Elisabeth Beresford, - writer, broadcaster and creator of the Wombles, died on Christmas Eve, aged 84.
With apologies to both my wives (mainly the current one!) who have each shaped my life in their own way – it can’t be denied that Elisabeth changed my life dramatically and irrevocably when in the late sixties, long before I knew her - she dreamed up the Wombles while walking on Wimbledon Common with her children Marcus and Kate. One of the kids mis-pronounced “Wimbledon Common and called it “Wombledon Common”. When they got back home, Liza (as we always called her) made a list of Wombles characters based on members of her family. In her mind, they didn’t yet have pointy noses and grey fur. That would come later, when the great stop-frame animator, Ivor Wood – he of Magic Roundabout and subsequently Paddington and Postman Pat fame, would design the “look” of them for the first BBC TV series) They were just…Wombles. They lived underground and came up at times when they were unlikely too be spotted by humans, and would convert all the old rubbish left behind by us, into useful items to use in their daily life.
The first book “The Wombles” that appeared caused quite a ripple of interest and was featured on the TV programme Jackanory. After that the BBC commissioned a series of 5 minutes Wombles episodes which were aimed at a pre-school audience but which had the good fortune to be narrated by Bernard Cribbins and also to be broadcast just before the six o’clock news, - a peak crossover spot when the whole family would be watching. Ivor Wood had redesigned them from the book illustrations, in which they were really nothing more than Teddy Bears, - so that now they had the familiar pointy noses and hats and scarves to distinguish between the characters of Bungo, Orinoco, Wellington, Tobermory, Great Uncle Bulgaria, Madame Cholet and Tomsk. Ivor had correctly worked out that seven characters were plenty for a pre-school audience to get to know.
I was brought in to write the music. I was asked by Ivor Wood , and producer Grahame Clutterbuck Managing Director of FilmFair Ltd, the producers, , if I could come up with a signature tune. I suggested that a song might be better, because I could sprinkle it with Womble names and make it sound intriguing. So I came up with “The Wombling Song” (thus becoming the inventor of the word “Wombling” as a verb, which did not exist in the first book). The company liked it, and offered me a fee. I said I would prefer to have the character rights for promotional entertainment and recording purposes instead. They thought that was fair enough, as they were worth nothing to them. So I made a record, which I then had great difficulty selling to a record company. It’s a long story, which I’ve written about on many occasions, but it led to my forming the Wombles pop group and having so many hits that we became the biggest selling singles group of 1975 according to Music Week Magazine, with me as Orinoco, the lead singer, and all of us wearing costumes made by my mother.
Even though the Wombles took up only two years of my 42 year career to date, even to this day I am still referred to as “The Man Behind The Wombles” a fact which I would imagine must have irritated Liza as much or more than it irritated me (although she never showed it).. I guess I was the man in front of the Wombles, being the singer and songwriter.
There was quite a lot of contact and discussion between Liza’s company “Wombles Ltd” and myself in those first days of Wombles’ success. The combined force of the books, the TV show and the pop group had launched the Wombles into a special place in people’s hearts and they had become a national phenomenon.
I did not always agree with decisions made by Wombles Ltd. It wasn’t Liza herself, but the two businessmen who ran Wombles Ltd together with Liza’s husband Max Robertson with whom I often crossed swords. I pulled my hair out with frustration when, at the height of the Wombles pop group’s success, they mounted NINE Christmas stage shows – of very poor quality – all over the UK. Because I was “The Womble Man:” I was deeply embarrassed to think that people would blame me for the shows, - and they did. They were horrible, scruffy shows, badly directed and produced on a shoestring budget. More importantly, they destroyed , in people’s minds the idea of the pop group being unique. There were nine Orinocos, Nine Wellingtons, Nine Uncle Bulgarias . Good grief!
To us (although probably ONLY to us) it seemed like having nine John Lennons and Nine Paul McCartneys. The specialness of “a pop group” had gone. Consequently, on the day the story of the shows hit the press (and it was front page stuff), we began to lose the race for “Christmas Number One” with “Wombling Merry Christmas”. Our daily sales figures halved, and the record which was heading steadily for number two “Lonely This Christmas” by the group Mud – overtook us and snatched the number one spot. That was when I lost interest in being a Womble for any more of my life. I was A CHARACTER in a band called The Wombles. I was “their” lead singer! Would I ever escape that? Probably not.
So I stopped doing it. And the Wombles disappeared from TV screens and the spin-off merchandising activity ground to a halt.
Through all of these ups and downs, Elisabeth and I had nothing but good conversations. She moved to Alderney, and when the children were grown up, she was divorced from her rather domineering husband, Max, and lived on the island until the end of her life. She always called me “Dear Heart” in the way characters in an Agatha Christie novel might. But I am absolutely sure it was nothing special; I’m sure everyone was “Dear Heart” to Liza, - rather like some people call everyone “Darling”. But she herself was a darling. She would write to me occasionally. She lost a lot of money – as did her husband – in the “Lloyds Name” scenario, and lived for many years in relative poverty.
I visited her once on Alderney, with her son, Marcus – who had been about thirteen when the Wombles had happened, in the seventies. He was by then grown up and had his wife and his own young son, Charlie, with him. Charlie’s Grandmother, Liza, was her usual charming, maternal self and we had a very pleasant couple of days thinking about the impending remake of some Wombles material, this time by ITV.
Recently, I’ve been talking to the even more grown up Marcus and Kate – the two children who had been walking on the Common with Liza on that fateful day, - the day that changed their lives, their mother’s life, and mine. We’ve been talking about the possibility of a Wombles revival. None of us was particularly enamoured by the quality of a remake by a Canadian company about twenty years ago, and we have been talking about making something special. Something Liza would be proud of. Liza has been ill for some time, but aware of our discussions. I know Marcus would particularly have liked his Mum to have seen the new, high quality incarnation of the Wombles, and to have shared in the fun.
