A straightforward, stadium-pleasing song by The Stereophonics is a perfect analogy for my life at Big Fish.  It’s a classic driving tune.

At first, as the song gets going, there’s a straightforward, deceptively stripped back momentum.  It is pure. Liberating, even.  In my previous employment, corporate, cats-cradle complexity had bled the life out of me.  This new sense of motoring, in a wood floored kitchen of a studio in Lots Road, was an absolute joy. The people were exceptional. We pulsed forward.  Life seemed stripped back to the simple.  There was discipline to the way that people worked, with a sense of suppressed excitement that anything – anything – could happen. I wasn’t in the slightest bit surprised when, every now and then, the whole thing opened up with a full throttle roar. This was a job with a throb.

The Stereophonics power on through Dakota with unstoppable momentum.  One of the song’s great hooks is that its four progression chords have absolutely no idea of how to change direction, nor any intention whatsoever of actually changing. The metronomic synth under the verse is unstoppable. The time signature, if not exactly blitzkreig, is brisk. So much so that, when it’s all been going on for about six minutes or, in my case, four-and-a-half years, one is aware that the juggernaut has been thundering on for quite a long time and perhaps, now, it’s time for something else to happen.

In the closing, musical coda, when Kelly Jones swaggers into the chorus, blundering about at half speed, bellowing randomly as if gargling rivets, it becomes clear the conclusion is going to be a bit of a mess. The progression stops. The song grinds to a halt.  All sense of forward direction evaporates. The tune, effectively, hits the buffers.

Perhaps my departure from Big Fish wasn’t entirely like that, but there are some close parallels. Nobody was hurt.  Nothing really seismic happened.  Except that my part was played out.  It was the moment to throw my drumsticks into the crowd and wander off.

I should just conclude with two reassurances: a) I love the song Dakota (a zillion nights of very loud listening) and b), Big Fish was an incredibly enjoyable working experience on so many levels. It is an exceptional company.  In the end, I guess it was just a timed visit.

I’ve always wanted to write a book.  Or perhaps, more truthfully, I’ve always wanted to say I’ve written a book.

Now I can.

It’s been fascinating.  I was commissioned to write about Wembley Park, the 85 acres around Wembley Stadium, by a small design consultancy called Sutton Young.  Their client, Quintain, has been responsible for the development of the place over nearly twenty years.

The idea was to capture something of the place, its transformation and glue it all together in a narrative. Twenty thousand words, three to four months in the capturing and writing and we’d all be done by January.  Or at least, that was the theory.

Wembley as a place, at the end of 2018, was a marriage of a globally recognised icon and seismic new construction.  I jumped at the chance. Approaching the subject through people who knew the inside stories, it was to be a fabulous, diverting education.  I shared a few, initial thoughts with Sutton Young who, in turn, talked it through with those at the top of Quintain.  The idea that ‘flew’ was a series of interviews where the last question would ask the interviewee to name the person who, to them, personified the true spirit of Wembley.  There were no constraints.  The choice could be someone living or dead, famous or not, known to them or else a complete stranger.

‘Pass It On’ was born.

On my first trip into Wembley after I’d been given the green light, I was on an 83 bus one early morning. ‘Do not spit Paan’ shouted little green signs hanging from the lamp posts on Alperton Way.  An £80 fine was threatened. We trundled past the magnificent, if slightly incongruous, Shri Vallabh Nihi Mandir.  A Hindu temple, its elaboration makes St Pancras look like Lego, with all its intricate details fashioned in limestone from Jaisalmer, a city in remote (ish) west Rajasthan where Clare and I rode camels during our honeymoon.   In Wembley Park, it was the night after an Anthony Joshua fight and the roads were festooned with huge posters and digital screens anticipating – correctly, as it had turned out – his win.

When Quintain bought the site, with its endless, desolate car parks and worse-for-wear industrial buildings, Wembley Park had one full time resident.  He was the Irish night watchman.  Sadly departed, he might have raised an eyebrow at the 7,000 people who now live in the area full time in addition to the 90,000 who flow into the place on the 40 ‘event days’ each year.  The scale and speed of building has been eye-watering.

I met fascinating people.  They granted me loads of time and spoke freely.  The upshot is a volume of slightly more than 20,000 words with accompanying photographs, somewhere between coffee table book and extended inflight magazine. Each interview was a fascinating, often funny and ceaselessly rewarding education.

Besides a fund of brilliant stories, I do now have an ISBN number to my name. I never thought I would.

Lots of people helped make it happen beyond the interviewees, particularly Mike Sutton, Charlie Byrt, James Kinsey and Michael Ibbison of Sutton Young and both James Saunders and Julian Tollast of Quintain.  Industrial quantities of thank-yous are due in their direction. And writing everything down, perhaps befitting to the pitch at the epicentre of Wembley, I had an absolute ball.

On a pizza-sized plate

With whorls and wheels

I brush the hairs of Kiwi fruit

Into a small pile amongst the lemons.

These little things

That define my days.

I’d miss them.

Before I start, can I just say that all Linked Inners, especially those to whom I am connected, are wonderful people.  I can?  Oh good.

Don’t know about you but I’m approaching Peak Linked. Every connection I ever made, those thousands of wondrous filaments, have meshed to an impenetrable fence. Linked In is now, to me, a clunking, pendulous chain that weighs heavily.

