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Artist News
Dr Luke reps points to Clive Davis memoir over Kelly Clarkson comments
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 9 March 2016
The public relations element of the ongoing legal battle between Dr Luke and Kesha continues, with a spokesman for the former responding, sort of, to those claims by one time American Idol Kelly Clarkson to the effect that Dr Luke isn’t a nice person and is hard to work with.
As much previously reported, Kesha Sebert accuses Lukasz Gottwald of plying her with drugs and alcohol and raping her as a teenager. Gottwald claims that the allegations and resulting lawsuit are an attempt by Sebert to get out of her contract with his Kemosabe label, a Sony imprint.
Clarkson – also signed to a Sony label and a past collaborator with Gottwald – discussed the case in an interview with an Australian radio station. She didn’t specifically comment on Sebert’s claims, nor did she make any similar allegations against the producer. However, she did say that Gottwald wasn’t a nice person, and that she had been pressured into working with him by her record company.
Asked by Digital Spy for a response to those comments, a rep for the producer simply provided an extract from the 2013 autobiography of record industry veteran and Sony Music exec Clive Davis. In it, Davis discusses the tensions between Clarkson and Gottwald – and his fellow producer/songwriter Max Martin – concluding that they were caused by Clarkson being out of her comfort zone when in the studio, and that while Gottwald and Martin put pressure on the singer, they did so to get the best performance from her.
Writes Davis: “[Gottwald and Martin] are intent on getting perfect vocal performances, and are relentless in that pursuit. It was hard for Kelly, who had come from the high of winning ‘American Idol’ and then having a double platinum album… But then suddenly you’re in an entirely different world of making records in a studio, and you have to take direction. Kelly didn’t like it”. The results of that process, he added, were magnificent.
As previously noted, while Gottwald prevailed in court in the most recent chapter of his legal battle with Sebert, there has been a lot more public support for the singer than the producer, with a number of artists noting that – whatever did or did not occur while Gottwald was working with Sebert – it is well known that female artists often find themselves working within a misogynistic culture when navigating the music industry.
