The Verve — "Bitter Sweet Symphony"
The swelling string loop, Richard Ashcroft shoulder-checking his way down a London pavement without breaking stride, and the most famous royalty heist of the decade — a smash hit whose writer earned a grand total of $1,000 from it for 22 years. (This is The Verve, from England — no relation to Michigan's The Verve Pipe.)
The Verve released "Bitter Sweet Symphony" on June 16, 1997, as the lead single from "Urban Hymns." The song was built on a sample of the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra's mid-60s orchestral recording of the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time," and it climbed to number 2 in the UK and number 12 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in 1998 — one of the most recognizable songs of the decade, instantly summoned by two bars of strings.
But its success masked a legal catastrophe. Virgin had cleared the recording — the Oldham Orchestra's version, licensed from Decca — but not the composition rights underneath it, which belonged to Allen Klein's ABKCO. When the dispute ended, The Verve had relinquished all royalties to Klein, the songwriting credit was changed to Jagger–Richards, and Richard Ashcroft received $1,000. His song played everywhere on Earth; the money went elsewhere. Walter Stern's video — Ashcroft striding down a busy Hoxton pavement, oblivious, bumping into stranger after stranger without ever breaking stride — became as iconic as the track, and the accolades piled up regardless: a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song, and Single of the Year honors from both Rolling Stone and NME for 1997.
The story got its ending in April 2019, when ABKCO, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards agreed to return the royalties and the songwriting credit to Ashcroft — by which point Billboard estimated the song had generated almost $5 million in publishing revenue. "Bitter Sweet Symphony" had long since become something more than a hit: the canonical cautionary tale of sampling, and a pretty good joke about its own chorus — he really couldn't make ends meet.
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