It’s not you.  It’s me – and a testament to too much casual linking. Ah, youthful impetuosity. I used to click and click. What was I thinking?

I’ve been ‘reached out’ to by myriad lovely people to the point that I’m no longer touched but just thoroughly, exhaustively fingered. The act has lost its pleasure. All that reaching and grasping has left me a mass of grubby thumb prints. I feel rubbed raw. So many people have offered to ‘share synergies’ with me, it’s a wonder I haven’t caught something. They always promise ‘mutual advantage’, these charming requests, but increasingly the invitations have the resistible allure of car keys tangled in the pot of a bunch of swingers from Frimley.

There are the droves of gorgeous coders, SEO magicians and email engineers from all parts Bangalore. They are, I’m sure, unfailingly brilliant. Quite rightly, they tell me that over and over again. Tssk.  I should have known.  The same goes for the massed ranks of intermediaries in the head hunting game. Enchanting people, I have no doubt, every last man, woman and Natasha, of whom there seem to be an inordinate number.

The language is worn thin with repetition.  The sparks are depressingly few and far between, in the grey slurry of selling messages and professional dating demands.

As for the simpering crowd of ‘honoured to’s’, ‘proud that’s’ and ‘humbled by’s’ who, for very human reasons to do with rampaging ego, lack of self knowledge and an eye on next year’s Cannes shortlists, feel compelled to share their latest creative washing on the Linked-In line: just stop it. Enough already. Please channel your inner Jennifer Aniston and demand of your sanity, IS IT WORTH IT? Exactly. Spend some more time in front of the mirror instead.

Most recently, it appears that the most effective ‘How-to-flog-stuff-on-Linked-In’ chain letter ever has reached truckloads of US digital businesses, because they now all conclude their invitations with the sentence, “Let’s hop on a call next week and discuss opportunities.” More and more, I keep both feet on the ground, some way from the telephone.

Oh god, I’m such a grinch.  Hypocritical too, because I’ve dabbled in a bit of hardcore sharing.  This little article here; that pack design we loved from the studio there; something funny or infectiously clever that I wanted to pass on, that might – just – reflect well on me.

Nevertheless, in the waterfalls of solipsistic self-reverence, it’s all one can do not to drown. It never ceases, this overload of business blancmange at best, a downpour of drivel at worst. It’s like being wrapped in candy floss and read the phone directory at the same time. Sweet but boring.

And yet. And yet…  There are, still, wonderful exceptions.  The piece about a new Spotify poster campaign this morning.  The agency is called Who Wot Why.  The work is excellent, with that current, understated, on-brand twang in the writing that the brand has made all its own.

  

Hmmm.  Rant over and a sense of relief.  Perhaps I’ll take the fingers out of ears and my palms from over my eyes.

I wonder what’s out there? Perhaps one more teeny weeny look. Just one last lunge at the Links today.  Just one…

 

 

For the last four-and-a-half years, I have worked in a design studio by the Thames in Chelsea.  To reach it, with increasing frequency, I’ve walked through Brompton Cemetery on my way between Big Fish and Earl’s Court tube.

It’s been a civilizing, contemplative commute.  Lottery money has poured in to the cemetery and a team of gardeners keeps the place neat and spruce.  Still a working burial ground, there are occasional interments to add to the 200,000 people laid to rest in this ‘great garden of remembrance’. On a recent hot July morning, I stepped around two magnificent black horses being cooled with water buckets. Alongside was the ornate hearse ready for the later funeral.

Brompton is a far cry from the neglected and notorious spot it used to be, a menacing place I visited in the 1980s. On a grey winter’s day, my overwhelming impression then was that I had found the inspiration for CS Lewis’ Charn, the dying world described at the beginning of The Magician’s Nephew.  Charn is a grimly desolate place. The two children, who feature as the protagonists, find themselves in a never-ending corridor of seemingly dead and petrified people sitting either side on chairs, unmoving and unseeing.  At the very head of these long lines, they disturb a proud and cruel looking woman by sounding a bell.  The wicked witch, as we come to know her, rises imperiously, a vision of awakened and evil intent (and, thanks to Pauline Baynes’ illustrations, in a setting that’s a doppelganger for the catacombs of Brompton Cemetery).  The witch later sweeps into 18th Century London and creates mayhem before being transported to a new world at its birth. That is Narnia, where the Witch lurks as a super baddy to challenge all things good and Aslan-ish.

One can disappear into many rear-view reveries, walking through Brompton.

There are some very notable people there.  Emmeline Pankhurst’s grave is never without fresh flowers and admirers. William Howard Russell, the greatest, as well as the first ever, war correspondent is buried off the beaten track.  John Wisden, of cricket and Almanack fame, lies to one side of a quiet path.  Near the back southern wall, Kit Lambert’s marble plaque is attached to that of his ancestors, a calm tableau not entirely in keeping with the complicated, restless man who brought The Who together.  Bob Carlos Clarke, who took fantastically erotic photographs that enthralled the advertising and art worlds, is under a simple, bold stone in the south west corner. It marks his departure, tragically early at 55, when he jumped in front of a train.

