Ed Sheeran sings Nina Simone during Shape of You copyright caseon March 8, 2022 at 12:59 pm

Ed Sheeran has serenaded London’s High Court in an attempt to prove he did not copy portions of his 2017 hit Shape of You from another artist.

The star is accused of lifting his song’s “Oh I, oh I, oh I” hook from Sami Chokri’s 2015 single Oh Why.

In court, he sang elements of Nina Simone’s Feeling Good and Blackstreet’s No Diggity to illustrate how the key melody is commonplace in pop music.

“If you put them all in the same key, they’ll sound the same,” he explained.

Sheeran denies having heard Chokri’s song and has rejected the idea he might have been played it by friends or fellow musicians before writing Shape of You.

His upbeat pop track was 2017’s best-selling single and remains the most-played song of all time on Spotify, with more than three billion plays.

But Sheeran’s royalties – estimated to be about £20m – have been frozen since Chokri and his co-writer Ross O’Donoghue claimed copyright infringement in 2018.

Lawyers for the pair played the court voice memos and draft vocals from the Shape of You recording sessions as they accused the star of copying elements of Chokri’s track.

In one recording, Sheeran could be heard saying he needed to change the “Oh I” melody because it was “a bit close to the bone”.

“We thought it was a bit too close to a song called No Diggity by Blackstreet,” the star told the court. “I said that was a bit close to the bone [and] we should change it.”

Asked whether his final melody bore a similarity to Chokri’s song, he added: “Fundamentally, yes, they are based around the pentatonic scale [and] they both have vowels in them.”

Andrew Sutcliffe QC, representing Chokri and O’Donoghue, asked: “It was a phrase you already has in your head after listening to the chorus of Sam’s song, wasn’t it?”

“No,” Sheeran replied.

The court later heard several recordings of Sheeran “stacking up” the harmonies of the “Oh I” phrase, which had been labelled “Oh Why” by his engineer.

“It sounds as though you were singing, ‘Oh Why,’ doesn’t it?” asked Mr Sutcliffe.

“The lyrics is, ‘Oh, I’m in love with your body’,” said Sheeran. “Oh why I’m in love with your body doesn’t make sense.”

The star was asked repeatedly who had come up with the “Oh I” phrase, but explained it had been a collaborative effort with his co-writers Steve Mac and Johnny McDaid.

“It was all of us three bouncing back and forth in a circle,” he said.

“Three people could not create the germ of the melody,” suggested Mr Sutcliffe.

“Why can’t three people create a melody?” Sheeran replied.

The singer was also accused of being an “obsessive music squirrel” who consumed music “voraciously” and would have been aware of Chokri’s music.

“I’m a music fan, I like music, I listen to music,” Sheeran said. But he insisted he had “disappeared for the whole year” in 2016 and was “not plugged in” to the UK music scene.

The star also disclosed that Shape of You had originally been envisioned for Little Mix or possibly Rihanna, and that he had not wanted to release it on of his multi-platinum Divide album.

“I thought this song clashed with Castle On The Hill. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the album,” he said.

“I didn’t want to put it out and I was subsequently proved wrong.”

The singer briefly became irritated when a snippet of an unreleased song was played to the court.

“That’s a song I wrote last January. How did you get that?” he asked. “I want to know how you got that.”

It was later explained that some of the music played to the court was from Steve Mac’s personal laptop, and the wrong folder had been accidentally accessed.

The case continues.

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