I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor, 1978)

I like a mash-up. There are only so many ways of throwing chords together in a way that is pleasant to listen to, and after seventy years of rock’n’roll, not to mention the fifty years of jazz and gospel music from which it emerged, there’s not much that is genuinely new. Technology changes, but not the blues. A lot of songs sound the same.

George Harrison was famously taken to court in 1976 when his first post-Beatles hit (My Sweet Lord, released in 1971) was considered to sound uncomfortably close to the Chiffons’ 1963 song He’s So Fine. Although Harrison claimed to have based his composition on the old hymn Oh Happy Day, he was found to have unconsciously plagiarised the Chiffons' hit.

Perhaps if he’d stuck in a verse of He’s So Fine, or quoted the Chiffons’ instantly recognisable “doo-lang, doo-lang-doo-lang” introduction, My Sweet Lord would have been considered a tribute and not a rip-off. There’s no shame in sounding familiar. When I was working for touring theatre company TAG in Glasgow we had a motto which covered even accidental plagiarism: “all art is synthesis”. It was usually followed by another, “if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.” In pop music, it’s almost a given that your next hit should sound a little like your previous one, or somebody else’s previous one.

For example, take Gloria Gaynor’s empowerment classic I Will Survive. It's incredible to think that the song was originally a B-side. It’s instantly recognisable both in her version and in the heartfelt singalong from all women at every disco where I played it. I can’t think of any song since which has tried to emulate its distinctive arrangement and defiant mood. Shania Twain’s That Don’t Impress Me Much  perhaps comes close on the latter count.

However –

When in the mid-1980s I was working for the socialist 7:84 (Scotland) Theatre Company (“7% of the population own 84% of the wealth”), we took a play called The Albannach to a festival in Toronto. Our leading lady was fabulous force of nature that is Alyxis Daly. The festival club was a bar called the Silver Dollar, to which we repaired every night after our performance. It had a small stage and festival performers were encouraged to get up and do a turn.

Wild horses could not have held Alyxis back. Unaccompanied she launched into the slow introduction and foot-stomping, clap-along verses and choruses of … Those Were The Days, the second release on the Beatles’ Apple label in 1968 and a hit then for Mary Hopkins. Alyxis owned the song and the stage and the entire Silver Dollar and repeated her performance by popular request on every night of our visit to Toronto.

We were so proud. But after the second or third night I found myself thinking, “this reminds me of something.” The chord progression of Those Were The Days is almost exactly the same as that of I Will Survive and with a bit of concentration you can sing one song to the chords of the other as a sort of descant.

Twenty years later I was in an acoustic duo playing the pubs of East Cumbria and we did just that – a mash-up of the two songs, which go together surprisingly well not only musically but thematically. Both look back to happier times. Both reached #1 in countries all around the world including the UK and the US. I have to admit that our version did not have the vitality of Alyxis’s, Gloria’s or even Mary’s; but our audiences did enjoy the meeting of the two songs.

If you sometimes think you can hear a hint of balalaika in Those Were The Days, it’s because the song was originally called Dorogoi Dlinnoyu (Дорогой длинною, literally By the Long Road), written by the Russian romanticist Boris Fomin with lyrics by poet Konstantin Podrevsky, and first recorded in 1925 by Georgian contralto Tamara Tsereteli. There really is nothing new in popular music.