   

Despite the odd and obvious stand-out gravestones like these, the overwhelming sense one has walking through the cemetery, from one end to the other, is how most of the stones are comfortably dull.  Of the 200,000 or so lives commemorated, most have made do with a name, some dates and the simplest of expressions. There are plenty of ostentatious, flowery outpourings too, but the majority are similarly forgettable.   While every person there will have had passions, achievements and histories in life, the details or individuality are simply lost in the telling, or lack of telling. (I use the observation as a metaphor for brands seeking attention from a disinterested audience strolling by. Londoners, according to a Guardian article from the summer of 2018, are exposed to 13,500 commercial messages a day.  Their capacity to remember any is, on average, only one.  One.)

The joy of Brompton, though, has been the endearing clutch of quirky individuals and rewarding encounters with animals.  There are no end of grey squirrels. The place is home to an army of crows, who hop about in appropriately black plumage, a seething convention of noisy undertakers. With them come a small number of eccentric bird feeders, who upend whole loaves of Hovis from cavernous shopping bags.  Usually women of a certain, senior vintage, they scowl at the runners and dog walkers who pound the pathways. This summer, a fox lair right at the centre became something of a focus as one adult raised two cubs with extraordinary care. I learned this from both watching them and also from a lady in a motorised wheelchair. She put down frankfurters for the foxes most evenings, cooingly happy with her pampered charges.  Other characters waited patiently until the coast was clear and then took up stations, simple watching or photographing the animals’ antics from just a few feet away.

My favourite spot of all is just under the two pine trees (the photo at the top).  I chose to walk under them more often than not.  They became, to me,  the Touching Trees, a duo that appear, in fanciful imagination, to be holding hands. Standing underneath them awakened all sorts of positive memories.  The pine needles made me think of the big ‘swing tree’ at my childhood home of Little Downham, where after innocent hours of swinging or being swung on a wooden seat suspended from a great bough, we later – and more mischievously  – packed the needles into rolled up rhododendron leaves and smoked them furiously.  From the age of 7 to 13, I was away at St Neot’s, a curious and enchanting prep school that was stuck, a fossil of perfectly preserved 19th Century tradition marooned in the middle of Bagshot sands, near Wokingham. The best growing plants on the sands are bracken and pine trees, and the school was bulwarked by 70 acres of both. Pine resin, pine bark and pine needles are all immediate calling cards that take me straight back to the years of running madly, but very happily, through ‘The Rough’ as the woods were called.

More indulgently still, there was something about the Touching Trees that struck me as parental. The duo appeared tightly bonded, whatever the season, holding hands in happy communion.  The sense of protection afforded by their quiet, swishing response to whatever complications were seething through my mind never failed to make the moment calmer.

Under the Touching Trees is candidate for my favourite place, although there are many. I shall miss walking through Brompton more than I can say.

[The following was published recently by D&AD.  The cartoon appeared in Punch in 1981.]

 

I once wrote a 3,200-word ad in a weekend.  I would have killed for a copywriting bot at the time.  A giant silvery worm that hoovered up the endless briefing documents and pooed out whole sentences would have been a godsend. Instead, my long defence of British Satellite Broadcasting ran in Monday’s FT.  On Tuesday, Rupert Murdoch bought the company out and it ceased to exist. The ad wasn’t just fish wrap.  It was a shroud.

Nevertheless, riffing about Artificial Intelligence Writing Tools to a creative audience is close to shooting fish in a barrel. It’s easy to take aim. I think I know which side you’re on. Do any of us welcome these gizmos at all? No one wants to be replaced by a machine, ever. Yet, in this gig economy, the mechanical genii are very much out, about and fucking difficult to stuff back in the lamp.  (Do AI tools swear, I wonder?)

Search the subject and Google will tell you that they’re all about content writing, SEO dominance and how to fashion data as text.  I get that. AI gear can churn out functional, factual information that bounces about the top of search lists. Think 21st Century equivalent of Dymo tape that sticks to the subject and labels it with clarity, shrieking ‘look at me’ louder than most, humanly applied intelligence can do.

Truthfully, even Google Search itself is a better, faster friend to the copywriter than the late, lamented Daily Telegraph Information Line. That chatty telephone service was used to fact-check every ad I wrote in my first two agencies. But equally truthfully, closer inspection of the information written by AI bots – or the terms and conditions that have been vomited out of their various app’s sequencing gubbins – reveal it to be phenomenally, catastrophically boring.

For instance, you could throw the whole AI suite of digital tools at an ironmonger’s shop. By return, you could expect crystal clear descriptions of all the nails, tacks and screws. Everything will be written into its place according to length, diameter and more.  Never, ever, in a trillion years, would any one of them come up with “Fork Handles” and keep their readers or viewers amused, absorbed and repeating the phrase over and over for years as Ronnie Barker’s famous sketch did. That requires human genius.

The obvious point to make is the Bill Bernbach one. Persuasion is an art, not a science. However many microchips conspire to produce something emotional and artistic, the results are tellingly cold. The algorithms behind writing tools are the product of committee thinking. Google Translate has democratised understanding, but that committee-effect is rubbing out local character, nuance and idiosyncrasy.  No machine  – yet – can ever capture the glorious, madcap, inconsequential and illogical lunacy of human beings as they really communicate.

