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Tulisa not suing Will.i.am, says Will.i.am

By | Published on Tuesday 19 March 2013

Will.i.am

Tulisa Contostavlos is not suing Will.i.am over her possible contribution to his recent hit with Britney Spears, ‘Scream & Shout’, according to the producer himself.

As previously reported, Contostavlos originally recorded a track called ‘I Don’t Give A Fuck’ with ‘Scream & Shout’ songwriters Jean Baptiste and Jef Martens for her 2012 solo album, ‘The Female Boss’, which at least bears some similarities to the subsequent Will.i.am and Spears song. However, the track didn’t appear on ‘The Female Boss’ when it was released.

Depending on who you talk to, Tulisa either decided not to use it (despite it being on the tracklist originally announced for the album), or Baptiste and Martens decided they didn’t want her to have it, or Will.i.am simply demanded that he be given it, so that he could twiddle with it and record the reworked song with Britney instead.

Will.i.am’s version of events is the middle explanation, that it was Baptiste and Martens who took their backing track back and passed it on to him. He then worked his Will.i.am magic on the track, meaning ‘Scream & Shout’ was a very different song, just using the same beat as ‘I Don’t Give A Fuck’.

But last month The Sun reported that Tulisa was livid that she hadn’t been given a songwriting credit on the Will.i.am/Britney hit, claiming that she had contributed some lyrics to it.

The tab added that Contostavlos was preparing to sue for a cut of the royalties, but this, Will.i.am has now said, is not the case. The producer told The Daily Star: “There is no suing. That’s just silly. That needs to be cleared up because that’s just silly. It’s not real, the suing, it’s all just silly”.

So, there you go. Perhaps it is silly. It certainly seems quite silly. Though there we were thinking we’d finally come to a satisfactory conclusion as to why Britney puts on a bizarre Briddish accent on ‘Scream & Shout’ – “she was singing Tulisa’s words” we thought. Now we have to go back to the explanation Will.i.am gave KIIS FM back in December, in which he claimed that he asked her to sing it like that because he is quite famous in the UK.



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