Alas, that is not, now, to be. But I do think Marcus and Kate will have kept Elisabeth up to date with our progress, and now, all the more, I feel a duty to help to bring about a new awakening for the Wombles – in memory of the very special woman who created them.
Sunday, 26 December 2010
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Postman Batt breaks silence on silence.
So I’m sitting there fielding a few tweets and someone asks me the old question about whether it was digital or analogue silence that I stole from John Cage in 2002. Well, that’s an old line I used at the time, that my silence was better than his because it was digital. But it made me think, “enough’s enough, I’m going to spill the beans on how this old story came about”, so I “confessed” that it had all been a “scam".
Actually, it was a TEENY bit scamesque but not totally. It came about from a real situation.
What happened was that I had been mastering the album “Classical Graffiti” by The Planets group which I produced and managed. Classic FM radio had told me they couldn’t play tracks with electric guitars on them, but apart from that, they loved it and would have made it album of the week. So I went into the studio and did a set of “classical” mixes of the tracks, with Ben, the guitarist using his classical, gut-strung guitar. They sounded good that way, and we didn’t feel it was an artistic compromise. But I didn’t want the “shape” of the album to include these repeated tracks, so I put a minute of silence in between the main album and the handful of more classical sounding mixes, to distinguish them from the rest of the album.
While I was mastering them, I thought it might be fun to give the silence a name, at the same time as having a dig at John Cage, who famously wrote a silent piece called 4’33”, - which was literally that length of just silence. I called my track “A One Minute Silence” and credited the writers (Mike Batt/Clint Cage) on the label copy that I supplied to EMI Classics. Why “Clint” Cage? Because I didn’t want to be accused of misusing John Cage’s name, even though I thought it highly unlikely, and – in the unlikely and almost unimagineable case of a copyright challenge, I would be safe. The Performing Right Society and the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) allow a writer or composer to have two registered pseudonyms, so I became, and still am, Clint Cage. Clint and Mike had co-written a silent piece called “A One Minute Silence”.
The album was released and went straight to number one in the UK Classical charts and stayed there for three solid months. Some time during those delightful months I had a letter from the MCPS informing me that they would be upholding a claim from John Cage’s Publisher,- Peter’s Edition – for half of the royalties on “my” silence. My secretary brought the letter to me one lovely sunny day when I was having lunch on the terrace of my house, with my mother. I exploded with laughter. I couldn’t believe anyone would take a bit of silence seriously. My mother (bless ‘er, still with a great sense of humour, aged 85, said “Which bit of his 4’33” silence do they claim you pinched?”. That night, I couldn’t get into bed for roaring with laughter. I was convulsed, it was just so delightful. Of course I did eventually get into bed but you know what I mean. I couldn’t for a while, then I did, after the laughter died down. Don’t ask stupid questions, and sit up straight.
I wrote back to the MCPS telling them that they’d got it wrong. My co-writer was not, and was not CLAIMED to be, John Cage, but a certain Clint Cage – in other words myself. I could prove that I had registered the pseudonym at the time of writing the “piece”, as I still had the letter to PRS, and I also had a copy of my label copy notification to EMI. The situation had been made a little more complicated by the fact that – on receipt of my label copy sheet showing “(Mike Batt/Clint Cage)” as the composers, some bright spark at EMI had shortened it to (Batt/Cage) – giving the impression that I was masquerading as the great man.
Eventually, I got to speak to the MD of Peter’s Edition, Nicholas Riddle, and he told me that they did indeed have a case, and that it was based on my use of Cage’s name. I said that I was sure we would sort it out in a gentlemanly way, - perhaps by them giving in and admitting I was right. But they didn’t. There was a certain amount of humour in our conversation. I thought he seemed a nice bloke and said to him that whatever happened, any reportage of the incident would raise awareness of the EXISTENCE of copyright – which cannot be taken for granted. He agreed.
I challenged him to a public duel. We would meet at Baden Powell House on the Cromwell Road, and The Planets could play my piece of silence and he could bring a musician or band to demonstrate/perform the Cage piece. We invited the world’s press, expecting perhaps someone from the Big Issue and a couple of sex-crazed Planets fans, but in fact the World’s Press DID turn up, and Nicholas and I found ourselves in heavyweight press conference situation. After the two performances – during which the Planets swayed about, doing nothing, but looking great, and a young clarinetist “played” 4’33” by, er, doing nothing for 4’33”. Nicholas and I engaged in a robust debate and took questions. We both gave at least 3 TV interviews. It was featured on the National TV news that evening, It made a big piece in the Telegraph and many other papers the following day, and then got picked up as a story, internationally. I was interviewed by several American news radio stations. The story even made it to Time Magazine and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Job done, or so we thought. We all had a bit of a titter, but not in public, - but, horror of horrors – Peter’s Edition DID NOT drop their case.
After a while, I thought of a way of spinning the story and having a bit more fun with it – and bringing closure to the situation in a dignified way for the Cage Estate/Peter’s Edition. I called Nicholas and made a proposal. I told him there was no way on Earth he could win, but that I had an idea. I would make a donation of an “undisclosed sum” (actually 1,000 pounds) – to the John Cage Trust, so long as Nicholas received it on the steps of the High Court in London in front of The World’s Press, - giving the impression that we were settling out of court to avoid a costly battle, but NOT ACTUALLY SAYING THAT. This was pure scam, pure publicity stunt on my part, and I’m not sorry! Nobody got hurt, - and the fact that copyright exists and can be protected - and has a value, - was once again being demonstrated.
