Sampling – the act of taking a small piece of another artist’s song and using it in your own – is not a new phenomenon. It can be subtle, akin to dexterously layering an instrument or voice so it enhances rather than dominates, or it can be bold, such as when the sample in question does all the heavy-lifting by way of the hook or even the lion’s share of the sound.

For that reason, samples can be controversial, not least when there’s a great love for the original song that’s being borrowed from. Artists that use samples come under attack for being lazy, thieving or for ruining a much beloved track, but this tends to be when they’re in your face. That’s not always the case, though. Borrowing from more obscure tracks, or using less familiar parts of a song, avoids this problem, as does using the sample in a clever or creative way.

The first song to be acknowledged to use a sample is ‘He’s Gonna Step On You Again’ by John Kongos. This was back in 1971 and it lifted its energetic beat from a recording of African drumming. It got to number four in the UK charts and was most famously covered by the Happy Mondays who renamed their version as ‘Step On’. Interestingly, this later version also included a sample, specifically three guitar notes from the Kongos original. Despite this, the Happy Mondays version couldn’t top the chart position of its predecessor, only reaching number five.

Sampling didn’t take off, though, until the 1980s with the explosion of hip-hop. Those artists were looking for portions of songs that they could rap over, often, but not always, meaning a drumbeat. DJs would loop the breaks to create the space for the rap to be performed. It even became something of an industry. Between 1986 and 1991, Street Beat Records gathered suitable samples from myriad tracks and put them out on records titled ‘Ultimate Breaks And Beats’, making them the go-to source for hip-hop artists and producers.

Initially, the ethical implications of using someone else’s work in your new song wasn’t a concern, and it would take a while for the music industry to catch up.

Some of those early samples have proved so popular that they’ve taken on a life of their own, appearing across countless songs. An example of this is the ‘Amen Break’, a furious drum break lasting just seven seconds. Originally laid down by Gregory Coleman, drummer with the Winstons, the break comes from a 1969 B-side called ‘Amen, Brother’.

The aforementioned ‘Ultimate Breaks And Beats’ included the ‘Amen Break’ sample back in 1986, allowing the likes of Salt-N-Pepa to make use of it. Two years later, Mantronix released ‘King Of The Beats’, which put the sample at the core of the track, with ‘Straight Out Of Compton’ by NWA arriving shortly afterwards. In Britain, drum and bass, and jungle, would make the ‘Amen Break’ central to an entire music scene. You will have heard it thousands of times.

The first the Winstons knew of all this was in 1996 when the band’s frontman, Richard Lewis Spencer, was contacted by a music exec. Understandably, he wasn’t happy, accusing users of the snippet of plagiarism, and of copying and pasting Coleman’s talent for their own ends. In the US, the statute of limitations for copyright infringement is just three years, meaning there wasn’t any action that Spencer could take.

Coleman died in 2006, homeless...


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