The classic Leonard Cohen song Leo Sayer plagiarised for the awful ‘When I Need You’
The story goes that Leo Sayer was the inspiration for Disco Stu – the lame disco king in The Simpsons who refers to himself in third person and has Sayer’s signature mop. They say to be cringe is to be free, but really, Sayer was pretty cringe, but got himself caught up in a whole messy situation with one of music’s coolest figures.
It’s not a great character read to end up being the inspiration for a mocked and laughed at comedy cartoon. But even while Sayer had hits, that’s always seemed to be the kind of attention and reputation he’s fostered. There’s a sense of pity, almost as if Sayer never seemed quite able to get his branding right. He had the voice, and he had the song, but what he lacked was a palpable vibe, or really, a coolness.
Meanwhile, Leonard Cohen never had that issue. Cohen at first didn’t even want to be a musician. He was a writer living on a Greek island, but he seemed to effortlessly draw in attention and admiration. When he landed in New York, the Greenwich Village scene not only quickly adopted him, but they were quickly begging him to make music, as if they could sense destiny in him, because the artist himself even could.
It’s not that it was effortless. In fact, Cohen’s entire thing was that he was proud of the effort he put in. “If it is your destiny to be this labourer called a writer, you know that you’ve got to go to work every day, but you also know that you’re not gonna get it every day,” he said about his process. Captured in his track ‘Tower Of Song’, he spoke often of paying his dues and putting in the time to pay his “rent every day in the ‘Tower of Song’“.
That’s what makes it even more frustrating to hear of Sayer skipping the work to merely rip Cohen’s off. Stealing the melody from ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, Sayer turned it into ‘When I Need You’ and sang his same chorus to what was found to be the exact same structure. In the end, Sayer was forced to pay Cohen 15% of all of the song’s royalties.
As for Cohen himself, though, he didn’t care too much. “I once had that nicking happen with Leo Sayer. Do you remember that song ‘When I Need You’?” he asked The Globe and Mail in 2006. “Somebody sued them on my behalf … and they did settle,” he continued, suggesting that the entire case was somewhat out of his hands.
Given the mysterious tenderness of ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ with its cryptically emotional lyrics, it might be expected that he would have been hurt or offended by Sayer’s actions. But instead, his response highlights the ridiculousness of plagiarism cases in a world where everything is inspired by something.
“They hired a musicologist, who said that particular motif was in the public domain and, in fact, could be traced back as far as Schubert,” Cohen laughed as the chain went back way further than just his own song, begging the question of whether Sayer should have had to play the classical musician too.