We met on the steps of the High Court a few days later, and everyone from Reuters to Whippet Trainers’ Monthly turned up. Nicholas and I gave our respective TV, radio, press and TV interviews as the Planets stood around looking sexy. Someone from Reuters was pushing Nicholas to disclose the “undisclosed sum”. Was it four figures? Nicholas shook his head. Was it five figures? He said “No Comment”. Was it SIX figures, perhaps?. Nicholas caught the eye of my assistant, She caught my eye. I nodded to her. She nodded to him. He nodded to them. Three naughty nods, it was, but harmless fun.
The next day, the headlines read “Batt pays 110K for Stealing Silence” and stuff like that. There were pictures with me and the scantily clad girls from the Planets – I wonder why the boy members of the band were cropped out!
The story went around the world again and has passed into recent legend. Oxford University held a debate about it, even asking me to attend and speak, but I was unable to make the date. Professors of law and students of copyright have variously argued about it. Friends sympathized with me at the injustice. I winked and told them not to worry – all was not what it seemed. Rivals and enemies (do I have any?) – well if I do, they hugged themselves at my foolishness and pointed out that all would have gone my way, had I not been so stupid as to credit Cage as the writer.
That’s it. So all these years I’ve kept silent about that silence. I’ve allowed people to think I was a bit silly to let EMI credit John Cage as the writer. “Cage” is only a surname. If Peter’s Edition represented a young songwriter called Angus McCartney would they be challenging every Lennon/McCartney song on the grounds that it carried the same surname as that of their composer?
Hee hee. Silence is Golden.
And now, a REAL breach of copyright, for which I apologise in advance to the authors of the correspondence I shall now quote – from the site, linked:
http://johncage.org/blog/hyde_riddle_exchange.html
and declare that I will gladly take down the following letters to which they OWN THE COPYRIGHT, should they ask, - even though by having been posted on another site I presume they are now in the Public Domain. Wikileaks, eat your heart out.
Lots of Love,
Mike Batt
PS: “A ONE Minute Silence” is available on iTiunes for 99p
Lewis Hyde/Nicholas Riddle Exchange
Dear Nicholas Riddle, I have your name from Laura Kuhn at the John Cage Trust. I wrote to Laura a while back because, in a book I am writing about "cultural commons" vs. proprietary work, I think I may use the story of Mike Batt listing a minute of silence under the "Batt/Cage" credit--and the Peters Edition suit that followed. I know about this from various news reports, such as the one I paste below (see Cassingham essay.)
Cage was/is an important figure for me (he appears in a chapter of my book, TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD), and mostly I am amused by the philosophical implications of this tiff. (For example: much copyright law is based on the idea of the work reflecting the author's personality; Cage, of course, went to some lengths to remove personality from the work.)
I rather assume that there is more to this story than what's reported in the papers. Is there? What might you tell me? All best wishes, Lewis Hyde
From: Nicholas Riddle
Sent: 10 July 2008
To: Lewis Hyde
Subject: John Cage & Mike Batt – a query
Dear Lewis (if I may),
Very many thanks for your message - Laura had mentioned that you would be writing. I'm certainly very happy to answer your questions as far as I can, the only proviso being that we did make a confidentiality agreement over some details, and so some specifics have to remain private to the people and organizations involved. However, I suspect that much can be deduced from more general statements. The first thing to say is that the press went considerably beyond the facts that they were given and in some cases did not entirely understand the import of what they were being told. It might also be worth knowing that only a couple of journalists turned up for the "final round" on the steps of the High Court, and their impressions of what was happening then traveled around the world and became the holy writ of the story - in spite of the fact that they had not entirely accurately grasped the matter. In particular, neither Mike Batt, nor I, nor any member of the Peters team or the Cage Trust, has ever quoted any figure to the press in connection with the settlement. Perhaps it would be helpful to use the text you forwarded as a basis for a brief commentary:
British musician Mike Batt produced the album Classical Graffiti for the rock group The Planets. The album had two distinct styles on it, so Batt decided to put a minute's break between the two sections.
"I thought for my own amusement it would be funny to call it something, so I called it A Minute's Silence and credited it as track 13, and put my name as Batt/Cage, as a tongue-in-cheek dig at the John Cage piece," Batt said.
So far so good, but it might also be important to know that his record company forwarded the label copy to MCPS, which was handling the mechanical royalties for these CDs. They then identified Cage’s 4’33” as the work in question and started to pay out pro rata royalties to us as Cage’s publisher. It was some time before this turned into a late June news story in one of the broadsheet papers. After some discussion between the parties, we agreed to a run-off between the Batt piece (performed by The Planets) and the Cage piece, performed at the clarinet by our London firm’s Head of New Music, Marc Dooley – a real virtuoso on the instrument when a work actually calls for notes to be played, by the way. A great deal of press turned up for this at Baden Powell House in London, with television coverage and many slightly stereotypical journalists who had not the faintest idea what we were talking about, but wrote quite entertaining – if also misleading – stories about it.
The Cage piece he refers to is a 1952 "composition" called 4'33", a "famous" bit of "music" -- 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence -- by American avant-garde composer John Cage, who died in 1992. Cage was granted a copyright for 4'33". Batt's acknowledging it, even in a cheeky way, was a big mistake: Peters Edition, Cage's music publisher, sued Batt for copyright infringement on behalf of the John Cage Trust, asking for a quarter of the royalties from Batt's album.
That's right: the lawsuit claimed Batt stole his silence from Cage. "As my mother said, 'Which bit of his four minutes and 33 seconds are they claiming you stole?'," Batt said at the time. None of it, he insisted. "I certainly wasn't quoting his silence. I claim my silence is original silence." Perhaps in the world of lawsuits, such a claim makes some sort of logical sense.
