The Hollies, Radiohead and Lana Del Rey: The line between inspiration and robbery
Music is a lineage. Time and time again, people fail to really realise that. Inspiration is one big cycle, and sounds and styles trickle down. One song impacts another; one artist shapes another. Sure, there are limits. You can’t go about ripping off entire chord progressions or entire sections of lyrics. The contemplation of the line between influence and robbery requires nuance, something that Radiohead arguably failed when they dragged an artist into the courthouse.
The story goes like this: In 2017, Lana Del Rey released Lust for Life, her fifth album. Closing it out is an epic, cinematic five-minute masterpiece called ‘Get Free’, a contemplation on fame, sacrifice, and enlightenment. She croons for lost stars, women who haven’t managed to survive this industry, as she rallies to do it for them.
In 1992, Radiohead released ‘Creep’, a song about being a social outcast that literally everyone in the world knows. It’s a timeless anthem and a huge, huge hit. A looming hit that even the band themselves resent being caught in the shadows of. They came to hate the song that only idiots would like and wished they’d never released it. But despite that, upon the release of Del Rey’s track, they were quick to jump and defend their claim on it.
Radiohead hit the singer with a lawsuit, claiming her new song was plagiarised from theirs. Del Rey claimed that despite offering 40%, the band were pushy. They wanted all 100% of publishing royalties of the song.
The thing is that Del Rey herself said that ‘Creep’ didn’t even come into question when she was writing her track. “I know my song wasn’t inspired by ‘Creep’,” she said straight out in a statement about the suit, adding, “Their lawyers have been relentless” about the pressure Radiohead applied.
The thing is, though, there’s a third player. In 1972, Albert Hammond released ‘The Air That I Breathe’, which, in 1974, The Hollies made a hit. Then, in 1992, when Radiohead released their song, Hammond and the other songwriter, Mike Hazlewood, sued them.
Radiohead lost that one, so on the writing credits of ‘Creep’, Hammond and Hazlewood are right there and get a portion of the royalties. So there lies the question: did Radiohead have any right to try and fight for their names to be on Del Rey’s track, or should it have been Hammond and Hazlewood? Who owns a song? The first person? Or the one that made it most famous? Does ‘Creep’ now overtake ‘The Air That I Breathe’?
Their battle against Del Rey was dropped, so these questions were never posed in front of a court. But time and time again, they are. Each and every year, there are battles between old anthems and new tracks, each one bringing up these same arguments of who owns an idea and when does inspiration overstep the line, even in a case like Del Rey when she claimed Radiohead didn’t even pop into her mind in the process.
