Olivia Rodrigo and Elvis Costello share a fondness for the same riff that he used for Pump It Up and she recycled with Brutal.

I don’t think I’d heard of Olivia Rodrigo when Brutal came out three years ago. Since then it’s had more than 60 million YouTube views, which means Elvis Costello could have made a lot of money if he’d got his lawyers on the case.

Because it doesn’t take a pop expert to recognise that the main riff is not so much similar to as exactly the same as Pump It Up. Or, if you’re an unnecessarily cautious NME writing about it now, “fans suggested there were similarities between their songs.”

So similar that there are mash-ups on YouTube celebrating the similarity. Happily, and to his vast credit in this over-litigious world, Costello has declined to take action of any kind. And this week he’s been speaking about it again.

He first came to her defence when it was released in 2021, saying: “That’s fine by me. It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That’s what I did.”

He even admitted that his own composition Pump It Up had been inspired by Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues and, furthermore, that Dylan’s song had in turn been inspired by Chuck Berry’s Too Much Monkey Business.

Now, he’s explained again why he didn’t get lawyers involved to try to claim royalties from Rodrigo’s hit single. “I did not find any reason to go after them legally for that because I think it would be ludicrous,” Costello said in a new interview with Vanity Fair. “It’s a shared language of music.”

Brutal was not the only song on Rodrigo’s 2021 debut album Sour to be subjected to the microscope for plagiarism. After its initial release additional credits were added for Taylor Swift, St. Vincent and Jack Antonoff.

At a later date Paramore’s Hayley Williams and former guitarist Joshua Farro received writing credits on Rodrigo’s single Good 4 U, after similarities were pointed out with their 2007 hit Misery Business.
Rodrigo responded with a self-penned song called Vampire whose lyric referred to a “bloodsucker, fame fucker”, prompting suggestions it was about Williams.

She defended her songwriting, saying she had come up with the lyrics and melody of Good 4 U in the shower one morning, adding: “All music is inspired by each other. Every single artist is inspired by artists who have come before them.

“It’s sort of a fun, beautiful sharing process. Nothing in music is ever new. There’s four chords in every song. That’s the fun part — trying to make that your own.”