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The Hives lose court case against The Cardigans

One of Sweden's most successful rock bands, The Hives, has to pay 18.5 million kronor ($2.9 million) to Swedish pop group The Cardigans, a court ruled Tuesday.

The Hives lose court case against The Cardigans

The dispute is one of several lawsuits embroiling Tambourine Studios, a recording studio in the southern city of Malmö used by some of the country’s biggest artists, which also handled the two bands’ finances.

Tambourine had said it was standard practice for the company to transfer money from bands with high liquidity to those with less cash.

But The Hives claimed it was never told that some of the money the band was receiving was a form of loan from The Cardigans, whose biggest hit “Lovefool” topped global charts in 1997.

“There are no loan agreements, no signed documents, no agreements on interest rates,” The Hives said in a blog post before the ruling.

The Lund District Court ruled that, while the transfers “shouldn’t be viewed as a loan” as such, the money still had to be repaid “since there is no reason… to keep the money that came from The Cardigans.”

The Hives was also ordered to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees.

Other Swedish bands involved in the Tambourine accounting scandal include Europe, the band behind eighties rock anthem “The Final Countdown”, who have claimed that the company forged signatures on some of its documents.

AFP/The Local/og

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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