The Case

In what has become known as the "Chariots of Fire" case, EMI brought a claim of infringement of copyright against the composer Evangelos Papathanasiou (known professionally as Vangelis), his publisher Spheric BV, Amsterdam, and his record labels Warner Brothers US, and Warner Brothers UK. They accused Vangelis of deliberate or subconscious copying of their work I Menexedenia Politieia by Stavros Logarides, which had been used as the theme music to the 1975 Greek television series The City of Violets. Vangelis’ music to Chariots of Fire was composed in 1981.

The case was heard in 1987. Mark Griffin, in his 1997 book "Vangelis: The Unknown Man" records on page 87 how the claimants sought damages of £2 million in what he calls “possibly a game of corporate tit-for-tat”. EMI had been injuncted in Warner v de Wilde in 1983 (de Wilde’s composition, which was found to be a “blatant” copy of Chariots of Fire, was published by KPM – a division of EMI). Vangelis is a composer of international success, active since the 1960s. His soundtrack album to the film Chariots of Fire earned an Academy Award in 1982 for best original score. The title track and soundtrack album were very successful in several countries, including a number one single and album in the USA, selling several million copies.

Case for infringement

EMI contested that Vangelis had been played the theme to City of Violets over the summer of 1975 on several occasions. They produced musicological testimonies by two experts – Professor Stephen Dodgson, recently retired from the Royal College of Music, and Joseph Cooper, composer, pianist and former presenter of the BBC’s Face the Music quiz. Both experts focused on the coincidence of four notes between the two works, which became referred to as the ‘turn’. These notes are the FGAG sequence at the end of the third and fifth bars in the transcription of City of Violets, and the second, third and fourth bars of Chariots of Fire. That these ‘turns’ were identical was not disputed and was accepted by the court. The sides agreed that similarity only existed in the first bars of the main theme, and the trial focused on these.

Case against infringement

EMI’s claim of title to the Logarides work was complex, and possibly tenuous (ownership was claimed under an assignment from either the Greek publisher Intersong-Hellas, or a Greek partnership, Pantas OE) but in the end this was not a key consideration for the court.

Dr Geoffrey Bush (giving musical expert commentary for the defendants) in accepting some similarity between the two, stated “disagreement centres on the extent of the resemblance and the cause . . .”. Musicologist Guy Protheroe, also for the defence, highlighted instances of the same ‘turn’ in other music and in earlier compositions by Vangelis that pre-dated City of Violets – notably a song called Wake Up that Vangelis released in 1969 with his band Aphrodite’s Child. Vangelis defended himself, and mentioned a number of earlier works that he considered to be the ‘genesis’ of the Chariots of Fire theme, and in particular the 1973 album Earth. This demonstrated quite clearly that the ‘turn’ in question had been written by Vangelis before Logarides composed City of Violets, and therefore could not be considered an infringement.