Robbie Williams has mounted a staunch defence of Olivia Rodrigo after it was put to him that her new single, Take Me Home (4 Christmas), sounds similar to his 2012 hit, Candy.
Writing on Instagram, he began by saying: “There’s something about the music industry that’s been bothering me for a while. People coming after people because they’ve spotted a similarity between two songs. Some of it I completely understand. Some of it is absolutely justified. Most of it, I think, is complete bollocks.”
Williams went on to say that he’s had experience of people ‘coming after’ him in the past, claiming that a song of his sounds similar to something else. “Sometimes I listen and think, fair enough, I can hear that,” he admitted. “Other times I think, are you having a fucking laugh?”
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“There are only so many notes,” he continued. “Only so many chords. Only so many ways of putting them together before you inevitably find yourself somewhere somebody else has been.”
This brought Williams to Olivia Rodrigo, who he says he’s “loved” since he first heard Brutal, the opening track of her 2021 debut album, Sour. “What a fucking record,” he noted. “I wish I’d made it.”
On the subject of Take Me Home (4 Christmas) and its alleged similarities to Candy, Williams said: “It sounds to me as though she may have accidentally stumbled across a musical echo of mine in one of her new songs. And do you know what? I couldn’t care less. I don’t know whether there’s technically a publishing issue, a copyright issue, or no issue whatsoever. And I don’t want to know. I’m not going after her. Because at some point, some fucking sanity has to prevail.”
This refreshingly sensible take will doubtless be appreciated by Rodrigo, who has had several copyright disputes to deal with down the years.
Three months after the release of Good 4 U, another song on Sour, Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Josh Faro were credited as co-writers based on its similarity to their 2007 song, Misery Business, and Taylor Swift and her co-writer Jack Antonoff ended up being listed as songwriters on both 1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back, which interpolated Swift’s song New Year’s Day – something Rodrigo freely admitted – and, more controversially, Deja Vu, based on the alleged similarity between the song’s bridge and the one in Swift’s Cruel Summer.
Around the time of its release, it was also suggested that the aforementioned Brutal sounded like Elvis Costello’s Pump It Up. However, like Williams, Costello was relaxed about the whole thing, writing on Twitter that “This is fine by me … It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand-new toy. That’s what I did.”
Even if Williams had taken issue with Rodrigo, though, we suspect he’d have had a hard time proving that Take Me Home (4 Christmas) plagiarises Candy. The syncopated, conversational vocal delivery might be similar at times, but it feels far more like a case of a few stylistic similarities than any kind of direct ‘lift’.
In fact, the song that Take Me Home (4 Christmas) more closely resembles is The Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping; Chris Butler, who wrote that song, has revealed that Rodrigo reached out to him a couple of months ago asking if he’d listen to it.
When it was put to him on Facebook that he should have been given a writing credit, he dismissed the idea: “Can’t copyright a vibe,” he pointed out. “Her song has no copy of melody/chord progression… nothing to justify a claim. I’ll take flattery for the win!”
