The Verve vs The Rolling Stones: A failed Netflix show that never came to fruition
‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, the lead single taken from The Verve’s third studio album, Urban Hymns, is undoubtedly the band’s signature track. While the song is an undoubted hit, for a long time, Richard Ashcroft and the group did not receive any royalties for their efforts, a situation which very nearly became the centre of a Netflix series.
The song is based on a four-bar looped sample of the 1965 orchestral version of the Rolling Stones’ classic, ‘The Last Time’. However, it was not a direct sample that was used in the final recording but was an arrangement by Wil Malone merely based on the melody in the sample.
In order to use the melody from ‘The Last Time’, The Verve secured rights from Decca Records. However, they ran into problems because they did not get permission from the old Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein, who owned the copyrights to their catalogue from before 1970.
Klein subsequently denied clearance of the sample, claiming that a larger portion of the song had been used than was initially agreed. When the song was released and became a hit, the Verve had to give away 100% of the royalties to Klein, and both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were added to the song’s writing credits.
Naturally, the band were furious, with singer Richard Ashcroft saying that ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ was “the best song Jagger and Richards have written in 20 years”. The song’s copyright issues were always a source of frustration for The Verve, with it generating nearly $5million dollars by 2019.
Eventually, Ashcroft decided to contact Klein’s son, Jody, who had taken over the family business when his father died in 2009. After conversations with Jagger and Richards, they both agreed that the rights to the song would be returned to Ashcroft.
When Ashcroft was awarded the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music, he said: “I never had a personal beef with the Stones. They’ve always been the greatest rock and roll band in the world. It’s been a fantastic development. It’s life-affirming in a way.”
The story is one of the more interesting copyright battles in popular music, so much so that Netflix considered using it to form the basis of a TV series. “The way [the song] has come back to me is fantastic,” Ashcroft said (via Radio X) at the time, although upon hearing about the potential dramatization of the case, he expressed his dismay”.
“I saw an absolutely terrible script Netflix were going to do about ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’. It was an insight into just how far from reality these shows can go. It was an absolute piece of garbage,” he said. “It’s quite scary someone wanted to make it and make people believe it was the reality. I hope it doesn’t happen.” We certainly second Ashcroft’s thoughts here, as any potential series about ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ sounds utterly desperate.