Pure logic as a selling tool –  Ronseal and precious few others excepted – falls on stony ground in the limbic brain.Twenty years after Flat Eric, the curiously yellow puppet employed by Tony Davidson and Kim Papworth to advertise stay-pressed Levi’s, that ad strikes as being as far from a logical sell as you could conceive.  Further back still, Chris O’Shea’s “My shout, he whispered,” for reassuringly expensive Stella and Frank Budgen’s incomparable “Which of these three kids is wearing Fisher Price anti-slip roller skates?” (with only one child visible) would never, for simple mathematical reasons, have been spawned by Artificial Intelligence.

If we default to AI tools wholesale fashion, we’ll make the business of communication even less attractive to the next generation (and the communication itself even more ignorable). Yes, there are vital roles for AI copy that, like Desert Orchid, can overcome all the handicaps and finish first when the snapshot is taken. But they are only part of the picture.

If there’s one handy, look closely at the copywriter nearest to you. Imagine them going all Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner suddenly.  “I’ve seen body copy on fire off the creative director’s desk,” they might say. “I’ve watched pronouns glittering in the dark near paragraph ends. All that punctuation will be lost like tears in the rain. Time to delete,” before expiring as small batteries start firing out of their nose, ink cartridges leaking visibly under their skin.

Honestly, I don’t think we’re in any real danger yet. AI is really about helping, not replacing us.

A closing shot should go to one Keaton Patti. On Twitter, he declared he’d forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of commercials for Olive Garden (a casual Italian dining chain in the US).  He then asked it to write a script of its own. If you haven’t read it, you should. It is so brilliantly funny, it could never have been written by anything other than a human being.

Whatever the debates, there’s one conclusion of which we scribes can be absolutely certain. AI Writing Tools would never dream of winning a D&AD pencil, even if we all do.

“I’ve flown this route many times,” barked the account director next to me, puffing on his Silk Cut.  “There’s only one way to travel.” The British Airways stewardess smiled down at him and handed over a vodka and tonic. From that point on, she served up a winning stream of miniatures with the constancy of Roger Federer.

The account director was Jerry Judge. His mischievous eyes constantly swept the horizon for fun.  Jerry was the reason I had landed at BBH in the first place.  Meeting him at a party in rural Bucks, he encouraged me to show our portfolio to Graham Watson who, in turn, shunted it towards John Hegarty. A charismatic performer nonpareil, Jerry started young, starring opposite Richard Attenborough in the 1959 film Jet Storm, aged eight.  Something of the schoolboy performer stayed with him in perpetuity.

Sitting in the back of the plane alongside us were Paul Edwards, a precise, bow-tied planner, Stephen Gash, account manager, and Martin.  We were to meet a new client for a briefing and, shortly afterwards, come up with advertising to boost sales in Europe. It was spring, 1988.

The client was Norwegian Caribbean Lines.  After meeting in their offices on the Miami seafront, we were to ‘experience’ a weekend cruise to Nassau.  Come the Friday morning, body clocks off kilter, we slid out of the elevator at the appointed hour. The office decor was all dull cream, leather and cigar-smoke, so beloved by corporate America. Our haggard looks spoke of a blizzard of inflight drinks and little sleep. Outside, under grey morning skies, an occasional cruise ship swept out of the maritime car park.  Meeting the senior marketing manager, a man called John, clad in serious suit and tie, we attempted concentration.  The morning lurched from one impenetrable transparency projection to another, until John announced that we would go out to lunch.

In seconds, he changed personality to become a shrieking party banshee, energetically piloting us down to taxis and on to the legendary Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant. He giggled us into Dubonnet cocktails as we were wrapped in paper bibs.  The stone crab was in a class of its own, elevated higher still by little pots of melted butter. Outside the sun broke through. John made happy little claps when anything pleased him. He clapped a lot.

From the restaurant, we boarded our home for the next 48 hours, the SS Sunward II. Already ‘of a certain age’, about 350 passengers and nearly the same number of crew members swarmed its decks.  After the offices, the bright coloured carpets and furnishings were an assault, a Berni Inn backed into a particularly fluorescent biryani.

       

We nosed out of the Miami seaway towards the open ocean and a very light swell. Paul looked anxious.  It was the first time I had ever seen him without a bow tie.  Sporting a towelling polo shirt (that may well have been ironed), he turned green. The waves were perhaps a foot high and spaced a cricket pitch apart but it became clear that he’d left his sealegs at home.  Deftly grabbing a small glass ashtray, he was neatly, precisely and accurately sick, a triumph of distressed control. We watched, fascinated.

John herded the rest of us to the bar for our induction.  A Hieronymous Bosch meets pantomime affair, it was led with terrifying cheerfulness by the Ents Officer. A ringer for Richard Stilgoe, he grinned horribly through his beard until the finale, when he seized an accordion, played a medley of tunes at benzedrine speed and bobbed about as if having a fit.  It was awful.  Earlier, he had commanded us that, wherever we were, whatever we were doing and whenever we heard him yell, “Bahamarama” over the ships tannoy, we were to bellow back the same, as loud as we could.   Duly, Jerry cleared his throat and murmured, “Bahamarama” with impeccable BBC diction and started to look for an escape route.  John, the client, clapped and hooted with delight. The Ents Officer gibbered to a close.

