Frozen’s Belgian controversy

Our Team Member from Beligum Verity reports:

“This morning on the first page of Belgian newspaper ‘Het Nieuwsblad‘ there is an article on a Belgian composer who accuses Madonna of plagiarism. Madonna‘s song ‘Frozen‘ is allegedly copied from a song she might have heard back in 1979 when she was a background dancer for Patrick Hernandez. ‘Experts’ have discovered four succeeding notes that are identical. At the time, Madonna is said to have stayed a while in a hotel in a Belgian city Moeskroen and it is there that her then producer, might have played her the song which she then turned into Frozen nineteen years later.
Over the years, Belgian journalists have come up a few times with the hook that Madonna lived for some time in a town called Aalbeke (for instance Joepie 1987, Man Bijt Hond 2002). When interviewed around her HMV concert in 2003, Belgian journalist André Vermeulen asked Madonna to comment on her stay in Belgium (this was two years ago, so before any accusations whatsoever) but she clearly had no recollection of it whatsoever, as she – rather rudely – repeated that her “discoverers” put her in an apartment in Paris.

Nevertheless, the claim of plagiarism seems quite ridiculous, as we all know Frozen developed from Revenge. Moreover, the song, which is titled something like ‘L’amour fou’, was made into a single somewhere early 1990s, and even though produced in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, it failed to sell out. It is obviously very unlikely Madonna ever heard this song or has a recollection of it let alone copy it.
A court in Bergen/Mons will investigate the matter this summer.”
Verity

Front page and page 3 of today’s “Het Nieuwsblad”