Best Friend Marketing

Originally published as part of 'What Grinds Georgia's Gears' January 2012 Exepose

I vividly remember a few years ago buying an innocent smoothie and smiling at the twee messages on the side, sweet endearments that try to convince you that this Coca-Cola owned brand is as friendly as it is healthy. Fair enough, I thought, they did start as a small business founded by three kooky Cambridge grads, quite clever marketing really. Wrong.

Now, when it isn’t soups, smoothies or organic mousse, its department stores with sickeningly cute children, or banks that insist they aren’t robots through the medium of song attempting to get on your good side. Note: Good side in this instance refers to that squishy corner of your brain, the one usually reserved for Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens etc.  I used to consider those double glazing adverts, or my local politician sending me a letter on my 18^th birthday the most infuriating of them all. Surely nothing could be more annoying than a balding man shouting ‘BOGOF’ as you drink a cuppa waiting for the next half of Downton Abbey, and that was just the politician.

Yet these, along with those horrifically exploitative 20790% APR loan shark adverts or affectionate ‘no win no fee’ announcements don’t come close to the puny pre-pubescent whining of the child on the Thomson commercial who insists that there just isn’t enough time in the day to see his parents. They simply must book a holiday to have the lasting nuclear family he’s always dreamed of.

I can imagine those marketing execs sitting around a large table with those boring blue chairs, brainstorming the best way to catch us unawares and snap our feeble heartstrings. But, giant corporate marketing person, maybe, just maybe I would like a smoothie that just has the ingredients on the label, adverts where no-one sings, Yummy Mummies who don’t play Bingo online together and a world where Google Chrome isn’t the only tool for family interaction. What was wrong with Dad making little Sophie a real scrap book? What if she accidentally deletes those online memories or her external hard-drive falls ill with a techno virus, what happens then? Children don’t really jazz up their parents spreadsheets out of love regardless of what Windows 7 insists, and as much as The Saturdays are extremely talented artists, watching them stroke an animated puppy isn’t going to make me go out and buy a Nintendo DS.

I would argue that those adverts are even worse than pop-up’s that exclaim ‘Are you SURE you want to leave this page? You have been chosen as a $1,000,000 prize winner!’ Or spam e-mails that encourage you to click on them only to bombard everyone you’ve ever met with discounted soft porn. At least they don’t pretend to be your best mate. They knowingly lie and laugh at you, much less scheming, more admirable really.

Maybe this is all technology driven. Perhaps if I switched the television and radio off, popped my laptop under the bed and played dominoes with chums we would all be safer. Those suited conmen and women... con-people would be out of a job as we regain our bank balances and claw back our detached and fragile dignity. That is until the doorbell rings and the Royal Mail delivers an affectionate letter from that nice clothing shop offering you a cheeky discount if you rack up lots of juicy debt on their credit card.

We must count our blessings though. In America they have twenty minute infomercials where Katy Perry talks through the ultimate cure for acne, and pharmaceutical companies sell wonder drugs that warn of side-effects such as Liver Failure and Death in a laid-back ‘just gone surfing’ Southern California drawl. Back in the UK with the nauseating voice of the Marks and Spencer’s pudding ad, beautifully slim models scoffing chocolate and ‘celebrities’ flashing their wobbly bits in fitness video’s, it’s enough to make you feel slightly nauseous, and that’s before noting the irony. Maybe I’m just getting old, but if Boots play ‘Here come the girls’ one more time as a group of (you guessed it) girls go shopping, I may scream.

John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Double Fantasy Review

Published in October 2010 Exepose

If it hadn’t have been for a certain disillusioned fan armed with a gun in New York 30 years ago, John Lennon would have been celebrating his 70^th birthday on the 9^th October.  Released three weeks before his death after a five year househusband hiatus, the album Double Fantasy received some less that complimentary reviews, however many of these were retracted after his death. Part of the problem with the record was that with his new found happiness, his writing strayed away from his usual socio-political, edgy stances and towards songs written about his children and marital problems. Giving half of his album to his caterwauling and widely unpopular other half Yoko Ono didn’t help.

Often it sounds as if they were working on two different albums, Lennon’s songs drenched in rockabilly sentiment contrast heavily with her new wave and disco inspired contributions. Reportedly unhappy with the original mix of the tracks, Ono consented to a 2010 remix of Double Fantasy, and with this the album takes on new importance. Lennon’s vocals are crisper, unnecessary additional layers to the production have been removed and have instead been replaced with clips of his good natured jostling in the studio. ‘Yes, I’m Your Angel’ is a surprisingly soft contribution of Ono’s,  sounding more suited to a Disney film with its twee whistling and “tra-la-la’s” than a rock and roll album, and ‘Kiss Kiss Kiss’ sounds creepily contemporary with its catchy chorus and spoken Japanese.

   

In the remixed version, for some unexplained reason, the production team have gone backwards, replacing the quirky reggae beat of ‘Every Man Has A Woman That Loves Him’ with whirring synth, giving the impression that in any moment a beat will drop and it will become a club classic. Instead the harmonies blur into echoes and swim in no direction, the song is stolen of any climactic moment and it sounds like it belongs on a new age album with squawking dolphins and the rush of waterfalls. ‘Dear Yoko’ has a refreshingly earthy quality with the English concertina, despite once again professing his undying love for his wife, there is a horribly sad irony in the lyrics “I’ll never ever ever ever ever gonna let you go.”

Reviewing this album with the nostalgia that 30 years have given us, it has to be remembered that despite their warbling insistence of normality, Lennon and Ono with their pop art installations, joint screaming albums about primal therapy and the addition of worldwide fame were never going to be the blueprint of your average married couple, and if they wanted to spend five years away from the industry and return with an album about each other that spanned several genres, they would. Whether the album made triple platinum because of his murder or not, Double Fantasy will forever hold historical musical importance and huge significance to Lennon fans.