Ed Sheeran has been stuck in a long legal battle going on since 2018 with grime artist Sami Chokri, who performs as Sami Switch, and music producer Ross O’Donoghue. Sheeran is being accused of stealing parts of another song for his hit single Shape of You. The star is accused of lifting his song’s “Oh I, oh I, oh I” hook from Sami Chokri’s 2015 single Oh Why.
The Perfect crooner denied having heard Mr. Chokri’s song and shunned the rumors. He said that his friends might have played it to him before he wrote Shape of You in October 2016. His upbeat pop track became 2017’s best-selling single and remains the most-played song of all time on Spotify.
On Tuesday the British top charter Ed Sheeran sang part of his 2017 uber hit Shape Of You in court in a copyright trial over the tune and said that songs can sound comparable without being replicated.
While being interrogated by Chokri and O’Donoghue’s attorney Andrew Sutcliffe in court, Sheeran sang the Oh I snare and lines from tunes remembering Nina Simone’s Feeling Good for a similar key to show how tunes can sound the same.
Chokri and O’Donoghue said the Oh I hook in Shape Of You is “strikingly similar” to the Oh Why hook in their song but Sheeran and his co-writers have denied the accusations saying that they haven’t listened to their track ever before.
On being asked about the similarities between the “Oh Why” and “Oh I” hooks, Sheeran repeatedly told the High Court in London that
“They’re both pentatonic scales and they both use vowels.”
