Crockett's Theme vs Chariots of Fire

Hammer vs Vangelis

  • Crockett's Theme

    Votes: 6 66.7%
  • Chariots of Fire

    Votes: 3 33.3%

  • Total voters
    9

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Chariots of Fire is a shit tune and yes Crockett's Theme is good. Also if it weren't for that piece of shit Blade Runner half of you geeks wouldn't even care about Vangelis tbqh.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
can’t go for anything Miami Vice

the clothes, moody pair of shit lead actors, boats that attempted to fill you with awe for the exotic, silly A-Team style gun play, a sunset and fade to closing credits

like Ghostbusters, inadvertently daft 80’s remnants, burn the master reels
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
it seems I am an unreliable narrator, I really should have done my research before posting my potentially libellous contribution to this thread - the damages awarded to Vangelis were only £200,000
I wonder if he ever felt a tiny pang of guilt sending bailiffs round to squeeze the last drops of blood out of his former friend.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
I wonder if he ever felt a tiny pang of guilt sending bailiffs round to squeeze the last drops of blood out of his former friend.

it doesn't seem like it - he was probably wealthy enough to let it ride, or at least come to one of those "pay back £3 out of each giro" arrangements, but no, he let his former friend rot

I have to say that I'm bothered by the judge's statement that it was "impossible" to tell if Vangelis consciously or subconsciously copied the tune - does this mean I can copy any tune and pass it off as mine? After all, it would be impossible to tell that I copied it, even if a 5 year old could mistake my tune for the one that it's impossible to say I copied

which reminds me of a Fall biography I read where one of the ex-members recalled that, allegedly, Brix Smith would rush into rehearsals and breathlessly announce "hey lads, I've come up with a killer riff, listen to this!", and then play it, only for the band to say, "Brix, that's Rebel Rebel by Bowie" or "Brix, that's Search and Destroy by the Stooges" - maybe Vangelis should have stayed in a band so that they could say, "hey Van, that's City of Violets by your former flatmate"...he could have avoided the bother of being sued if he had someone around to tell him "no"
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Are you sure was Brix? In the Mark E Smith book he talked about the way he wrote songs with a certain Fall guitarist (I forget the name but I *think* it was the one Liza had a thing with) and how, as a result, this guy thought he himself wrote the songs. So MES said he would hum a bit and get the guy to play it and then suggest various joining bits and get the guy to mess around with a few and then MES would pick the one he liked and suggest improvements etc so all the ideas came from him. But this guy thought they came from him - and this became most apparent when MES trying to get him to play I Wanna Be Your Dog (this was the exact example he gave) and it ended up with fallbloke37 thinking he had written that himself.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Are you sure was Brix?

[...] at the beginning of August we're back in Focus Studos recording the rest of the album.

Two weeks for twelve songs, starting with Brix's. 'Those two songs you've got', remarks Paul, somewhat snidely, 'did you realise, one's "Egyptian Reggae" by Jonathan Richman, and as for "Elves", that's just "I Wanna Be Your Dog".'

'Really?' She's incredulous. 'I've no idea what you're talking about. I've never heard those songs.'

'Really?' counters Paul. 'I can't believe you've been living with Mark for a year and a half and you haven't heard any Iggy Pop.' Brix ignores him, absorbed as she is in intently tuning her new Rickenbacker, while the rest of us have a happy little bitch, working out between us how we're going to disguise the borrowed riffs.


from The Big Midweek - Life Inside The Fall - Steve Hanley & Olivia Piekarski
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Oh right. So they both did a kinda similar steal... I was gonna make a joke about how you inadvertently stole the story in the same way but you spoiled it by being right.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
I'm wondering if Mark E Smith also did the humming trick on Brix, with the result that she could "come up" with the Stooges and Richman riffs and still honestly say she had never heard the records - I wouldn't put it past him...
 

martin

----
Never seen a full episode of Miami Vice, but remember that tune. If you’d played it to me blind and asked which TV show, I would have guessed “Wish You Were Here?” Just looked like a crap Professionals knock-off, with espadrilles and speedboats.

The judge was completely right, Chariots of Fire sounds nothing like the other song. I hate it though, as it was used for fucking everything in the ‘80s, from Hearts of Gold presentations to comedy skits to local news reports about some charity milk float race. A bit like how you couldn’t watch a Sky football match in the late ‘90s without hearing “Praise You”.

Going with ‘Chariots’ just to spite the unhinged sickos here who want to piss on Vangelis’ grave. Too soon.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think I said before but Jan Hammer was one of the first cds we owned as a family cos one year at Christmas we got a hi-fi with a cd player and so we bought cds as presents for mum and dad. He requested Enya and the Best of Jan Hammer while Mum got one of those Motown Chartbusters Comps. So I always knew that that tune was Jan Hammer although I had no idea who or what Crockett was or that the tune was from a telly programme.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
^ there's my point; most people are aggressively transferring their baggage about the reputation and image of the source for the tune when in reality it's a tune. Nobody hears a song like "Take My Breath Away" by Giorgio Moroder & Berlin and starts sneering about Top Gun (which is a bad movie) unless you have some knowledge pre-existing of Top Gun and know the thing is supposed to be used to accompany the movie. But it's still just music on it's own.

If you hear "Chariots of Fire" on it's own, its the most banal cliches thrown together that on it's own feel trite and overly simplistic, stirring to achieve nothing with false pomp. "Crockett's Theme" on it's own has a balearic/tropicalia theme, it works to convey something more than just a mood because it has multiple moods given that it glistens and also has an undercurrent of dread. Yes it's equally guilty of cheese, but it has so much more by itself divorced of the show.
 

qwerty south

no use for a witticism
I'd love to hear the arguments that the lawyers made that were able to convince judge and/or jury that there was no similarity between the tunes - and that in fact it was so ludicrous of the plaintiff to claim that there was, that his action in bringing the case had to be seen as a malicious attempt to extort the legitimate profits an innocent man had earned from his original work of art - not to mention as a huge waste of the court's time. It seems that the lawyers were able to further persuade the judge that the only moral and legal course of action open to him was to apply punitive damages against the plaintiff at such a massive level that it would dissuade anyone from even thinking of trying this scam again. They must have reasoned that although hitting a penniless artist with such a large fine would mean that he would never be able to pay it back and thus it would, sadly, completely destroy his life, that was a necessary evil that could be borne to rid the world of such spurious cases.



Seems like he copied him there for the second time, er, I mean for the first time of course. To any lawyers reading this, let me be clear that no-one with ears could think that the Vangelis tune was in any way influenced by the other version of it that his flatmate did before his version and which he definitely played to him.
That looks like a rotten theft
 
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