Billy Ocean

Billy Ocean (born Leslie Sebastian Charles, 1950, in Trinidad and Tobago) moved to London as a child and became the biggest-selling Black British recording artist of the 1980s. “Caribbean Queen (No More Love on the Run)” won him a Grammy, and hits like “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going” and “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” made him a fixture on both sides of the Atlantic, with tens of millions of records sold.

A silent protest

In February 2025, Ocean was credited among the 1,000-plus co-writers of “Is This What We Want?”, a protest album of recordings made in empty studios and performance spaces, organized by composer Ed Newton-Rex and featuring names from Kate Bush to Hans Zimmer. The album’s twelve one-word track titles combine into a single sentence: “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies.” Profits went to the charity Help Musicians.

The target was a UK government consultation, launched in December 2024, proposing a copyright exception that would let AI developers train on protected music, art, and text unless the creator actively opted out. The protesting artists argued this reverses the basic logic of copyright — putting the burden on working musicians to police the machines rather than on AI companies to seek a licence.