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And Finally
Sigur Rós raped on British TV
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 23 February 2010
Sigur Rós’ Jónsi Birgisson has said that the band’s song, ‘Hoppípolla’ has been a little overplayed on British TV. Actually, the word he used was “raped”, which is probably fair, considering that the band are only rivalled by Snow Patrol when it comes to soundtracking overly sentimental moments of forced self-discovery on tedious telly shows.
Speaking to Gigwise, Birgisson said: “‘Hoppípolla’ has been raped on British TV. In some weird way, the national TV here in Britain doesn’t have to ask permission to use songs if it’s in the background of TV shows or whatever. So they can just take it and use it and that happened a lot with ‘Hoppipolla’. The David Attenborough show [‘Planet Earth’] was cool though. We’re all big fans of his”.
The “weird way” Birgisson talks about refers to the fact TV producers can licence music for their programmes via UK recording rights collecting society PPL, ie unlike movie makers and advertisers, the producers of telly programmes don’t need explicit permission from labels and/or artists every time they use music in their programmes.
