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Legal
Lewis vs Avicii reaches court today
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 8 August 2011
Swedish producer Avicii will later today go to the High Court in London seeking an injunction blocking Leona Lewis from releasing her new single, ‘Collide’.
As previously reported, Avicii claims that Lewis and her label, Simon Cowell’s Sony imprint Syco, used his instrumental track ‘Penguin’ as the basis for the first single from her third album without permission. He’s doubly pissed off because he and his label, Ministry Of Sound, were preparing to release their own vocal version of the track, renamed ‘Fade Into Darkness’.
Syco has been quoted in the tabloids as saying that there is “zero legal case to answer” because “Avicii is already credited as a songwriter on Leona’s song, it’s a case of sour grapes from Ministry Of Sound”. Lewis has also insisted that Avicii had been aware of and had agreed to publishing splits for her version of the song.
Avicii’s manager Ash Pournouri, however, issued a statement, saying: “We never got to hear the track before it was promoed on radio, how could we clear anything? We’re not amateurs – we don’t sign papers without knowing what we’re getting into”.
If an injunction is granted, it will mean that the planned 4 Sep release for ‘Collide’ will have to be scrapped.
