An All-Star lineup coming together to stop A.I. Steve Marriott was not on my 2024 Bingo Card.
A long list of artists including Robert Plant, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, Peter Frampton, Bryan Adams and more have joined the late British singer Steve Marriott’s children and bandmates in opposing the release of “new” recordings featuring AI-generated versions of his vocals. ...
The AI-generated recordings, which are said to be incomplete, were authorized by Marriott’s third wife, Toni Marriott, whom he married less than two years before his death.
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Shirley tells Variety that late last year, he received an email from Los Angeles-based independent label Cleopatra Records, which had issued some of those Humble Pie releases, mostly to his satisfaction, about renewing their agreement. “Buried in the renewal contract,” he says, was a new paragraph addressing AI.
At first, “I had no idea what it was, to be honest with you,” he says. “But eventually I realized what it meant, [France] confirmed it, and I said, ‘I want nothing to do with it.’”
In an effort to prove that the AI-generated recordings would be unsatisfactory, Shirley proposed that Cleopatra attempt an AI version of “Georgia on My Mind,” the R&B classic made famous by Ray Charles, as an example. He would then compare the result with a rough recording of the song in his possession that Marriott had recorded during the 1960s that was unreleased (so the AI couldn’t be trained with it).
The AI recording was “horrible,” Shirley says. “It sounded like someone trying to sound like someone trying to sound like Steve Marriott.” The company sent him another attempt, which “sounded like a not-bad soul singer,” he says, “but it didn’t sound like Steve. And the backing track was just laughable.”