The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony
1997
13K Likes
Best comments
1.“I am Jack's overwhelming joy that this exists.”
More comments
- 2.“Bitter Sweet Symphony – an anthem for anarchy.”
The story
This is a fan tribute: the full, uncut Verve song laid over footage from David Fincher's Fight Club. The two were never officially linked. The film came out in 1999, two years after the single, and its famous ending belongs to the Pixies. Somebody just noticed they were singing from the same hymnal.
Bitter Sweet Symphony is built on a four-bar loop from a 1960s orchestral version of the Rolling Stones' The Last Time, recorded by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra. The Verve thought they had cleared the sample. Allen Klein, whose ABKCO controlled the Stones' songs, said they had used more than agreed. The band gave up every cent of royalties, the songwriting credit went to Jagger and Richards, and Richard Ashcroft reportedly walked away with $1,000. The song still hit number two in the UK and number 12 in the US and got a Grammy nod for Best Rock Song. In 2019, twenty-two years later, the Stones and ABKCO handed the credit and the royalties back.
Fight Club had its own rough start. It fell short at the box office, then home video turned it into a cult classic, the defining one of its era according to the New York Times. A movie about men buried under the stuff they buy, cut to a song about life grinding you down for a paycheck, written by a guy whose own song got taken by the money men. Bittersweet is right.
