This was news about 4 days ago

I bet Colin Hay wishes his press shot was moodier. Looks like hes trying to do that fanny thing with his hands.

about 4 days ago? more like EXACTLY four days ago.

it's a different rythmn to the kookaburra bit.. dotted etc..kookaburra is quavers. this flute thing is dotted. kookaburra is quavers. dumb

Probably wouldn't work, but couldn't they re-edit it without those 2 bars, then re-release it, start some campaign that ''You're not an Aussie unless you buy this......again'' then they'd get #1 again, and probably make enough cash to get these assholes of their.....assholes.

Probably wouldn't work, but couldn't they re-edit it without those 2 bars, then re-release it, start some campaign that ''You're not an Aussie unless you buy this......again'' then they'd get #1 again, and probably make enough cash to get these assholes of their.....assholes.

''Opportunistic greed''

thats actualy a good idea jp

Its a nutszoid decision. if there isnt an appeal I would say there has been an injustice.
the part they claim is the same is not really part of what makes the song. and its so small that its just natural that a musical phrase might have been played similarly in past songs. there are only so many notes you can play. and the fact that it was written in the 70s and has been a world wide hit for more than 30 years proves that there is nothing in the claim as it would have been taken to court years ago if it was a legit claim. Men at work are being screwed.

I rec'n they just leave the song exactualy as it is bar the two bars in question, and people can just whistle / hum that part, as we all fuck'n know how it go's anyway.

The melody of ''Kookaburra Sits In An Old Gum Tree'' is ripped off from an old Welsh folk song, ''There You Are Sitting, Black Bird''. So, even if a small quote should count as infringement, Larrikin shouldn't have the copyright to the melody of an old Welsh folk song.

This means the end for Even.

How the fuck do bands like Happy Mondays get away with this kinda stuff?

Shit, gotta be carefull what I say, don't want me old mate Bez going to court.

Even when Ryder tries to rip a vocal line he's so tone-deaf that the comparison would hardly stand up in court. But Lazyitis, for one, is credited to Lennon/McCartney.

Really? Thats cool. I didn't know that.

The melody of ''Kookaburra Sits In An Old Gum Tree'' is ripped off from an old Welsh folk song, ''There You Are Sitting, Black Bird''.

So if the original old folk song is out of copyright I wonder what would have happened if Men At Work claimed they were referencing that and not Kookaburra.

Given that both songs are now etched in the boosom of Australia's musical heritage, could Mr Hay not argue that they were paying homage to an Australian classic, whilst writing a 'Modern Australian Classic'? Could they not argue that this was pre-sampling days and they had no technological means to 'give a nod' to the cutural significance of the song, so therefore used a refrain of 2 bars? Given that then entire flute riff would have changed the original tune by more than 10% (thus no copywrite?), surely then there is no claim?

If thats not the case, then does/did New Idea need to pay BJERK for their woeful rip-off of an already crotch-vomiting song?

Even when Ryder tries to rip a vocal line he's so tone-deaf that the comparison would hardly stand up in court. But Lazyitis, for one, is credited to Lennon/McCartney.

hahaha by this logic i could practically cover 'hey jude' and have my own new composition! hurrah!

Yeah you can have originality in cover songs if you're talented enough to make it your own. It's from the case of CBS v Gross which was to do with Collette's 'Ring My Bell', but she failed as the song was only partially rewritten because her vocal range was so limited.

Men At Work's filmclip has the flute player in a tree with a kookaburra. Fail.

Actually just watched it, it's in a tree with a koala. But having listened again, that kookaburra song sound goes all the way through with the reggae chord progression. And I hope Madness never see.

No, it's a Koala in the tree.

Snup!

I don't know why people bother with a legal team. Col should have just started a thread here and saved thousands.

jeez I bet Jet are keeping their heads down

i wonder how spicks and specks feel about this

considering they brought it up, I'd imagine they're pretty chuffed with themselves.

