The lyrics are uneqivocally radical – “Block up the streets and houses” “Break out the arms and ammo” – but John Keen’s singing is more tremulous hopeful and fearful at the same time. For any fans of the idents tracking the song down, the rollicking piano section and the aggressive sentiments of the last verse might provide a nastier shock than they did in 1969. It’s simply the fact that it’s on quite so often – surely as much as Jamster’s Crazy Frog in its heyday.Īnyway, whatever ‘subversive’ power it had has perhaps only increased.
YES?), and it’s not the fact that this sometime radical-chic song has been co-opted into serving the consumer broadband ‘revolution’ that bothers me. In fact it’s being more than used, the highly recognisable intro and verse melody has been adopted by the brand as a sound ident, and on the programmes TalkTalk sponsors (which seems to be most of them) it opens and closes every ad break in original and various remixed forms.Īs ads go, these are in themselves less clunky than the song’s previous service for British Airways (There’s SOMETHING.
THERE MUST BE SOMETHING IN THE AIR FREE
This position mostly evolved out of frustration with people howling on my message board about Nick Drake and Volkswagen, or about the Shins and McDonalds, and away from those particular debates I might be less stringent, even admit my own irritations. But I’d never actually blamed an ad for spoiling music until I sat down to listen to “Something In The Air” and realised that I loathe the first thirty seconds and quite enjoy the rest.įor non-UK readers: “Something In The Air” is currently being used by telco TalkTalk to advertise its free broadband service and assorted mobile tariffs. Association with some particularly horrid brand might well make me doubt an artist, but mostly these ads are product speaking unto product, and as ever its what we do with the music when we get it home that counts, not what its owners do with it. My stock line on songs and adverts is “so what?” A song you like appears in a commercial? Who cares? It doesn’t harm the song, and if it harms your relationship with the song, maybe it wasn’t that strong anyway.
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