When I was stacking singles on my Dansette after school, I didn\u2019t envisage a time when the musicians who played on them would be pensioners. But then, neither did I dare to foresee a future that would endorse Danny & The Juniors\u2019 brash assertion that rock\u2019n\u2019roll was here to stay. Half a century after those records rescued me from homework, however, the outlook for their makers is bleak, because 50 years is the copyright term for sound recordings, a cut-off which means an end to an appreciable source of income for musicians in retirement.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, the European Parliament voted to extend that term from 50 to 70 years. Labelled \u201cthe Beatles Extension\u201d, since it would prevent the Fab Four\u2019s first hits losing copyright protection in 2012, an arrangement that would suit neither Sir Paul McCartney nor EMI Records, it might more aptly have been called \u201cthe Cliff Richard Extension\u201d, since his earliest releases have already lapsed into public domain, an arrangement that suits neither Sir Cliff nor EMI Records.<\/p>\n
The question – to extend or not to extend? – has been asked with increasing urgency the closer loomed the confluence of that 50-year limit and the demi-centenary of pop. If Eddie Calvert\u2019s ‘Oh Mein Papa’ or David Whitfield\u2019s ‘Cara Mia’ went out of copyright, who cared? Records like that had the fusty ring of post-war rationing or National Service. But the hits we – the first generation of modern teenagers – grew up with? They still stir memories, set toes tapping. The very best remain thrillingly alive.<\/p>\n
In 2005, Gordon Brown \u2013 then Chancellor – commissioned the former Financial Times<\/em> editor Andrew Gowers to advise on the future of copyright in the digital age. Published a year later, the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property rejected the case for term extension, an unexpected conclusion which provoked an instant response from more than 4,500 members of the UK\u2019s music community, whose names, printed as compactly as the credits on an album sleeve, crammed a full-page ad in Gowers\u2019 old paper, overprinted in red with an appeal for \u201cfair play for musicians.\u201d<\/p>\n Sceptics, unsurprisingly, pointed to the rich and famous among the signatories, suggesting, as the Times did, that \u201cfor many campaigners the extra income is probably not essential for paying the winter heating bills.\u201d But by no means all the signatories were household names with money to burn. Although the Rs, for instance, included Robbie Williams, Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey, listed alongside them was Ronald Prentice.<\/p>\n Unless your special subject is session players of the 1960s, there\u2019s no reason why you should know a name unmentioned on the labels of the records he played on. Google \u201cRon Prentice\u201d, and the English bassist is outnumbered 20-1 by a vociferous American opponent of same-sex marriage. Even in his heyday, Prentice was a secret unshared with the pop public, and yet he played on more hit records than those other three illustrious Rs, among them Cilla Black\u2019s ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’, Petula Clark\u2019s ‘Downtown’, Tom Jones\u2019 ‘It\u2019s Not Unusual’, Sandie Shaw\u2019s ‘(There\u2019s) Always Something There To Remind Me’, and Dusty Springfield\u2019s ‘You Don\u2019t Have To Say You Love Me’. By then he had been a musician for more than a dozen years. Catching the music bug from George Formby 78s as a wartime evacuee, he joined the jazz revival when \u201ctrad\u201d was a cult confined to the back rooms of pubs, but prudently realised a living could be made playing strictly slow-slow-quick-quick-slow in dance bands.<\/p>\n When ‘Rock Around The Clock’ topped the UK hit parade in November 1955, the sheet music propped on Prentice\u2019s stand scored the week\u2019s other big hits \u2013 ‘The Man From Laramie’, ‘Yellow Rose Of Texas’ and ‘Hernando\u2019s Hideaway’, tunes couples could waltz, quickstep and tango to \u2013 and for two more years at least there were enough new ballads, cha-chas and mambos to keep dancers on the floor and bands with ten-piece brass sections on the rostrum. But slow as rock\u2019n\u2019roll was to catch on, ultimately it was unstoppable, and as record companies sought home-grown singers to recreate American hits, they needed musicians to replicate the backings: real musicians, of course, since it stood to reason that a sight-reading professional would be more dependable than a kid with a quiff, three chords and a pelvic thrust.<\/p>\n Discounting Tommy Steele\u2019s earlier travesties, British rock\u2019n\u2019roll was born in Abbey Road Studios on 24 July 1958. The opening guitar figure of the debutant Cliff Richard\u2019s ‘Move It’, as zesty as a pools winner bounding downstairs to greet the postman, was an unequivocal announcement that you didn\u2019t have to be a Yank to rock\u2019n\u2019roll. Wary of trusting Cliff\u2019s teenage guitarist to pull off the riff in a take or two, the musical director recruited an experienced player, Ernie Shear. If there had been any doubt before, there was none after. Producing a pop session, you hired a pro.<\/p>\n With booking information as scant as date, time and location, session players rarely knew in advance the name of the artist they would be backing and had no sight of the score until they arrived at the studio. Both A- and B-sides of a record would be scheduled in a two-hour half-session, so the moment the big hand ticked past the top of the clock, everyone had to be on the ball. \u201cOccasionally a mistake would occur in the run-through,\u201d Prentice recalls, \u201cbut if it happened a second time, the MD would inquire sarcastically, \u2018Is there a problem with your part?