Future Echoes: The Last Time

In Future Echoes we look at the evolution and influence of those songs that split off in all directions.

The Verve‘s Bitter Sweet Symphony has as strong a claim as anything by Blur, Oasis or Pulp to being Britpop’s defining statement. From the booming thump of the drums through exultant strings, to its “man on the street” wisdom, somewhere between drudgery and possibility. Since 2008 it has taken it’s rightful place as the them music for ITV’s coverage of England international football. To the extent that Britpop had any particular goals, practical or artistic, Bitter Sweet Symphony achieved them all.

Allen Klein was a central casting villain of 1960s rock and roll. A ruthless businessman, a terrifying negotiator and (now, brace yourself) eventually imprisoned tax cheat, he had spent the early part of the decade managing Sam Cooke, and a handful of British Invasion B-listers. Eventually he landed the two greatest prizes in music at the time: The Beatles — lost after the death of Brian Epstein — and, most important for our purposes, The Rolling Stones. In both cases he would leave in cloud of acrimony and litigation that would last for years.

The Verve sampled heavily from The Andrew Oldham Orchestra‘s fabulous version of The Stones‘ The Last Time, surely the greatest example* of that distinctly 1960s trend of taking the pop hits of the day and re-doing them with orchestras.

The original The Last Time was, of course, The Rolling Stones‘ rollicking blues rock classic, during the transition from R&B cover band into that hazy, androgynous, feline blues, R&B with its hips rolling and a little pout on its lips.

The Verve had gotten permission from Decca, The Andrew Oldham Orchestra‘s record label, to use part of the recording, but not Klein, who still owned the rights to the Stones pre-1970 material. And despite the great liberties the Orchestra had taken with the source material, it was still credited as a solely Jagger-Richards composition. Once the song was out and selling like crazy, Klein pounced, successfully suing The Verve for all the song’s royalties. The Stones themselves always kept their distance from the action — while doing nothing much to oppose or reverse it — until last month, when they signed the rights back over to the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft.

There is of course a lingering irony here. Beyond the basic chordal architecture of the song, you may note The Stones’ single doesn’t sound a huge amount like the orchestra version. A song it does sound a great deal like is This May be the Last Time, by the imperishable The Staple Singers, an eerie blues gospel howler. It was recorded a few years earlier, but, as a Keith Richards put it, the melody “goes back into the mists of time.”

I should be clear — I don’t intend this as any kind of gotcha. They’re all amazing songs, and their similarity to one another, conscious or otherwise, makes them more beautiful, not less. Musical allusions, sometimes bordering on theft, are as old as music, and are the only way forms and genres develop. From Bach and Beethoven, to Childish Gambino, sea to shining sea. We can’t stop it and a damn good thing too.

Still, there’s a sour taste to this story that’s hard to wash away. Rock and Roll, for all its genuine emancipatory potential, innovation and vitality was built on the (largely uncredited) ideas of black men, often themselves built on the ideas of black women**. Britpop was a genre built by young working class people in the depressed dog-ends of Thatcherite Britain, leaping on a promise that a handful of those bands had left for them a few decades earlier. It ended its brief period as a dominant genre with one of those bands stealing that promise back.

*If anyone has any “60s rock songs reimagined by Orchestra” recommendations, please let me know, I’m quietly obsessed with them.

** Happily, credit in both cases is slowly arrving where it has long been due.