Of course, the claim was nothing to do with stealing silence from Cage. The issue was entirely that Batt identified this silence as having Cage authorship, leading to a presumption that he was quoting in some sense from 4’33”, and was so successful in doing so that the collecting society started to pay out mechanical royalties for it. There were really only two options here: either, the track really was intended as a quotation from 4’33” or some other unidentified Cage work, in which case mechanical royalties were due; or, he was misappropriating Cage’s name in the context of a musical work, and that also would not do. He, after all, was the one who claimed it was Cage in the first place. Was he passing off something else as being by Cage, or was the work actually Cage? Since performances of 4’33” could be said in some sense to be self-identified as such, it was really his call.
When the infringement claim came to light, few thought it could possibly prevail. Duncan Lamont, a British lawyer specializing in the music industry, was one expert who rolled his eyes over the squabble. "Is [Cage's composition] a work? Has it been written down, is it a literary, artistic or dramatic work? The argument will be there is no work because there are no notes." If there is "no work", there could be no infringement and the case would fail.
Well yes, it has been written down – in three versions, as a matter of fact. There is another point here: what makes a performance of 4’33”? Partly it must be the announcement of the performance, the attendance of the audience, the intention of performer and his/her/their adherence to the instructions in the score; but one could argue that it is also the apparatus around it – the concert hall and its traditional accoutrements, and perhaps also the payment of performing or other royalties that attends the performance of any work of music. Well, that’s one of the more theoretical issues in the story. In fact, the question Duncan Lamont put is only partly related to the issue. If there was no performance of an artistic work here, then Batt is still open to question for having used Cage’s name as he did.
Batt, too, was feisty. "Has the world gone mad? I'm prepared to do time rather than pay out," he told the press. "We are talking as much as 100,000 pounds (US$155,000)" in royalties. Besides, he said, "mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds."
If a 1 minute piece on a 76 minute CD could, on a pro rata basis, generate £100,000 royalties, just imagine what the overall royalty rate would have to be – or alternatively, how many copies one would have to sell to reach these figures…
But just a few months later, Batt was done -- he settled out of court for an undisclosed six-figure sum, or pretty much what he was afraid he would have to pay if the suit succeeded. He handed over a check on the steps of the High Court in London, saying he was "making this gesture of a payment to the John Cage Trust in recognition of my own personal respect for John Cage and in recognition of his brave and sometimes outrageous approach to artistic experimentation in music."
See my comments above on what I can and cannot say. However, the events described above did indeed take place. Actually, here’s something nobody knows: the cheque he handed me on the steps of the High Court turned out actually to say “Pay the Bearer: An Undisclosed Sum” – which was very funny at the time, and perhaps just showed that he did not want the details discovered by accident if one of us were to drop the cheque. However, he followed it up, good as his word, with a real cheque shortly thereafter.
A spokesman for Peters Edition, Cage's publisher, called the payment a "donation" which was accepted "in good spirit." He said the company had been ready to go to court to defend the copyright they controlled.
Well, not quite. We carefully said that we would willingly go to court to defend the reputation, works, and legitimate interests of our composer – a distinction that was lost on the reporter.
Donation, or extortion payment? You be the judge, but be warned: now that you know of this case, you really can't afford to be silent about it.
Well, obviously it was not the latter. Mike Batt really did make a donation, and he did so as his proposed solution to the issue, which we accepted. Although we didn’t actually talk about this in arriving at the settlement, my personal take on this is that it is important to remember that Mike Batt is also a composer and that a significant part of his income is from royalties earned on his existing works. The same applies to CDs of his music or the music of the bands he creates and promotes. He is heavily invested himself in the concept of intellectual property and its value. And rightly so, in my view. Artistic creativity is one of the things that truly differentiates us from the animal kingdom (as well as opposable thumbs), and is one of the most distinctively human characteristics. It has always seemed to me that the current generation has its sense of values completely screwed up: artistic creativity is one of the most valuable things on the planet, worthy of more protection and appreciation than most of the things on which we place emphasis and consider valuable. The people who think that artistic creativity of all or any kinds should somehow be valued like the air we breathe, or the water we need to live, simply don’t understand what kind of human gold dust they are dismissing as so much air and water. It’s the crown jewels of the human race. Of course, it should be made available to all, but the creators should be protected and valued for what they say about what it means to be really human. Hope this has been of some help. If there’s anything else you would like to know (apart from the things I cannot go into, obviously), please do not hesitate to get in touch.
With best wishes, Nicholas Riddle
From: Lewis Hyde
Sent: Between 10 July and 23 July 2008
To: Nicholas Riddle
Subject: John Cage & Mike Batt – a query
Thanks so much for the helpful background on the Mike Batt dust up. I had suspected that the issue had more to do with attribution than with infringement.
I end up with one set of questions about the case, which I'll preface with a few somewhat philosophical reflections.
First of all, I agree with you about the value of intellectual property although, as I am deep into a book about this, I feel there are many nuances to be teased out. One of those nuances appears in what follows; beyond that I'll simply say that I think the 1710 Statute of Anne was a wise and just law, combining authors' rights with a term limit such that created work eventually feeds the public domain. Much of the puzzle in IP policy is to figure out how to balance public and private rights such that both are preserved.
As for the Batt business and the nuance it raises, I would now frame the conflict as a moral rights issue, where such rights include the right of attribution, the right to prevent false attribution, and the right of integrity. As I understand it, the concept of moral rights comes out of a tradition (beginning with Kant) asserting a connection between an author and his or her creation. Moral rights protect the personal and reputational, rather than purely monetary, value of a work to its creator.
We don't really have this tradition here in the United States--with one exception, and that rather recent: the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 speaks to both attribution and integrity. That law says that these rights "are considered personal to the author and cannot therefore be bought, sold or transferred"; moreover, they end with the death of the artist.