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Uncredited they might have been, but these players\u2019 contribution to a record could be audibly conspicuous. It\u2019s impossible to sing along to Tom Jones\u2019 ‘It\u2019s Not Unusual’ without vocalising the instrumental \u2018ba-da-ba-da-ba-da\u2019 line, while there can be few people on the planet whose pulse hasn\u2019t quickened as Prentice danga-dang-dangs his six-string bass guitar over the opening credits of a James Bond film. And although many sessions required note-for-note reading, being confronted by a simple chord chart could be a sharper spur to creativity. When Big Jim Sullivan wah-wahed his way through Dave Berry\u2019s ‘The Crying Game’ in 1964, he \u201cmade up that whole guitar part – nobody had heard a sound like that before, and that\u2019s what made the record.\u201d True.<\/p>\n Spending so much time in the studio that they rarely had the opportunity to hear their work on the radio didn\u2019t mean they were unaware when a record had done well. \u201cYou\u2019d make a single with some unknown singer, and when you went back to make the second one, he\u2019d drive up in a Rolls Royce,\u201d Sullivan reflects without rancour, since neither he nor Prentice had cause for complaint. In 1964, when the average weekly wage was \u00a316, a three-hour session paid \u00a39, plus 10 shillings porterage, an automatic bonus for bringing your own instrument. By Monday lunchtime, with a busy week ahead, they were already well up on most nine-to-fivers.<\/p>\n It would be cheering to picture the pair of them in comfortable retirement, but when you work for yourself, there are always more pressing payments than putting something by for old age. Now neither can afford to keep his feet up. A 1996 amendment to the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act produced an annuity of sorts in the form of a broadcast royalty for \u201cnon-featured artists\u201d, but the response of those musicians who had known for years about their US counterparts annually banking six-figure cheques as their share of income channelled through their union, was not a thankful tug of the forelock, but a chorused \u201cAbout time too,\u201d if not \u201cToo little, too late.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, to qualify for payment, musicians had to prove which records they had played on. Even those with dusty work diaries in their attic were pushed to provide evidence, because a date, a time and a studio aren\u2019t as conclusive as, say, Marianne Faithfull: ‘As Tears Go By’. Sullivan played on every Tom Jones record from 1963 to 1975, but it took a letter from the singer\u2019s manager to corroborate what was common knowledge throughout the music business, while Prentice has abandoned hope of establishing some bass lines as his own, aware that another musician must be wrongly receiving his share.<\/p>\n Reluctant to pry into the finances of people I barely know, I quizzed a session-playing pal: last year\u2019s income from broadcast royalties amounted to \u00a38,000, less than a fortune, but more than the annual state pension for a couple \u2013 a significant top-up. The first records Prentice played on were released in 1958, so his royalty payments ceased as corks popped last New Year\u2019s Eve and, if the copyright term remains unchanged, remuneration from 1959\u2019s hits will stop in three months\u2019 time.<\/p>\n Gowers\u2019 advice to the government not to tamper with the term didn\u2019t convince the last Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, who suggested in December 2008 that there was \u201ca moral case for performers benefiting from their work throughout their lifetime.\u201d Dismissing this as \u201cpretty silly\u201d, Gowers restated his view that \u201ccopyright extension has high costs to the public and negligible benefits to the creative community.\u201d But the argument was soon to gain a wider airing in Strasbourg, and the law was passed – by 377 votes to 178 – on 23rd<\/sup> April.<\/p>\n Besides approving a 70-year copyright term, the legislation also establishes an entirely new fund \u2013 for session musicians, not superstars \u2013 in the form of a 20% share in record sales to complement the broadcast royalty; allows artists to renegotiate 50-year-old recording contracts, signed in the dark age of analogue serfdom; and contains a use-it-or-lose-it clause to restore unissued or deleted recordings to the ownership of the artist. But what appeared in April to be a significant breakthrough is still several signatures short of implementation.<\/p>\n Though approved by MEPs, the legislation has yet to be ratified by the European Council, and the EU presidency is currently held by Sweden, whose six-month stint is more likely to focus on climate change, health and \u201cdignified ageing\u201d than copyright, a touchy topic domestically following the April imprisonment of the founders of file-sharing site Pirate Bay, sentences which provoked such a tide of public antagonism that a hastily formed Pirate Party now has a seat in Strasbourg.<\/p>\n When the EU first moved towards extending the copyright term, Feargal Sharkey, the head of the industry group UK Music, declared, \u201cI am especially pleased that the announcement focuses on the \u2018invisible\u2019 members of our industry\u2026 who could derive real benefits from this move at a time in life when their earning power would be severely diminished.\u201d<\/p>\n All music fans with a grasp of pop history should be equally pleased. We should applaud the prospect of a more comfortable retirement for those invisible, invaluable musicians. So, fingers crossed they won\u2019t have to wait too long for \u201cthe Prentice Extension\u201d to finally come into force.<\/p>\n (Originally published in September 2009)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was stacking singles on my Dansette after school, I didn\u2019t envisage a time when the musicians who played on them would be pensioners. But then, neither did I dare to foresee a future that would endorse Danny & The Juniors\u2019 brash assertion that rock\u2019n\u2019roll was here to stay. Half a century after those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}