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Liddle Britain

J.S. Bach should claim the royalties

Rod Liddle

Wednesday, 15th November 2006

Rod Liddle reflects on the Procol Harum case and the stunning pretentiousness of 1970s pop groups that ripped off classical music with appalling results

The baton, however, had been taken up, particularly by British pop groups. The unspeakably awful Moody Blues bestowed upon a puzzled nation the portentous, quasi-orchestral (i.e., they used a Mellotron) ‘Nights in White Satin’; those lumpen Brummie journeymen Deep Purple teamed up with another famous orchestra to record an album of great significance which nobody in their right mind will ever listen to. The classics were ripped off right, left and centre. Dave Edmunds stole from Khachaturian for ‘Sabre Dance’. The Beach Boys, a band which once made beautiful pop records of blinding simplicity and delicacy, nicked Bach’s ‘His Sheep May Safely Graze’ for the turgid 1970s sludge of ‘Lady Lynda’. And then there was Eric Carmen, who did what many must have reckoned impossible, and made Rachmaninov even more syrupy and saccharine than he was already with the enormous hit record ‘All By Myself’.

It’s no wonder you’re by yourself, you curly-permed ass, I remember musing, when the song came out. Carmen had done what pretty much all the bands craving high seriousness had done: mistaken whining self-pity for insight and revelation and attempted to justify the whole thing by nailing it to a classical motif. And there was always, lest we forget, Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s take on Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition, arguably the most fatuous and boring record ever made, anywhere, by anyone, ever. Look — don’t get me started. In a perfect world both Mr Fisher and Mr Brooker would be in the dock charged with the premeditated perversion of a hitherto exciting and entertaining art form: rock music. It took the upheaval of punk rock to blow this epic self-indulgence out of the water.

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