Avicii & Leona Lewis Controversy Over “Fade Into Darkness”

Posted by Juicebox on July 17, 2011

Sounds familiar right? Alright so here’s the situation. Everyone and their mother not only had Avicii’s essential mix on repeat during finals, but also couldn’t get enough of that addictive melody featured in “Penguin”. A leak we posted a few days ago entitled “Fade Into Darkness,” surfaced featuring a vocal piece over Penguin’s infectious melody. However, yesterday, a Leona Lewis single entitled “Collide” leaked featuring pretty much the same exact instrumental found on “Fade Into Darkness.” Let the confusion begin…

The Origin:
To keep things easy, let’s start with the origin of the track. The Penguin Café Orchestra was a group of elite performing musicians originally formed by British guitarist Simon Jeffres. The Penguin Café wrote a song called, “Perpetuum Mobile” (posted below) that Avicii clearly sampled in his latest single.
The Penguin Cafe Orchestra – Perpetuum Mobile

The Confusion:
Apparently the original sample was offered to both Avicii’s team and Leona’s…however, SyCo (Leona’s label headed by Simon Cowell) was informed the song would be Avicii’s next single and was no longer available. Yet, yesterday, Leona Lewis put out her new summer single, which is pretty much an identical copy of “Fade Into Darkness.” However, the production side for Leona Lewis’s track was provided by Sandy Vee, most famous for production on Rihanna’s Only Girl and David Guetta’s Where Them Girls At. This obviously resulted in a lot of confusion and tension. Avicii’s label, Ministry of Sound is obviously accusing SyCo of plagiarizing their track, yet Simon Cowell is disregarding any claims and still pushing to have the official release asap. I clearly support Avicii as he has been playing this track in all of his sets, including his EDC set, and Radio One has been playing it since back in December. Leona Lewis’s camp had to of known this, yet they still continued production of the track. Whether they had the official rights to it or not (which is still unclear and will probably be settled in court) I think that fact that Avicii has had it previewing on the radio for 6 months now, while Leona first previewed it this week stands above anything.

Here’s what Avicii’s team tweeted –

Avicii’s management – “We never got to hear the track before it was promoed on radio, how could we clear anything? We’re not amateurs – we don’t sign papers without knowing what [we’re] getting into.” – Ash Pournouri, Manager and Executive Producer of Avicii

Avicii’s Tweets
“To be clear im not taking credit for the melody (everything was cleared with penguin cafe orchestra and simon jeffes who wrote the song)”

He goes on to explain that he’s just upset someone else took credit for the song before they released it. Especially because of how much time his label and himself put into it.

Show your support and join Team Avicii

Finally…Kap Slap went ahead and mashed the vocals of the two tracks together which turned out pretty cool and shows how similar these two songs really are. Sorry Leona, I’m on Avicii’s side.

DOWNLOAD: Kap Slap – Penguins Collide Into Darkness (Avicii vs. Leona Lewis)