A chapter in my book, TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD, is devoted to the creative uses of chance and, of course, contains considerable reflection on Cage's practice. At one point I contrast Picasso and Cage:
"Picasso ... was quite happy to work with accident as a tool of revelation ('From errors one gets to know the personality!'), but Cage was not ('Personality is a flimsy thing on which to build an art.'), for Cage was after [Jacques] Monod's 'absolute newness' of pure chance. He was not out to discover any hidden self, nor did he think chance operations would reveal any hidden, already-existing divine reality, as ancient diviners thought. 'Composition is like writing a letter to a stranger,' he once said. 'I don't hear things in my head, nor do I have inspiration ....'"
Elsewhere I contrast Cage and Jackson Pollock:
"Pollock's working assumption was that the wildness of his paintings expressed his deep, primitive, and feeling self, and Cage would argue, I think, that no matter how 'deep' the self is, it's still the self. 'Automatic art... has never interested me, because it is a way of falling back, resting on one's memories and feelings subconsciously, is it not? And I have done my utmost to free people from that.' Cage much preferred the incidental drawings that are scattered throughout Thoreau's JOURNALS: 'The thing that is beautiful about the Thoreau drawings is that they're completely lacking in self-expression.'"
You write that artists help us know "what it means to be really human." I agree. In Cage's case, what he wanted us to know is that the impermanence of personality is a gateway to perception.
I am aware that there are complexities here, that Cage for example used chance in composition but then cared very much that his pieces be performed as composed, not submitted to further chance.
That said, and to come back to the Mike Batt affair, what interests me is the seeming disconnect between Cage's Buddhist practice that sought to suspend self-making and personality, and the philosophy behind moral rights which assumes, as some European law asserts, that the work contains "the imprint of the author's personality." Though not working from the same tradition, U.S. Copyright law has sometimes touched on "personality" in a related way. A key Supreme Court case from 1903, for example, concerned whether or not there could be a copyright in something as mundane as printed posters for circus acts. In affirming that there could be, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that "an artist who draws from life ... makes a work that is the personal reaction of an individual upon nature. Personality always contains something unique. It expresses its singularity even in handwriting, and a very modest grade of art has in it something irreducible which is one man's alone."
Such is the set of ideas out of which I'm musing on the Mike Batt story, with one addition, I suppose, and that is Cage's sense of humor wherein there is a strong link between happiness and being open to happenstance. For it seems to me that this tale begins with a joke on Batt's part, and that once the mechanical royalties appear, the joke continues--the "run-off" between the two pieces seems entirely in the right spirit.
But then things seem to have gotten serious, I presume because of the background moral rights issue (as you say of Batt, "he was misappropriateing Cage's name"). All of which leads me to my questions:
You write that Batt's donation was "his proposed solution to the issue." What had Peters Edition ask for, such that a solution was required? Was a legal action ever brought or suggested? If so, what was the point of law? If not, what issue needed to be solved? If the issue is "reputation" and misappropriation, and if Batt--himself a composer--understood that, why not a simple apology and change in the credit line? Why a donation? From the outside, at least, the donation has the look of an out-of-court settlement.
I really appreciate your having taken the time to reply to my original e-mail.
All best wishes, Lewis
Actually, it was a TEENY bit scamesque but not totally. It came about from a real situation.
What happened was that I had been mastering the album “Classical Graffiti” by The Planets group which I produced and managed. Classic FM radio had told me they couldn’t play tracks with electric guitars on them, but apart from that, they loved it and would have made it album of the week. So I went into the studio and did a set of “classical” mixes of the tracks, with Ben, the guitarist using his classical, gut-strung guitar. They sounded good that way, and we didn’t feel it was an artistic compromise. But I didn’t want the “shape” of the album to include these repeated tracks, so I put a minute of silence in between the main album and the handful of more classical sounding mixes, to distinguish them from the rest of the album.
While I was mastering them, I thought it might be fun to give the silence a name, at the same time as having a dig at John Cage, who famously wrote a silent piece called 4’33”, - which was literally that length of just silence. I called my track “A One Minute Silence” and credited the writers (Mike Batt/Clint Cage) on the label copy that I supplied to EMI Classics. Why “Clint” Cage? Because I didn’t want to be accused of misusing John Cage’s name, even though I thought it highly unlikely, and – in the unlikely and almost unimagineable case of a copyright challenge, I would be safe. The Performing Right Society and the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) allow a writer or composer to have two registered pseudonyms, so I became, and still am, Clint Cage. Clint and Mike had co-written a silent piece called “A One Minute Silence”.
The album was released and went straight to number one in the UK Classical charts and stayed there for three solid months. Some time during those delightful months I had a letter from the MCPS informing me that they would be upholding a claim from John Cage’s Publisher,- Peter’s Edition – for half of the royalties on “my” silence. My secretary brought the letter to me one lovely sunny day when I was having lunch on the terrace of my house, with my mother. I exploded with laughter. I couldn’t believe anyone would take a bit of silence seriously. My mother (bless ‘er, still with a great sense of humour, aged 85, said “Which bit of his 4’33” silence do they claim you pinched?”. That night, I couldn’t get into bed for roaring with laughter. I was convulsed, it was just so delightful. Of course I did eventually get into bed but you know what I mean. I couldn’t for a while, then I did, after the laughter died down. Don’t ask stupid questions, and sit up straight.
I wrote back to the MCPS telling them that they’d got it wrong. My co-writer was not, and was not CLAIMED to be, John Cage, but a certain Clint Cage – in other words myself. I could prove that I had registered the pseudonym at the time of writing the “piece”, as I still had the letter to PRS, and I also had a copy of my label copy notification to EMI. The situation had been made a little more complicated by the fact that – on receipt of my label copy sheet showing “(Mike Batt/Clint Cage)” as the composers, some bright spark at EMI had shortened it to (Batt/Cage) – giving the impression that I was masquerading as the great man.
