This month’s themed playlist is songs that have later gone on to be featured in TV adverts. Some of these are songs that were already well-known, but others are from bands or artists that became popular because their songs were featured in TV adverts. I could have spent hours choosing hundreds of songs for this, but, like most playlists of the month, there’s just ten. As usual, you can follow along on Spotify, and I’ve included YouTube links to the adverts as well.
- Mr Oizo – “Flat Beat” – One of two appearances for Levi’s jeans, this advert featured a yellow puppet head-banging in a car. There were several adverts featuring this character, apparently called Flat Eric.
- Babylon Zoo – “Spaceman” – Levi’s took one of the remixes of this song and sped it up for the advert. As such, the single version of this song starts off sped up, and then slows down to normal speed, becoming a meme about disappointment.
- Jess Glynne – “Hold My Hand” – Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday! This also became a meme, and I can confirm that they play this advert on board Jet2 flights as my outbound flight to Athens last year was with Jet2. I can’t really recommend flying with a budget holiday airline for work, but at least someone else was paying.
- Perez Prado – “Guaglione” – Back to the 1990s again for this advert for Guinness entitled Anticipation, although the song was originally released in the 1950s. I remember having this as a (very badly animated) screensaver which must have come on a CD-ROM mounted on the front of some kind of PC magazine.
- Lord Rockingham’s XI – “Hoots Mon” – Another 1990s advert for Maynard’s Wine Gums, and again, featuring a variation of a song from the 1950s. Better known as “There’s a moose loose aboot this hoose”.
- Dandy Warhols – “Bohemian Like You” – Vodafone did some pretty good adverts in the early 2000s – this one was called How are you? and features this Dandy Warhols song. This is another song that did well on the back of being featured in an advert – originally charting at number 42, it made it to number 5 after the advert came out.
- The Mock Turtles – Can You Dig It? – Vodafone followed up How are you? with this advert featuring David Beckham and this song by The Mock Turtles. They were a bit of a one-hit wonder – whilst they released three studio albums and multiple singles in their time, none were as successful as this song. The CD release even featured a mobile phone on the cover. Also, the lead singer of The Mock Turtles is the older brother of Steve Coogan, better known as Alan Partridge.
- Fleetwood Mac – “Everywhere” – Another advert for a phone network, this time Three (now wholly owned by Vodafone but was independent back in 2011 when this came out). The advert features a dancing pony, to the tune of a Fleetwood Mac song.
- Smash Mouth – “Walking On The Sun” – Most people know Smash Mouth from the first Shrek film, but they had another single as well which Ford used for an advert called Get Out More.
- The Vines – “Ride With Me” – Apple don’t make iPods any more, but when they did, they often used existing music to advertise them. This was the one that was out at around the time I bought my first iPod.
It’s here that I should also mention the web site Commercial Breaks and Beats, which was a directory of UK TV adverts and the songs used in them. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated since 2008, but at least it still exists on the internet.
