Andrew Lloyd Webber has won a court battle with a dancer turned songwriter who claimed to have written the theme to the musical Cats.
The composer had faced a claim from Philip Christian over the authorship of the words and melody that eventually became Memory, the main theme from the West End and Broadway 1981 hit production.
Christian, 68, had told a court that a recording of a song that he had written was heard by a member of one of Lloyd Webber’s other shows, who then recited it to the composer in the run-up to the production of Cats.
In his breach of copyright claim against Lloyd Webber and the lyricist Sir Trevor Nunn, Christian argued that he owned the rights to the “lyrics and musical score” and demanded future royalty payments.
But sitting in the High Court at the Royal Courts of Justice in London last week, the judge, James Brightwell, dismissed the claim as “fanciful and entirely hopeless”.
Rights to the song Memory were registered to Lloyd Webber and Nunn, who shares the copyright in the words with Eliot’s family.
Christian told the court his own song was inspired by his experiences arriving in the UK from the Dominican Republic as an 11-year-old in the 1960s.
He said he was training in the performing arts when a recording was made of his song and then heard in 1980 by one of Lloyd Webber’s dancers at the renowned Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden.
Singing his song in court for the judge, Christian claimed that it must have been “memorised and then recited” in front of Lloyd Webber, who went on to use it for his musical.
Christian, who represented himself in court, told the judge: “I have always had that tune in my head … Every time I hear it on the radio, I get angrier.”
But Stephanie Wickenden, the barrister representing Lloyd Webber and Nunn, countered that Christian’s copyright claim was hopeless. She said that the suggestion that the song had been memorised and recited for Lloyd Webber was meritless, while much of the lyric was based on one of Eliot’s poems from 1917.
“If there were any merit to the claim, it would’ve been brought 40 years ago,” the barrister argued.
Giving judgment, Brightwell said that Christian had failed to produce a copy of the song, noting that he found it “inherently incredible that a dancer could, in the context of the entrance hall to a dance studio, have remembered, word for word, both the lyrics of the song and the melody and been able to communicate them at a later point to Andrew Lloyd Webber”.
The judge continued that the allegations were “entirely fanciful and entirely hopeless, and this claim cannot be allowed to continue any longer”.