And Finally Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #40: Red Hot Chili Peppers v Diana Vickers

By | Published on Saturday 23 October 2010

There’s been talk this week of the Red Hot Chili Peppers suing Diana Vickers. And not just because her voice is so offensive. It seems a few people, including the band and their ‘people’, think that her new single, ‘My Wicked Heart’ sounds more than a little like RHCP’s 1992 hit, ‘Under The Bridge’.

No legal papers have been drawn up yet, though. So, as long as Vickers keeps her mouth shut and her head down, she might just get away with it. What she definitely shouldn’t do is admit to having ripped off the song in an interview, or anything like that.

Oh dear.

Clearly unaware that ‘subconscious infringement’ is recognised by copyright law (that’s how The Stranglers got Elastica), Vickers told Digital Spy, when asked about the similarity between her song and the RHCP track: “Yeah, that happened without even knowing. We wrote the song in an hour. We had the song and it didn’t have the ‘my wicked heart’ bit in it and then we put the vocal in and we were like, ‘Why does it sound so familiar?’ Then we realised it was because we were listening to ‘Under The Bridge’ the day before”.

Then, really making sure that this had gone past a simple subconscious accident, she added: “We were saying, ‘Should we change it? Should we not? What should we do? Sod it, no, we’re just gonna keep it, it works'”.

Still, this doesn’t need to go to court. It’s such an expensive, time consuming activity. Red Hot Chili Peppers are currently working on their tenth album; I suggest they just use the chorus from Vickers’ debut single ‘Once’ in one of their new tracks. Then it’s just a straight swap and no one needs to be upset. Except perhaps all music fans in the world ever – but a new RHCP album was always going to be hard on them anyway.

This Beef Of The Week comes from this edition of the CMU Weekly. Subscribe to the CMU Weekly here.

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