The End of the Long Road to Nowhere

by Robert John Godfrey

For those of you who do not already know, I was involved in a dispute with the band Barclay James Harvest, arising from the work I did with them in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The heart of the issue between us consisted of a disagreement over copyright and authorship in which I was claiming to have been the composer of a substantial amount of the band's early music. After initially claiming that they hardly knew me and denying that I had done anything at all, BJH did eventually accept that I had done what I had said I had done. Their defence, which they maintained to the bitter end, was that the contributions I made to the music were minor and made no significant difference.

After leaving the band on bad terms in 1971, I made many efforts to get legal assistance during the 1970's to establish my rights but to no avail. The British legal profession in civil cases is motivated exclusivley by money. As I did not have any and Barclay James Harvest did not during the 70's have any, it was a non starter.

Then the legal aid rules changed in the early 80's. At this point, my legal representitives cfhanged their tune and advised me that I had a really strong case and advised me to take proceedings immediatley. (1983) All my solicitors had to do was to convince the legal aid board (consiting of other solicitors) that I stood a good chance of winning my case and demonstrate that the defendants (BJH) had sufficient funds to meet a favorable judgement. My solicitor applied for legal aid in 1984. It took nearly a year to obtain and it was finally granted in 1985.

After a number of last ditch attempts to have the trial stopped, the case finally came to the High Court in England in January 1995 nearly 25 years after the event and and 10 years after issuing the writs in 1985. You may ask why it took so long. (If you knew the British legal system, you would not need to ask)! It took so long due to a continual series of delaying tactics by BJH who were desperately hoping the whole thing would go away.

One of the most effective tactics BJH used against me was to try and get my legal aid certificate revoked. If this had happened, I would have had to give up the case immediately. They very nearly succeeded. Their solicitors wrote a lot of letters to the legal board trying to convince them, firstly that my case was weak and unfounded and secondly that BJH had had no significant success and therefore had no funds to meet a judgement should I be successful.

Because the band's success was almost entirely in France and Germany this made it all the more difficult for my solicitors to refute this assertion. BJH succeeded in getting my legal aid certificate discharged four times in all. Each time we had to appeal. Luckily (?) for me all these appeals were a success. However they took months to come up and in one case over a year. Every time one of these appeals was pending, evreything ground to a halt. The last time this happened, it really was touch and go. Luckily I was able to dig up a photograph of the band receiving an award from Polydor for having sold in excess of 7 million records!

By the time the case came to court, I was completely fed up with the whole thing. What should and could have been settled reasonably 10 years earlier at a modest cost, ended up costing the band £200,000 of their own money and the poor British taxpayer more than £400,000. - Was it because of BJH's meanness in not wanting to give me a token share of the profits and the credit I wanted and they must have known I deserved for my work? I think not. I believe they were badly advised and then milked dry by their solicitors. Who do you think got their £200,000? (I would of settled for a declaration of my authorship, an apology and £2000.

You may be asking why, if I was so fed up, did I not call the whole thing off and give up? The answer is that I couldn't.. Not after coming all this way. When you have a tiger by the tail, you just have to hang in there. Letting go could be fatal. Because I was a legally aided litigant, I had little choice in what I did. I was caught up in a legal jugernaught; a cog in a vast machine which was determined to run its course. If I had let go, BJH and their legal team would have wiped me out. I had to see it through and I am glad I did because I got the thing I most wanted from it all.

The case lasted two weeks and was very stressful for all concerned. The band to their discredit told a whole string of pointless lies about the way they had first met me. Fortunately the judge didn't believe them and said as much in his judgement.

There was a lot of argument about the difference between an "arranger" and a "composer" and the various functions supposedly carried out under these music industry job descriptions. Important musicologists (expert witnesses) were wheeled on to support both sides of the argument. We must have listened to all the music in dispute a hundred times over with each expert argueing which bit consisted of "arrangement"; which bit was "orchestrations"; which bit was "composition". The court was full of guitars, keyboards, CD players and tape machines. Luckily, the judge was quite musical and took the view that all these aspects of the case were irrelevant except in as much that, as the issues were debated by the experts, it became apparent just how much of the work in BJH's music was mine.

It all concluded (as I expected that it might) with a hollow moral victory for me from which no-one apart from the legal profession has benefited. In the end, the judge decided that I was, (as I have always claimed), the joint composer of six works in all, and that I jointly and equally own the copyright with my co-authors in BJH. In the case of Mockingbird, Dark Now My Sky and When The World Was Woken, he found my contributions to have been "substantial". In legal terms that means big! In the case of the other works, (Galadriel, Song For Dying and The Sun Will Never Shine Shine), he found my contributions "significant". In others words "not trivial".

That was the good part and I felt completely vindicated and relieved by this aspect of the judgement because BJH have constantly denied that I was the composer of any of this music whatsoever. The down side was that he decided not to grant me any monetary relief at all and "estopped " me from asserting my rights as a composer of these work and dismissed my claims. Although I won the argument, I lost the case!

What the judgement amounts to is this. I have the right to call myself a composer of all six works described above. Under EU law (to which the UK has signed up), I have an absolute right to assert my moral right to have my name associated with my creative work and intellectual property.

However, I cannot ever receive any royalties past or future for my work. The reason for this decision is because I waited until BJH were successful before bringing my action and I failed to make a strong enough complaint to the band at the time of my leaving in 1971.

This enabled BJH to say in court that they believed that they could use my work, (which they regarded as trivial), free of charge and that if they had known that I was serious about my claim they might have conducted there career differently and discarded the music which I had written with them on all future releases.

I feel that this is a very fair point and the one weakness of my case. The band cannot be held responsible for the way I have been let down by the English legal system.

I am now trying to get BJH's record companies to agree to put my name on their recordings of my music. It still remains to be seen whether or not this can be achieved. These record companies, (some more than others), are being very difficult and I wonder why?

If you want to hear BJH's version of events you can go to their homepage and search their site for Godfrey - there is quite a bit here about the trial and my contribution to their career.