including Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde and Vampire Circus for Hammer).

One thing that Bitersweet Symphony did do for Whitaker was remind people how good he was, and after what he said was '17 years of the phone not ringing' he started getting arranging session work again for the likes of Kenickie, Air, Simply Red, Eurythmics, Shack and even S Club 7 (Saint Etienne had started using him as arranger a few years before that,  presumably due to their love of 1960s French pop).

Is Richard getting it all or "The Verve"? If it's just Richard then that's horrific.

It's just Ashcroft. Only half the album was actually co-written as a band, the rest of the songs were initially intended to be the basis for an Ashcroft solo album. Urban Hymns was recorded in two parts, the first was before McCabe had been persuaded to return and was produced by Youth. Once McCabe returned they recorded some more tracks (which is where most of the band collaborations come from, and Neon Wilderness was a McCabe song) and did some rework on the songs from the sessions with Youth with Chris Potter producing.

[a duncandisorderly]

it's the old argument about whether session work should get a writing credit, isn't it?
I'm pretty sure Whitaker knew what the deal was at the time - arrangers get a session fee and no royalty unless it's an arrangement of a public domain composition. I'm not saying it's right, but that's the way it's been forever and despite efforts from some arrangers to get the royalty rules changed (Richard Niles in particular, with his book The Invisible Artist) there's no sign of it changing any time soon.

"The whole thing just makes one a bit sick, really."

yes. & more so when those responsible (largely glover, but ashcroft has perpetuated the crime) seem to have absolutely no conscience about it- it's whitaker's line, whoever signed whatever away on a contract decades earlier- or is there no honour amongst musicians? no, wait... don't answer that. but also, they could have avoided a lot of shit if they'd just steered round the sample in the first place. they had their own string arranger (malone) on call- why not just rework the line so that klein & co were never involved?
idiots.

[jobotic]

I can't even work out where the sample comes from in "The Last Time".

Anyway, imagine thinking to yourself "I fancy listening to Richard Ashcroft. Yeah, that's the stuff".

[a duncandisorderly]

I can't even work out where the sample comes from in "The Last Time".

it's in this version, but will malone kind of enhanced it under instruction from martin glover (who calls himself "youth", the tool.) as noted elsewhere, ashcroft didn't even want to do the song until glover persuaded him, on the basis of hearing an earlier demo done with john leckie. ahscroft decided he'd written it on his own after it became obvious that he'd captured some sort of britpop zombie zeitgeist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YrllfAMwHI

[buzby]

I can't even work out where the sample comes from in "The Last Time".

Anyway, imagine thinking to yourself "I fancy listening to Richard Ashcroft. Yeah, that's the stuff".

The Andrew Loog Oldham  Orchestra - The Last Time
Bittersweet Symphony (Demo) - basically Ashcroft singing along to the Loog Oldham version. This also fucks off Glover's claim that it was his idea to use the sample and the band didn't like it. What a surprise, Youth talking self-aggrandising bollocks.
Extended version of Bittersweet Symphony, where the additional Wil Malone strings are faded out in the break and the sample can be heard.

Note that the distinctive high string melody played over Whitaker's arrangement was part of Wil Malone's arrangement (and largely copied from the tubular bell riff that appears in Whitaker's arrangement). Here's bellend Ashcroft claiming that it was Malone's original work.

Don't forget that Malone would have only got a session fee for his work on The  Verve's albums too (History on A Northern Soul was his work).

[the]

This is why rock bands shouldn't be allowed near samplers. It's like watching a platypus trying to operate an industrial lathe, except everyone dies of boredom.

[jobotic]

Yeah you mock it but have you actually listened to the lyrics? Like really listened? They'll blow you away, man.

[a duncandisorderly]

Yeah you mock it but have you actually listened to the lyrics? Like really listened? They'll blow you away, man.

like a force-9 full of dogshit, yes.