NCL’s weekend trips were known by the crew as ‘divorce cruises’.  Snowbirds from the wintery midwest would flock down as soon as legal proceedings were done, all set to blow their alimony in the ship’s bars and on the gaming tables. There were also flights of the newly retired, set free and homing in on Florida sunshine. Among the Hawaiian shirts and cocktail dresses, a lot of cleavage was on display from both sexes.  ‘Turtleneck’ took on a whole new meaning.

Martin Galton, Stephen Gash, Jerry Judge, Will Awdry,  John (from NCL), the Captain.

The next morning we were roused by a ‘Bahaharama’ or two and found ourselves docked in Nassau. The divorcees and retirees were already off on manoeuvres,  invading the straw market and stockpiling Tee shirts, belts and hats of every description.  Martin and I wandered down the street to Government House, little realising we’d be back there two years later with some of Sir Lynden Pindling’s cabinet. That afternoon, we steamed to an atoll NCL had leased off the Bahamian government.  Approaching its immaculate white sand, attractively spaced coconut palms and thatched beach cabins, we admired its beauty, only to watch it transform in moments to an Omaha Beach of cruise passengers. They flooded the place like geese, shouting ‘Bahamarama’ every now and then and pecking at any last square inch that might still be uninhabited.  We joined the throng at a beach bar for a contemplative rum punch while Jerry reeled off anecdote after anecdote.  Gently, John replaced his clapping with surreptitious hiccoughs.

    

That evening, we were the honoured guests on the Captain’s table. Besides us, there were two fabulous Nashville divorcees and a dozen senior crew members. All the men were Norwegian or Danish, in smart white uniforms and heavy with melancholy. You could hardly blame them.  They had to sit with passengers every working night of their lives, miles from the soothing, cosy gloom of Oslo or Copenhagen, and suffer enforced cheerfulness. It must have been ghastly.  The First Officer, sitting next to me, appeared on the verge of tears until I asked about deaths on board. Instantly, his face lit up, wreathed in smiles, as he described the eight berth morgue – cleverly refrigerated – in the hold. He made it sound like heaven, which I suppose, in a way, it was. He told me about a couple who, together with their 68 year old daughter, had sailed for a ten day cruise to Cancun. The elderly husband expired in his cabin on the first day. The captain arranged  to meet the grieving widow and daughter, explaining they would be disembarked with the body at Nassau the next morning and repatriated to the mainland by plane.

The widow was emphatic. “No,” she said. “We’ve been saving for this for years.”

For the rest of the cruise, mother and daughter ate, drank, played deck games by day and took to the dancefloor by night as if there was no tomorrow.  Which, for the husband lying downstairs in the fridge, there obviously wasn’t.

Around the Captain’s table, my BBH colleagues were similarly wading through treacle, with the exception of Jerry who had somehow seated himself between the attractive ship’s purser, a provocative, Rula Lenska figure and an equally elegant woman, who ran the ship’s domestic staff.  He grinned wolfishly as we left the table.

All of us shot up to the top deck and danced madly with the throng to shake off the crew’s gloom.  The Nashville pair joined us, both very good company and extremely funny. I have a residual memory of Martin stepping out with each of them in turn.  He held his eager – and rather well endowed – dance partners at a decorous arms’ length, with the same rigidity one might handle a wheelbarrow.  At about 2am, knowing the next morning heralded a debrief meeting upon landing, I  headed for bed.  On the way down, I bumped into Jerry, ambling along a carpeted passageway. He was looking at the cabin numbers on the doors, with a studied, distracted air, checking them against the two scribbles on his napkin.

“Ah-ha.  Awdry.  Yes,” he ventured.  “Looking for, er, anyway…   Bahamarama”.

The next morning, feeling like death, we peeled ourselves off our bunks, bolted some breakfast and disembarked.   At our three hour meeting, Jerry, in very dark sunglasses, talked nineteen to the dozen, while we looked on in awe.  I don’t remember a word he said. None of us did. John, the client, as similarly compromised as we five, nodded wearily during the speech, and hiccoughed only slightly. We all left as very good friends.

The advertising we did was therefore something of a ‘what we did on our holidays’ exercise with a liberty or two about the age range. Ken Griffiths took the shots in Westway studios.  Our octogenarian dolphin lady, swinging about in a harness while grabbing a prosthetic fish, drank half a bottle of gin during the session.  For some reason, the French absolutely loved the ads.  They headed off to NCL cruises in shoals, while their advertising publications  showered us with all sorts of awards, none of which we understood.  The legendary art director Mark Reddy liked our snorkel piece in Direction magazine.

All in all, another’s day’s work in paradise. Or, as I might say if I was feeling a little more shouty, ‘Bahamarama’…

Self aggrandisement has reached epidemic levels on LinkedIn.  “Honoured/proud to have been part of…” every other comment begins before, implicitly and boldly, stating how fabulous the writer is. Some project or other has come to fruition. Except the comment is not really about the project and far more about them. They did it. Without whom, it, well, you know, disaster.  The whole thing would have crashed and burned.  Whatever it was.

“Look at me, look at me!” they might just as well say. Or, more to point in these cash-strapped days of freelance over-supply and budget downsizing, “For fuck’s sake, buy this thing or give me a job.”  Very understandable, but the sheer volume of self-loving commentary has rendered the phrasing a rusted cliché.  It’s up there with “reaching out” in my book.

