One of pop’s biggest days of the year fell last Thursday, when John Lewis unveiled its Christmas ad. The soundtrack to that ad is considered one of the prime showcase slots in the music industry – as Eamonn Forde wrote in the Guardian in 2014: “Winning the ad is the holy grail for sync departments and the pitching process is as long as it is secretive, with all entrants silenced by hefty non-disclosure agreements.” Yet so often the song that accompanies the ad, despite being inescapable for six weeks, is gone from our minds like melting snow in January (can anyone remember a single thing about Tom Odell’s version of Real Love in 2014?). But the music of adverts need not be like that: the adverts we remember might be accompanied by music we hate, but there is no danger of us ever forgetting them. These are the advert themes we can’t shake (or vac). What are yours?
Rowntree’s Tots
I’d love to tell you that my earliest memories are of some wonderful family holiday, or of the verdant loveliness of a childhood in the Yorkshire Dales. But I can’t: every last one of my earliest memories involves television. They start to crowd in from around the time I was three or four: Wizzard on Top of the Pops (I was terrified of Roy Wood), Robert Wyatt on Top of the Pops (I was intrigued by his wheelchair), the cartoon polar bear who shilled Cresta pop with the words “It’s frothy, man”, and the song from an advert for Rowntree’s Tots. I can’t remember the visuals that accompanied it at all, but a snatch of the melody and the lyrics inexplicably clung to me forever afterwards: “Candy Tots, something new / They’re dolly mixtures and soft to chew.” It would, in the way of ad music, pop into my head unbidden at inexplicable moments, until the day in the mid-noughties when I was sent a compilation of the work of late 60s/early 70s pop journeyman John Carter, variously the lead singer of the New Vaudeville Jazz Band, the brains behind First Class’s fantastic Brian Wilson homage Beach Baby, and the co-author of Summer of Love cash-in Let’s Go to San Francisco by the Flowerpot Men. I was only half-listening to it (as you might expect, given his CV, the musical quality was a bit variable) when the Rowntree’s Tots advert came bursting from the speakers: it transpired Mr Carter knocked out advertising jingles as well, and Rowntree’s Tots had been such a success that a spin-off single with altered lyrics was released. A little pathetically, I literally shouted in excitement. It would be nice if I could tell you the song was great, but, alas, 30 years on, it sounded a bit twee and irritating. Moreover, hearing it again didn’t – as I hoped - expunge it from my mind. It’s still rattling around in there, and I fully expect to be plagued by a jaunty endorsement of the manifold qualities of Candy Tots (long discontinued) on my deathbed. Alexis Petridis
Shake n’ Vac
Ever since I first heard it as a schoolboy in the early 1980s, the irritatingly catchy Shake n’ Vac ad song has lodged in my poor brain like a virus, and despite not being on TV since 1989, it still pops into my head. A retro, 50s-style rock’n’roll backing accompanies the brutally effective jingle: “Do the Shake n’ Vac and put the freshness back / Do the Shake n’ Vac and put the freshness back / When your carpet smells fresh, your room does too …” Argh, no! The advert itself now looks kitsch and dated: Jenny Logan plays a maxi-skirted, high-heeled, bottom-wiggling housewife who sings of the joys of a sinister white powder that resembles anthrax, which is sprinkled over a carpet and vacuumed up again to leave it sparkling clean. I’ve since resisted the tune’s demonic calling and marketing witchcraft in the only way I know, by installing laminate flooring. Dave Simpson
Carphone Warehouse
Poor old Stereo MC’s. Their legacy as British hip-hop pioneers, whose 1990 single Elevate My Mind was the first UK rap entry on the US Billboard 100, will forever be eclipsed by four little words: gonna get myself connected. Yes, the London four-piece were indeed the band who soundtracked those Carphone Warehouse ads with a funk loop nabbed from KC and The Sunshine band affiliate Jimmy “Bo” Horne and some sub-Britpop swagger. Like Mansun and soul patches, Connected is a thing of pure Nineties naffness – not quite dance but not quite indie, despite frontman Rob Birch showcasing a meandering, karaoke Tim Burgess vocal style. Although this writer was born two months after its release, its role in the marketing of 10-tonne Motorolas during my formative years means that – pardon the pun – I shall forever feel a connection. Hannah J Davies
Milky Way
“The red car and the blue car had a race.” Those words alone are enough to set a piece of music racing through the heads of TV viewers of a certain age – the music to the ad known as Red Car Blue Car, made for Milky Way in 1989, a tinny piece of country rock’n’roll written by Mike Connaris, and a song so infernally catchy that when the ad was revived in 2009, there were people who celebrated its return. Even more incredibly, when its lyrics were changed and the song re-recorded as Home for Christmas Day, it reached No 44 in the charts – in December 1991. Yes, even after two years of exposure to the ad, there were people who were not yet sick of it. (These, perhaps, were the same people who decided they needed to buy a copy of Brian May’s Ford advert, Driven by You. Or who cheered when John Farnham performed his Gillette razors track The Best in concert.) But Red Car Blue Car did its job. To this day, when I see a red car and blue car next to each other at traffic lights, I wonder if they’ll race, and if the red car will be able to do anything but stuff its face. Like “apples, hazelnuts, bananas, raisins, coconuts, sultanas” and “feed me! Feed me NOW!”, Red Car Blue Car is now embedded deep within me. It doesn’t make me want to eat Milky Ways, though. Michael Hann
Müller yogurt
Yoghurt advertising is irritating enough as it is: whether it’s Nicole Scherzinger orgasming over a fruit corner or some French children being intolerably wholesome in the vicinity of a Petits Filous, the flogging of the stuff is a small universe of ridiculous commercial fiction. But maybe the industry’s biggest crime was to take the transcendent 1968 Nina Simone song Ain’t Got No, I Got Life, layer some cow sound effects over it, and turn it into a maddening earworm most closely associated with imbecillic milk-based joie de vivre. Another unfortunate side-effect of using it to soundtrack a series of farm vistas is that it makes you realise how much Simone’s voice resembles a sheep’s. And thus, an icon now exists as little more in my mind than bleating shorthand for a worryingly fanatical devotion to dairy products. Rachel Aroesti
Huggies Pull-Ups
Morrissey once sang: “The music that they constantly play / It says nothing to me about my life.” That has long been the case for me and the song from the Huggies Pull-Ups advert, which has been constantly playing in my head now for at least two decades despite saying precious little about my life. A quick Google suggests it first seeped into my consciousness when I was barely a teenager. And yet, despite being free of the need to consider elasticated nappy/pant hybrids by, ooh, at least a year or so, the song has remained stitched to my eardrums like some kind of audio Celtic symbol. It is, undoubtedly, one of the most annoying jingles ever recorded. The lyrics are annoying, the tune is moronic and the kid’s voice instilled in me a deep loathing of all human beings under the age of five. And yet I’ve never felt truly free of its presence. Indeed, if its influence over my daily soundtrack had finally started to wane in recent years, then the arrival of my daughter this summer meant that it has since returned with a vengeance. Of course, now that I’m in a situation where I might actually need to buy “big kid pants”, you could argue that the Huggies advert finally does say something to me about my life. And does that make it any less annoying? No. No it does not. Tim Jonze