Eventually, I got to speak to the MD of Peter’s Edition, Nicholas Riddle, and he told me that they did indeed have a case, and that it was based on my use of Cage’s name. I said that I was sure we would sort it out in a gentlemanly way, - perhaps by them giving in and admitting I was right. But they didn’t. There was a certain amount of humour in our conversation. I thought he seemed a nice bloke and said to him that whatever happened, any reportage of the incident would raise awareness of the EXISTENCE of copyright – which cannot be taken for granted. He agreed.
I challenged him to a public duel. We would meet at Baden Powell House on the Cromwell Road, and The Planets could play my piece of silence and he could bring a musician or band to demonstrate/perform the Cage piece. We invited the world’s press, expecting perhaps someone from the Big Issue and a couple of sex-crazed Planets fans, but in fact the World’s Press DID turn up, and Nicholas and I found ourselves in heavyweight press conference situation. After the two performances – during which the Planets swayed about, doing nothing, but looking great, and a young clarinetist “played” 4’33” by, er, doing nothing for 4’33”. Nicholas and I engaged in a robust debate and took questions. We both gave at least 3 TV interviews. It was featured on the National TV news that evening, It made a big piece in the Telegraph and many other papers the following day, and then got picked up as a story, internationally. I was interviewed by several American news radio stations. The story even made it to Time Magazine and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Job done, or so we thought. We all had a bit of a titter, but not in public, - but, horror of horrors – Peter’s Edition DID NOT drop their case.
After a while, I thought of a way of spinning the story and having a bit more fun with it – and bringing closure to the situation in a dignified way for the Cage Estate/Peter’s Edition. I called Nicholas and made a proposal. I told him there was no way on Earth he could win, but that I had an idea. I would make a donation of an “undisclosed sum” (actually 1,000 pounds) – to the John Cage Trust, so long as Nicholas received it on the steps of the High Court in London in front of The World’s Press, - giving the impression that we were settling out of court to avoid a costly battle, but NOT ACTUALLY SAYING THAT. This was pure scam, pure publicity stunt on my part, and I’m not sorry! Nobody got hurt, - and the fact that copyright exists and can be protected - and has a value, - was once again being demonstrated.
We met on the steps of the High Court a few days later, and everyone from Reuters to Whippet Trainers’ Monthly turned up. Nicholas and I gave our respective TV, radio, press and TV interviews as the Planets stood around looking sexy. Someone from Reuters was pushing Nicholas to disclose the “undisclosed sum”. Was it four figures? Nicholas shook his head. Was it five figures? He said “No Comment”. Was it SIX figures, perhaps?. Nicholas caught the eye of my assistant, She caught my eye. I nodded to her. She nodded to him. He nodded to them. Three naughty nods, it was, but harmless fun.
The next day, the headlines read “Batt pays 110K for Stealing Silence” and stuff like that. There were pictures with me and the scantily clad girls from the Planets – I wonder why the boy members of the band were cropped out!
The story went around the world again and has passed into recent legend. Oxford University held a debate about it, even asking me to attend and speak, but I was unable to make the date. Professors of law and students of copyright have variously argued about it. Friends sympathized with me at the injustice. I winked and told them not to worry – all was not what it seemed. Rivals and enemies (do I have any?) – well if I do, they hugged themselves at my foolishness and pointed out that all would have gone my way, had I not been so stupid as to credit Cage as the writer.
That’s it. So all these years I’ve kept silent about that silence. I’ve allowed people to think I was a bit silly to let EMI credit John Cage as the writer. “Cage” is only a surname. If Peter’s Edition represented a young songwriter called Angus McCartney would they be challenging every Lennon/McCartney song on the grounds that it carried the same surname as that of their composer?
Hee hee. Silence is Golden.
And now, a REAL breach of copyright, for which I apologise in advance to the authors of the correspondence I shall now quote – from the site, linked:
http://johncage.org/blog/hyde_riddle_exchange.html
and declare that I will gladly take down the following letters to which they OWN THE COPYRIGHT, should they ask, - even though by having been posted on another site I presume they are now in the Public Domain. Wikileaks, eat your heart out.
Lots of Love,
Mike Batt
PS: “A ONE Minute Silence” is available on iTiunes for 99p
Lewis Hyde/Nicholas Riddle Exchange
Dear Nicholas Riddle, I have your name from Laura Kuhn at the John Cage Trust. I wrote to Laura a while back because, in a book I am writing about "cultural commons" vs. proprietary work, I think I may use the story of Mike Batt listing a minute of silence under the "Batt/Cage" credit--and the Peters Edition suit that followed. I know about this from various news reports, such as the one I paste below (see Cassingham essay.)
Cage was/is an important figure for me (he appears in a chapter of my book, TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD), and mostly I am amused by the philosophical implications of this tiff. (For example: much copyright law is based on the idea of the work reflecting the author's personality; Cage, of course, went to some lengths to remove personality from the work.)
