Robbie Williams has said he will not pursue Olivia Rodrigo over similarities between her single “take me home (4 christmas)” and his 2012 hit “Candy”, and he has criticised what he calls ambulance chasing in music plagiarism claims.
Williams is not seeking a credit, royalties or legal action. In an Instagram post, he wrote that it “sounds to me as though she may have accidentally stumbled across a musical echo of mine in one of her new songs.” He added: “And do you know what? I couldn’t care less.”
He said he did not know whether a publishing issue, a copyright issue or no issue at all existed, and that he did not want to find out. “I’m not going after her. Because I think at some point, some f***ing sanity has to prevail.”
Williams said artists should be able to act against “genuine theft”, but he drew a distinction between that and “treating every vaguely familiar sequence of notes as a winning lottery ticket”. He said: “Some of this stuff has become ambulance chasing. And I think it’s disgusting.”
He added: “We all stand on the shoulders of people who came before us. Sometimes consciously. Sometimes without even knowing it. That’s how music works.”
