Spoony, Sarc and Assmask wrote:What's all that about then!?
At the tail end of 2005, in the lull between the Scarborough gig and
Valor... coming out, Trudi was informed by Twinkle (he's gothbotherer on here) that there was a band on Myspace called
Active M (don't bother looking - they're gone now) who had a song that we might be interested in hearing. Trudi had a listen, was duly shocked and stunned, and dropped it onto the LiST for us to get our teeth into.
After a few of us joined their messageboard and pointed out the similarities, they firstly denied all prior knowledge of the WH; called it coincidence, and promptly booted anyone who tried to mention it again. Their first response to someone posting a link to
Weekend being:
"had to delete that, The Active M song has already been recorded, and yes it is gettign a release, and yes it will be featured on MTV next year.
So I'll not have any attempts at 'prior' knowledge being established on these forums." [sic]
The 'prior knowledge' defence becomes less than convincing when faced with the evidence that a) One of the two songwriters used to play in a band called
Urge, and b) he mentions
Plan A,
Backyard Babies and
The Yo-Yo's in the same post on their board - it's difficult to not at least brush up against The Wildhearts when you're circling that close.
Shortly after, their site began to experience 'technical difficulties' and 'data loss' and was locked down, only to resurface with the only data lost being any and all references to a song called
Let Me Down 2047. The song was swiftly removed from their Myspace player too, fortunately not before a quick thinking Listee grabbed a copy of it for, erm, 'evidence'.
More correspondence took place, culminating in a message from their management stating:
"Thnaks for letting us know, we are investigating this, and as it turns out, some of the melody for this song was in fact written by a former member of the band. If it is that close, that people believe it to be a medley, then it will be changed. But we really need to get in touch with the former stonehead guitarist, and find out just what is was that he one on. But rest assured, it will be changed." [sic, again]
So now it wasn't written by the two songwriters in the band who had claimed it, but the stoner who had left. Hmmm?
Then
Valor... came out, and we didn't care any more.
If you've got the willpower, you can read the whole saga
starting here. You can pretty much finish when Kev gets drunk on Cider.
