Has anybody in history lost in court more often than Donald Trump? He was at it again last week, when a judge ruled against his effort to dismiss a lawsuit brought against him by Guyanese-British singer-songwriter Eddy Grant over Trump’s use of “Electric Avenue” in a campaign ad.
Such cases typically get settled, usually with an undisclosed payment, but Trump doesn’t settle. This Billboard article lays out the copyright issues involved, and they don’t favor Trump’s case, which now goes to discovery.
Grant was born in Guyana and emigrated to England when he was 12, joining his parents, who already were working there. He rose to fame with a ’60s band called the Equals, the first integrated British pop band, who had a hit with “Police on My Back.”
Grant returned to Guyana after the 1981 Brixton riots, sparked by a police stop-and-frisk campaign in predominantly Black, immigrant Brixton. (Electric Avenue is a market street in Brixton that got its name when it became the first street in London outfitted with electric lights.) He wrote the tune after an album’s worth of material he wrote about the riots was lost in transit on his return to Guyana. It appeared on his 1982 album “Killer on the Rampage,” and reached No. 2 in 1983 in first the UK and then the US, where it was helped by MTV.