Graeme Downes from NZ band The Verlaines brings his rather encyclopedic music knowledge to bear on the Men At Work / Kookaburra saga on his blog.

I'll just quote a few highlights:

[...]

Why am I going in to bat for a convicted music thief, you might ask? Because I believe the decision is dangerous, counter-creative, and ahistorical.
Composers quote each other and/or themselves; it is a time-honoured tradition of public or private communication. Take Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet, his most played work in that genre probably eclipsing the other fourteen put together.
It is made up almost entirely of quotations, of his own music and others.

[...]

Lets be perfectly clear that artistic practice is not on trial here in the M@W case. Only the good fortune to have made large sums of money from a song is. Whether deliberate or accidental, collage is, in a moral sense, totally legitimate. Some of humanity’s greatest artists have practiced it to telling effect as I hope this blog has shown. And they gain their artistic legitimacy by dint of the fact that their borrowed materials creates something new, works that do not attempt to pass themselves off as someone else’s work. On this basis the decision in the M@W case flies in the face of common sense and history and points to a world full of lawyers and devoid of musicians.

For how much, in truth, has “Man Down Under” passed itself off as the Kookaburra song? Rhythmically identical for one bar is a given. But because they did not hire a musicologist, (or hired a poor one), they obviously failed to mount any decent argument about the differences. The song in its original guise has a childlike simplicity to it (it was written for a Girl Guides competition after all) and begins on scale degree 5 in a major key and utilises the pentatonic version of this scale in the bar in question (for non-musicians, play the black keys only on the piano and you will find this scale—it is a staple of popular music, simple and limited in the number of note combinations, and as such there is a very low threshold of originality surrounding its use). Pentatonic major is useful for bright, happy, uncomplicated, childlike things and as such is perfect for a children’s song (I guarantee without knowing a bar of their music, that the Wiggles use it extensively). But the Men at Work song is in a minor key and the flute melody begins on scale degree 7 relative to it. Whilst it shares pentatonicism (sorry for the big word, equals using the pentatonic scale) with the “Kookaburra” song, it is in its expressive demeanour, quite different.

What does the flute melody contribute, evoke, express? In its minor-key pentatonicism it is so unlike the major pentatonic scale of the original that it is closer to blues than major-key folk. And what does blues often evoke? Masculinity and sexuality? In short “Man down under” is a celebration of blokedom (any song with the line “where beer does flow and men chunder” in it can hardly be about anything else) and as such has no real use or place for the child-like simplicity of the original and it seems to me precisely in this M@W do not attempt to pass off the Kookaburra song. The flute melody expresses, in my view, a dark potency in keeping with the sexually suggestive lyrics (the plundering seems implied, in the context of the first verse, to be of a sexual nature). In short “Man Down Under” has little need of the essence of the “Kookaburra” song and in fact avoids that essence. We are essentially left with one bar of rhythm being responsible for a decent, hardworking musician being potentially stripped of 60% of the revenue derived from his labours. I cannot in any sense see any justice in this, especially when laid against more egregious instances as noted above. So yes I side with the songwriter. This is about greed, is counter artistic expression and sets a very dangerous precedent. If one bar of rhythm is copyrightable, then every composer on the planet is in peril.

For further reading on how complexes of words can mean different things in different contexts I recommend “The problem of speech genres”, by M.M. Bakhtin. His concept of the utterance applies equally to music I feel, or better to say that music and language achieve themselves from a limited stock of building blocks (notes or words) that will appear time and again in different utterances. It is the relationship between the words or notes in the entirety of the utterance wherein originality resides. The judgement in the M@W case is perilously close to copyrighting a word, or a phrase, or a rhythm.

If anyone reading this knows Mr Hay and co, please direct the contents of this blog to them. If they want me on their defence team for a high court appeal, I’ll be much cheaper than a lawyer.

gd

Greg Ham plays at the Espy every Sunday with Nudist Funk Orchestra. Pop down and give him the word, Frankie.

Wrong side of the river ;)

SUPPORT LIVE MUSIC.