I rather assume that there is more to this story than what's reported in the papers. Is there? What might you tell me? All best wishes, Lewis Hyde
From: Nicholas Riddle
Sent: 10 July 2008
To: Lewis Hyde
Subject: John Cage & Mike Batt – a query
Dear Lewis (if I may),
Very many thanks for your message - Laura had mentioned that you would be writing. I'm certainly very happy to answer your questions as far as I can, the only proviso being that we did make a confidentiality agreement over some details, and so some specifics have to remain private to the people and organizations involved. However, I suspect that much can be deduced from more general statements. The first thing to say is that the press went considerably beyond the facts that they were given and in some cases did not entirely understand the import of what they were being told. It might also be worth knowing that only a couple of journalists turned up for the "final round" on the steps of the High Court, and their impressions of what was happening then traveled around the world and became the holy writ of the story - in spite of the fact that they had not entirely accurately grasped the matter. In particular, neither Mike Batt, nor I, nor any member of the Peters team or the Cage Trust, has ever quoted any figure to the press in connection with the settlement. Perhaps it would be helpful to use the text you forwarded as a basis for a brief commentary:
British musician Mike Batt produced the album Classical Graffiti for the rock group The Planets. The album had two distinct styles on it, so Batt decided to put a minute's break between the two sections.
"I thought for my own amusement it would be funny to call it something, so I called it A Minute's Silence and credited it as track 13, and put my name as Batt/Cage, as a tongue-in-cheek dig at the John Cage piece," Batt said.
So far so good, but it might also be important to know that his record company forwarded the label copy to MCPS, which was handling the mechanical royalties for these CDs. They then identified Cage’s 4’33” as the work in question and started to pay out pro rata royalties to us as Cage’s publisher. It was some time before this turned into a late June news story in one of the broadsheet papers. After some discussion between the parties, we agreed to a run-off between the Batt piece (performed by The Planets) and the Cage piece, performed at the clarinet by our London firm’s Head of New Music, Marc Dooley – a real virtuoso on the instrument when a work actually calls for notes to be played, by the way. A great deal of press turned up for this at Baden Powell House in London, with television coverage and many slightly stereotypical journalists who had not the faintest idea what we were talking about, but wrote quite entertaining – if also misleading – stories about it.
The Cage piece he refers to is a 1952 "composition" called 4'33", a "famous" bit of "music" -- 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence -- by American avant-garde composer John Cage, who died in 1992. Cage was granted a copyright for 4'33". Batt's acknowledging it, even in a cheeky way, was a big mistake: Peters Edition, Cage's music publisher, sued Batt for copyright infringement on behalf of the John Cage Trust, asking for a quarter of the royalties from Batt's album.
That's right: the lawsuit claimed Batt stole his silence from Cage. "As my mother said, 'Which bit of his four minutes and 33 seconds are they claiming you stole?'," Batt said at the time. None of it, he insisted. "I certainly wasn't quoting his silence. I claim my silence is original silence." Perhaps in the world of lawsuits, such a claim makes some sort of logical sense.
Of course, the claim was nothing to do with stealing silence from Cage. The issue was entirely that Batt identified this silence as having Cage authorship, leading to a presumption that he was quoting in some sense from 4’33”, and was so successful in doing so that the collecting society started to pay out mechanical royalties for it. There were really only two options here: either, the track really was intended as a quotation from 4’33” or some other unidentified Cage work, in which case mechanical royalties were due; or, he was misappropriating Cage’s name in the context of a musical work, and that also would not do. He, after all, was the one who claimed it was Cage in the first place. Was he passing off something else as being by Cage, or was the work actually Cage? Since performances of 4’33” could be said in some sense to be self-identified as such, it was really his call.
When the infringement claim came to light, few thought it could possibly prevail. Duncan Lamont, a British lawyer specializing in the music industry, was one expert who rolled his eyes over the squabble. "Is [Cage's composition] a work? Has it been written down, is it a literary, artistic or dramatic work? The argument will be there is no work because there are no notes." If there is "no work", there could be no infringement and the case would fail.
Well yes, it has been written down – in three versions, as a matter of fact. There is another point here: what makes a performance of 4’33”? Partly it must be the announcement of the performance, the attendance of the audience, the intention of performer and his/her/their adherence to the instructions in the score; but one could argue that it is also the apparatus around it – the concert hall and its traditional accoutrements, and perhaps also the payment of performing or other royalties that attends the performance of any work of music. Well, that’s one of the more theoretical issues in the story. In fact, the question Duncan Lamont put is only partly related to the issue. If there was no performance of an artistic work here, then Batt is still open to question for having used Cage’s name as he did.
Batt, too, was feisty. "Has the world gone mad? I'm prepared to do time rather than pay out," he told the press. "We are talking as much as 100,000 pounds (US$155,000)" in royalties. Besides, he said, "mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds."
If a 1 minute piece on a 76 minute CD could, on a pro rata basis, generate £100,000 royalties, just imagine what the overall royalty rate would have to be – or alternatively, how many copies one would have to sell to reach these figures…
But just a few months later, Batt was done -- he settled out of court for an undisclosed six-figure sum, or pretty much what he was afraid he would have to pay if the suit succeeded. He handed over a check on the steps of the High Court in London, saying he was "making this gesture of a payment to the John Cage Trust in recognition of my own personal respect for John Cage and in recognition of his brave and sometimes outrageous approach to artistic experimentation in music."
See my comments above on what I can and cannot say. However, the events described above did indeed take place. Actually, here’s something nobody knows: the cheque he handed me on the steps of the High Court turned out actually to say “Pay the Bearer: An Undisclosed Sum” – which was very funny at the time, and perhaps just showed that he did not want the details discovered by accident if one of us were to drop the cheque. However, he followed it up, good as his word, with a real cheque shortly thereafter.
A spokesman for Peters Edition, Cage's publisher, called the payment a "donation" which was accepted "in good spirit." He said the company had been ready to go to court to defend the copyright they controlled.
Well, not quite. We carefully said that we would willingly go to court to defend the reputation, works, and legitimate interests of our composer – a distinction that was lost on the reporter.
Donation, or extortion payment? You be the judge, but be warned: now that you know of this case, you really can't afford to be silent about it.