But if you can’t beat them, echo them, I suppose. A long time ago, far away in Bartle Bogle Hegarty-land, it happened to me. Except that instead of saying, “Honoured”, I should really just say, “Phenomenally lucky to have been anywhere near the building when…” and leave it there.

Not to be unduly unassuming but, for reasons I will never fathom, back in the late 1980s, I caught an extraordinary wave.  I haven’t been, nor ever will be, a surfer. A Marigold washing-up glove would be more graceful on a board. Nevertheless, for a few moments,  in a work sense,  I stood up without thinking and didn’t fall over. I joined a shoal of other surfers in the BBH creative department.  We weaved in and out of each other on our wave with insouciant confidence.

Everything worked, including us, for long hours at odd times of day, although we did also stand outside Soho pubs at lunchtime for hours on end.

One day, Martin arrived in the office with a story he’d written.  In his inimitable handwriting, it told of a man who gathered his friends together in a funeral cortege.  They walked solemnly through the New Orleans streets to a soulful march, before gathering around a grave.  At that point, the man leaned forward and buried his battered old jeans, a shredded, threadbare pair of 501s, which he dropped into the earth. End of jeans and end of narrative.

Generously, he allowed me to mess about with it. We tinkered with some of the details, but the idea was all his.  We knew that a Levi’s 501 script was “having trouble”** in the system and there was a quiet flurry of alternative scripts flooding into John Hegarty’s office.

Our (or Martin’s) funeral procession script was picked, presented and selected.  We flew to New Orleans and inherited the crew that had just finished filming Oliver Stone’s JFK, with Kevin Costner.  All the crew seemed to be called Danah (pronounced Day-nah with ‘Y’all’ languor).  They told eye-watering stories of what Costner had supposedly got up to with varied, and evidently willing, young women of that city during the film shoot.

Our director was Michael Haussman, a protégé of the wonderful Helen Langridge. A cool American, he wore a very small pork pie hat and surrounded himself with a coterie of similarly cool hat wearers in white vests.  In the hot and sticky city, long before the terrible floods of Hurricane Katrina, we wandered into the French Quarter for four full days, filming the funeral procession and street marching band. In a separate sortie, we investigated the delta, south of the city  for locations but were put off by the hostility in the various bars and settlements we tried.  Instead, we drove the 24 mile long bridge across Lake Ponchartrain to the north and filmed our hero burying his jeans in horse-racing country.  Along the way, I remember struggling to get a conversation going with our chicken wrangler, a monosyllabic man who specialised in fowl on film.  We also had a genuine New Orleans street band, led by 14 year-old prodigy, Trombone Shorty. Now in his thirties, he’s a modest but brilliant star.  Having played with Bo Diddley when he was four, he grew up to record with the likes of Crosby, Stills & Nash, U2, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and countless other acts, as well as leading two command performances for the Obamas in the White House.

There was also a more complicated legacy to Procession.  Heart Attack and Vine, sung with commendable lunacy by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, is actually a Tom Waits tune. Although track clearance and rights permissions were all secured to everyone’s satisfaction, it turned out that Waits had the ultimate ownership and veto.  He sued Levi’s for over a million dollars.  They were very good about it and didn’t blame us.

The girl who stars as the admirer at the window in the piece was called Cynthia. She gave up modelling straight after the shoot and hurried off to become a dentist.  Ronnie Marquette played our lead guy, a stunning looking man with the troubled soul of a fantasist. His was a developing career in TV soap opera, particularly a Californian show called  2000 Malibu Road. During the Levi’s filming, he talked to Martin and I of his childhood in New Orleans in vivid detail. Later, we learned it was entirely fabricated for our benefit. He shot himself dead in front of his girlfriend, Michelle Pfeiffer’s sister, three years later.

 

Fast forwarding from New Orleans, in 1994, I was working with the wonderful Rosie Arnold after Martin had left BBH and joined Tim Delaney.  We were given a chance to develop a poster brief to continue the 501s story.  From somewhere – probably a mutual love of stylised sci-fi movies – we alighted upon a Valley-Of-The-Giants thought that Rosie, with the photographic genius of Nadav Kander again, brought to life in London’s largest studio.  When printed on to 10 by 20 foot poster sites, they were quite hard to miss.

     

There were a couple of other Levi’s campaigns that Martin and I produced before Procession.

The first was some print work.  While the likes of John Hegarty and Barbara Nokes’ ‘Laundrette’ commercial and its sequels did a powerful job of endorsing the  501 brand for the mainstream audience, it was important not to neglect the cognoscenti. These were the style gurus who spent the 1980s with their noses buried in The Face and their night times lost in Heaven, the nightclub (whether they were gay or not).  Our print campaign was to speak to them.  Martin was very taken with Richard Avedon’s collection of portraits of the American West. I jotted down a few counter cultural statements that no sane fashion brand would embrace – expressions about how Levi’s looked best when they were on the point of collapse, personalised to torn fragments and scrappy threads.  In a moment of genuine liberation, Martin took the handwritten statements and blew them up to sit around his drawings of how the portraits might be positioned.

