Ed Sheeran sings Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’ and Blackstreet’s ‘No Diggity’ during plagiarism court case

nme.com:

Ed Sheeran sang Nina Simone‘s ‘Feeling Good’ and Blackstreet‘s ‘No Diggity’ in London’s High Court yesterday (March 8) as his ongoing plagiarism court case regarding his song ‘Shape Of You’ continues.Sheeran has denied lifting the “oh I, oh I, oh I” hook in his 2017 hit single from Sami Chokri’s (AKA Sami Switch) 2015 track ‘Oh Why’.

The singer has also rejected the suggestion that he heard ‘Oh Why’ before he wrote ‘Shape Of You’ in October 2016.Royalties from ‘Shape Of You’, estimated to be worth £20million, have been frozen since Chokri and his co-writer Ross O’Donoghue issued a claim for “copyright infringement, damages and an account of profits in relation to the alleged infringement” in July 2018.As BBC News reports, Sheeran sang snippets of Simone’s 1965 rendition of ‘Feeling Good’ and Blackstreet’s 1996 hit ‘No Diggity’ in court yesterday in an effort to illustrate how the “oh I” melody is commonplace in pop music. “If you put them all in the same key, they’ll sound the same,” Sheeran argued.Lawyers for Chokri and O’Donoghue played audio from the recording sessions for ‘Shape Of You’ to the court, in which Sheeran could be heard saying that 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 ‘No Diggity’,” the singer told the court in response. “I said that… we should change it.”Asked whether ‘Shape Of You”s melody bore a similarity to Chokri’s song, Sheeran replied: “Fundamentally, yes.