Well, obviously it was not the latter. Mike Batt really did make a donation, and he did so as his proposed solution to the issue, which we accepted. Although we didn’t actually talk about this in arriving at the settlement, my personal take on this is that it is important to remember that Mike Batt is also a composer and that a significant part of his income is from royalties earned on his existing works. The same applies to CDs of his music or the music of the bands he creates and promotes. He is heavily invested himself in the concept of intellectual property and its value. And rightly so, in my view. Artistic creativity is one of the things that truly differentiates us from the animal kingdom (as well as opposable thumbs), and is one of the most distinctively human characteristics. It has always seemed to me that the current generation has its sense of values completely screwed up: artistic creativity is one of the most valuable things on the planet, worthy of more protection and appreciation than most of the things on which we place emphasis and consider valuable. The people who think that artistic creativity of all or any kinds should somehow be valued like the air we breathe, or the water we need to live, simply don’t understand what kind of human gold dust they are dismissing as so much air and water. It’s the crown jewels of the human race. Of course, it should be made available to all, but the creators should be protected and valued for what they say about what it means to be really human. Hope this has been of some help. If there’s anything else you would like to know (apart from the things I cannot go into, obviously), please do not hesitate to get in touch.
With best wishes, Nicholas Riddle
From: Lewis Hyde
Sent: Between 10 July and 23 July 2008
To: Nicholas Riddle
Subject: John Cage & Mike Batt – a query
Thanks so much for the helpful background on the Mike Batt dust up. I had suspected that the issue had more to do with attribution than with infringement.
I end up with one set of questions about the case, which I'll preface with a few somewhat philosophical reflections.
First of all, I agree with you about the value of intellectual property although, as I am deep into a book about this, I feel there are many nuances to be teased out. One of those nuances appears in what follows; beyond that I'll simply say that I think the 1710 Statute of Anne was a wise and just law, combining authors' rights with a term limit such that created work eventually feeds the public domain. Much of the puzzle in IP policy is to figure out how to balance public and private rights such that both are preserved.
As for the Batt business and the nuance it raises, I would now frame the conflict as a moral rights issue, where such rights include the right of attribution, the right to prevent false attribution, and the right of integrity. As I understand it, the concept of moral rights comes out of a tradition (beginning with Kant) asserting a connection between an author and his or her creation. Moral rights protect the personal and reputational, rather than purely monetary, value of a work to its creator.
We don't really have this tradition here in the United States--with one exception, and that rather recent: the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 speaks to both attribution and integrity. That law says that these rights "are considered personal to the author and cannot therefore be bought, sold or transferred"; moreover, they end with the death of the artist.
A chapter in my book, TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD, is devoted to the creative uses of chance and, of course, contains considerable reflection on Cage's practice. At one point I contrast Picasso and Cage:
"Picasso ... was quite happy to work with accident as a tool of revelation ('From errors one gets to know the personality!'), but Cage was not ('Personality is a flimsy thing on which to build an art.'), for Cage was after [Jacques] Monod's 'absolute newness' of pure chance. He was not out to discover any hidden self, nor did he think chance operations would reveal any hidden, already-existing divine reality, as ancient diviners thought. 'Composition is like writing a letter to a stranger,' he once said. 'I don't hear things in my head, nor do I have inspiration ....'"
Elsewhere I contrast Cage and Jackson Pollock:
"Pollock's working assumption was that the wildness of his paintings expressed his deep, primitive, and feeling self, and Cage would argue, I think, that no matter how 'deep' the self is, it's still the self. 'Automatic art... has never interested me, because it is a way of falling back, resting on one's memories and feelings subconsciously, is it not? And I have done my utmost to free people from that.' Cage much preferred the incidental drawings that are scattered throughout Thoreau's JOURNALS: 'The thing that is beautiful about the Thoreau drawings is that they're completely lacking in self-expression.'"
You write that artists help us know "what it means to be really human." I agree. In Cage's case, what he wanted us to know is that the impermanence of personality is a gateway to perception.
I am aware that there are complexities here, that Cage for example used chance in composition but then cared very much that his pieces be performed as composed, not submitted to further chance.
That said, and to come back to the Mike Batt affair, what interests me is the seeming disconnect between Cage's Buddhist practice that sought to suspend self-making and personality, and the philosophy behind moral rights which assumes, as some European law asserts, that the work contains "the imprint of the author's personality." Though not working from the same tradition, U.S. Copyright law has sometimes touched on "personality" in a related way. A key Supreme Court case from 1903, for example, concerned whether or not there could be a copyright in something as mundane as printed posters for circus acts. In affirming that there could be, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that "an artist who draws from life ... makes a work that is the personal reaction of an individual upon nature. Personality always contains something unique. It expresses its singularity even in handwriting, and a very modest grade of art has in it something irreducible which is one man's alone."
Such is the set of ideas out of which I'm musing on the Mike Batt story, with one addition, I suppose, and that is Cage's sense of humor wherein there is a strong link between happiness and being open to happenstance. For it seems to me that this tale begins with a joke on Batt's part, and that once the mechanical royalties appear, the joke continues--the "run-off" between the two pieces seems entirely in the right spirit.
But then things seem to have gotten serious, I presume because of the background moral rights issue (as you say of Batt, "he was misappropriateing Cage's name"). All of which leads me to my questions:
You write that Batt's donation was "his proposed solution to the issue." What had Peters Edition ask for, such that a solution was required? Was a legal action ever brought or suggested? If so, what was the point of law? If not, what issue needed to be solved? If the issue is "reputation" and misappropriation, and if Batt--himself a composer--understood that, why not a simple apology and change in the credit line? Why a donation? From the outside, at least, the donation has the look of an out-of-court settlement.
I really appreciate your having taken the time to reply to my original e-mail.
All best wishes, Lewis
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