In the final event, two of the ads are actually my handwriting – ‘Every pair’ and ‘I like them best’-  while the other two are, respectively, from Nick Worthington and John Gorse.  Richard Avedon took the four portraits in New York for $100,000.  Martin went to oversee the shoot but was bidden to remain outside while the great man actually photographed his subjects.  As with all his work, Avedon then took four prints from each shot and destroyed the negatives. In this era, the ads don’t seem that extraordinary but at the time they caused a bit of a stir.  I still have a few copies of The Manipulator in which the ads appeared, a bath towel-sized publication of largely black and white imagery that was so achingly hip no one ever bought it.  You needed to be in a hangar to turn its absurdly large pages.

 

 

Finally, there was a radio campaign.  One of the most enjoyably indulgent exercises of my working life, Martin and I spent a week in a New York studio with Joy Golden, radio producer extraordinaire and of razor wit, encouraging several slightly bewildered actors to extemporise off our writing.  After fourteen or fifteen takes, I would wander into the sound box and remove their scripts altogether, encouraging them to capture the gist in improvisation, rather than read it.  The results were then hacked down to time by our engineer during a long and fabulous week. Our agency producer, Lucy Marsden, was responsible for carrying the tapes back on our flight home.  A fabulous, funny, heron of a creature, she didn’t realise there was a hole in her bag, so forty hours of recordings were strewn across the floor at La Guardia airport as we ran for the flight.  Martin stopped, tutted and gathered up the tapes (it was that long ago) in his natty carry-on bag behind her.  Had he not, our return to BBH would have been considerably frostier than the warmth that met us.

 

[**The 501s TV script “having trouble” was a reworking of a corny old joke. Research and nervousness kept stalling it. Various people, both within the agency and at Levi’s were dead against it on grounds of taste, given its Benny Hill structure. The story was that two young girls approach a lakeside and see a a pile of clothes. A little way out, a lithe, fit guy is splashing in the water.  It’s hard to see, but the girls think he’s naked.  They steal his clothes, only for an old, withered and nude man to emerge out of the water and approach them to retrieve what are actually his clothes.  The young man, it transpires, still has his kit on.  Nick Worthington and John Gorse, a creative team almost opposite our office, had suggested the young guy should be wearing 501 shrink-to-fits and kept on finessing the ‘joke’. Eventually, with an Ansell Adams photograph, the Smashing Pumpkins song ‘Today’ and some pictures of the Pennsylvanian Amish, they combined with directing duo Vaughan and Anthea and went on to film what many consider the best commercial ever made:  ‘Creek’. Practically the only TV ad ever to have been granted a permit to be filmed in Yosemite.  When the Smashing Pumpkins refused permission for their composition to be used, the composer of the final piece turned himself into a band called Stilstkin, invented a bogus history and toured, successfully, for two or three years. A labour of several years’ persistence, the 60′ cut is below:]

 

 

Design:  Ariel Cortese;  Words:  Nell Fane.

In amongst all this ancient history, life does go on.  My days over the last four years or so have been spent helping imagine businesses into being, with the help of exceptional people at Big Fish. These are three examples of what I have been doing.

Mostly working with food companies, Big Fish is a brand, design and marketing consultancy.  We’ll name, design and develop their stories, either to help reinvigorate a flagging business, to take an organisation to its next stage or to launch an infant one.  Least it sound horibly academic and bulshitty, it’s anything but.  The spirit is somewhere close to the same, inventive zeal I experienced at BBH in the early 1980s.  The place buzzes with energy and fizzes with real life.

Eat Your Hat is a chocolate and coffee brand created for Traidcraft, an ethical grocery business that grew up with the Fairtrade movement, based in Newcastle.  (Show me a brand, company or production process that doesn’t hurt the planet and I’ll eat my hat was the start point.)

Applekind is designed for Korean eyes and ears.  Apples change hands for anything up to £10 each in South Korea, given especially as presents at New Year and the national thanksgiving day.  I wrote about the trip we made there a little while ago.  (https://wordpress.com/post/willawdry.blog/1117)  The company is the late flowering brain child of the Kims. After running a school for thirty years in Seoul, they have “retired” to the east of the peninsular, and grow their apples in near perfect conditions in a crater valley that borders with North Korea.

Design:  Marie Schultz;    Words:  Jim Medd/Lee Anderson

Applekind is run with scrupulous ethics by the family.  Besides being a place of orchards, it is also destined to become a respite destination for students and refugee workers from the incessant turbulence of Korean industrial life.

The apples, in case you wondered, are absolutely fantastic.  Adam and Eve would have been at them without any need for a snakey salesman. Intense, crisp, sharply scented but not frilly, refreshing and awakening.  Other apples are cotton wool by comparison.

Finally, for now, Leap is a wild fish brand we created for New England Seafood International.  Their company has a very long name for a bloke who started selling lobsters under a bridge in Wandsworth thirty years ago.

Wild fish – well, salmon, really – is genuinely different. It has lived a free life.  The animals are carefully monitored in the great summer runs of the Pacific Northwest to avoid overfishing and maintain sustainability.  If you try out any random selection of the population with farmed and smoked salmon, the results are consistent.   Only one in thirty people (who eat fish) have ever tried the wild variety.  When they do, one in three people prefer it.  It is slightly denser, has more ‘gnyaaahh’ to it, as Fergus Henderson might say, and is definitely better for the soul.

