How Men At Work went into Overkill with a looney lawsuit Down Under...

BEING one of those fine fellows who grew up in the '80s (yes, it applies to those who were born in the '70s as well), I have been blessed as far as the amount of wonderful music is concerned.

Let's face it, you've got one heck of an eclectic range of music to choose from: we listened to everything from Culture Club (I bet you still know the words to Karma Chameleon) to Def Leppard to Whitney Houston (long before she decided to become a drugged out visitor to Israel — really, don't ask) to Metallica via Toto and Oran Juice Jones — and no one thought it the least bit strange that you listened to such an absurdly diverse list.

Yes, back when Tina was not "retired" (I'll talk about so called comeback artistes another day), she was our Private Dancer and the deutschmark was still a currency (American Express will still do nicely, thank you). Whether you were Dancing On The Ceiling or Dancing In The Dark, Amadeus was there to rock you (both the movie and the still-funky song by the late and lamented weirdo Falco).

However, if there is one song that defines that era (even better than Prince's 1999, which ironically was an '80s song about the '90s), it has got to be Down Under by Men At Work. Come on: a silly song about Australia that involves thunder boxes, Vegemite sandwiches and heads full of zombie. It had a hook made solely of a flute solo, for the love of Fraggle Rock (which thankfully was not a full-blown solo, unlike One Night In Bangkok by Murray Head).

Yes, it was a major hit (some could cynically say only real hit) by the Aussie band, and they became the only Australian band to have a No 1 album and single simultaneously in US charts (Down Under was from the album Business As Usual). And though they had other songs like Overkill, they never quite reached the insane popularity of that hit, which became the unofficial official song of Australia (in the same manner that Randy Newman's I Love LA did for the Californian city).

The song won a Grammy for best new artist, and the song was just like you were at that age: young, joyful, playfully naughty and bouncy. Yes, even though there was an economic downturn in 1985, you felt that you could conquer the world and that you couldn't wait to be an adult already.

Alas, growing up is dishearting in that so many of the illusions you harboured as an idealistic young child became shattered. Santa Claus doesn't exist (yes, yes, I am sure some people out there will argue about this); becoming mature does not make life any easier; the Michael Bay Transformers movie was nowhere near as good as the original cartoon series; politicians aren't infallible after all (not that this was difficult to spot by anyone except said politicians themselves). And now, we have the added indignity of discovering that Men At Work stole Down Under from a schoolteacher!

According to Reuters, Australia's Federal Court ruled that part of the song's melody came from the children's ditty Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, written 70 years ago by Australian teacher Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides competition.

"In my opinion, there is a sufficient degree of objective similarity between the bars of Kookaburra which are seen and heard in Down Under to amount to a reproduction of a part of Miss Sinclair's round," the judge wrote in his decision.

The ruling means Men at Work songwriters Colin Hay and Ron Strykert, as well as their music company EMI, may have to pay millions of dollars in unpaid royalties to Kookaburra copyright owners Larrikin Music, who launched the legal case.

The judge ordered both sides to enter mediation on royalty payments and reappear in court on Feb 25 to discuss whether Larrikin should receive compensation from Hay and Strykert. "It's a big win for the underdog," Larrikin lawyer Adam Simpson told reporters outside the Sydney court.

Basically, the reaction of everyone whom I told this report to was along the lines of What The Hell?!?, and I am still mystified by it myself. My colleague John even went so far as actually sing aloud the Kookaburra song (dude, you seriously need a hobby), and a brief comparison shows as much similarities between the two melodies as there are between R2D2 and C3PO.

It's almost like that episode of Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law which dealt with a song copyright issue (if you haven't seen this zany adult cartoon series yet, drop everything and do) — you can go in depth and talk about unique use of the pentatonic. At this point, I figure that you might as well go for broke and sue every single music maker there use for using any of the twelve notes in the western musical; you could argue that since Arnold Schonberg was the father of the twelve-tone technique, all rights should go to his estate.

The verdict itself has generated some negative response on Internet forums, and it comes as no surprise that newspapers in Oz picked up the story for commentary. The main issue will be whether a judgement will affect creativity, because mash-ups look set to stay — and if sampling were to be outlawed (under strictly defined and enforced conditions), the rap music industry will basically join Notorious BIG in that big phat crunkfest in the sky.

At the heart of it all, of course, is the issue of copyright, which has been in force for ages and had it's origins in the Statute of Anne in Britain from 1709 (again with the British). And it is issues like this that have given rise to alternative methods of compensation like copyleft and the Creative Commons licenses, which seeks to address the balance between compensation to the creator and usage of said creations.

Personally, I find it all a little sad; a song that contributed to my growing years is now subject to arguments about dollars and cents. I have never understood the attraction of greed for wealth and power, and it doesn't look likely that I will ever understand it. What's next? Prince being sued by royalty for being named a title that he never inherited? Madonna being sued by the Vatican for being named after the Mother of God? All musicians sued by the estate of Rodgers and Hammerstein because they copyrighted the Do-Re-Mi scale in The Sound Of Music? Looks like it's time for Men At Work to sing the blues...

Ahmad Azrai can't get to sleep. I think about the complications of how anyone can eat a vegemite sandwich...