Design:  Nicola Ansell;     Words:  Emily Wright

About a year and a half after landing at BBH, I was working with Martin Galton.

We couldn’t have been more different as people.  An arranged art director/copywriter marriage thanks to John Hegarty, we’d been plonked with each other.  Martin wasn’t sure he wanted to work with anybody, let alone me, having secured his job as a lone wolf with a speculative Asda campaign that just happened – brilliantly – to chime with the stuff that had won BBH the pitch.  I wasn’t at all sure that my position was safe as a solo writer. My first art director partner, David Meldrum, had departed and I would have happily worked with a green mamba, if it meant I could stay.  I was still plagued by paranoia, having turn-coated from account executive, albeit a useless one, to copywriter.  There was precious little evidence from my geography degree that I deserved the title.

We battled with lots of grubby, hand-to-hand press work for Asda.  Our dreams were to have a go at the more sexy accounts. Reputations were being built up in the neighbouring offices – offices! – by the creative pairs behind Levi’s, Audi, Whitbread and Dr White’s campaigns, all the envy of the advertising business. Instead, flogging various products for the Leeds based supermarket was our staple diet, week in, week out. My job was to generate a headline for Asda’s tabloid press ads,  black and white galleries of nine separate, illustrated products with a price by each. These were of the ‘More dash, less cash’ variety.  One week, Martin went off to a shoot for a wrapped loaf of sliced bread, one of the items to be featured.  Once photographed, it would be converted into a black and white, halftone illustration.  Tabloid newspaper printing being what it was, halftones crudely but effectively simplified the image to avoid an end result more smudged brass rubbing than identifiable object.

Martin came back next day both amused and bemused.  The photographer, a young man, newly arrived from South Africa, had taken nearly six hours just to shoot the loaf. It was his first ever commissioned advertising work in London.   Looking at the black and white transparency, the picture seemed OK to me, but it was still, well, just bread, with a few slices flopping out from one end of the packet. What a lot of fuss. I agreed with Martin. It smacked of overkill.

The photographer’s name was Nadav Kander.

Fast forwarding, Nadav’s capture of Donald Trump for the front cover of Time’s Man Of The Year 2016 is hailed as one of the most brilliantly seditious portraits ever taken.  His capture of Obama in 2012 still sings out from the countless thousands taken before or since.  Be it people, landscape, abstract or object,  he is both peerless and fabulous. You’d hate him if he wasn’t such a charming bloke. I bet he took the same care over Trump as he did over our loaf of bread.                           https://www.nadavkander.com/

The day came when Martin and I were able to jump over the Asda wall.  We were given a brief for Pretty Polly.  The hosiery company was about to launch a line of stockings.  We hurled ourselves at the chance.  In the brash, hard, synth-dominated decade that was the Eighties, there was a lot of evidence that audiences craved a softer, more forgiving culture. Back To The Future was doing great box office. BBH was already turning heads with Levis’ advertising, ads that spoke of the gentler and simpler 1950s.  John Hegarty and Barbara Nokes had recently delivered the Nick Kamen ‘Laundrette’ commercial to the world. Together with director Roger Lyons, they presented a less aggressive male attraction, wrapped with charm, in a nostalgic tinge. It worked like wildfire.

For Pretty Polly’s launch of Nylons as a press campaign, Martin and I went retro too. John Hegarty allowed us to develop a vintage, paperback novel approach, putting pastiche gumshoe detective story or romantic fiction covers on the back of magazines. Two examples are shown above.  The backgrounds were shot for real in New York. “Authenticity” was the justification in that pre-Photoshop era. We chose the best photographer we knew: Nadav. For a few, sleepless days, Martin and he froze in various Manhattan locations. Despite buying some electric socks, both still suffered near frostbite.  Back in England, I was allowed to attend the studio shoot where we’d actually have somebody wearing the stockings, as a sop to me for staying at home and ‘doing the writing’.

Our model was Jilly Johnson.  Famous for the being the first person to appear naked in the Times newspaper, she was a glamour supermodel of her era. (In 2018, she still is.)  For the ‘Crooked Path’ composition, against Brooklyn Bridge, she had a wind machine howling at her with full force. At one, unlikely moment, her dress actually blew clean over her head, leaving her stark naked in the gale, apart from her nylons and heels, laughing her head off.  As she wandered over to the other side of the studio to scoop up the dress, Martin and I stared fixedly at the floor.  Nadav didn’t blink.  I remember the floorboards by my feet in the Britannia Row studio from that moment with extraordinary clarity.

Shortly after the campaign broke, Pretty Polly decided they wanted more, so we were instructed to think of a TV commercial.  The story of Wallace Carothers, the inventor of nylon, presented itself as a possible vehicle.  There was some discussion about taste. Genius that he was, Carothers was also plagued by depression and, tragically, took his own life very young.  In the end, we went with it and John S Clarke directed.  Shamefully, I can’t remember the name of the very beautiful star, but the retrospective piece was filmed over two very long days in Twickenham Studios.  Martin and I spent most of the time sitting by the vast, open door, giggling with our producers, Philippa Crane and Lucy Marsden.  It was a hoot.