6 September 1990
We’ve already had Italia ’90 songs, we’ll soon have movie soundtrack songs, and here’s another hugely-popular flavour of ’90s event release: The Song From The Levi’s Ad. The ad itself was usually glossy and expensive, with a slightly witty and romantic set-up where someone invariably had to take off or put on the branded jeans. The song was normally an oldie, though later they were new songs from unknown acts, perhaps as a flex to show how culturally powerful these ads now were. Anyway, this ad (directed by an Irishman, Hugh Johnson from Navan) was the one where a guy on a motorbike went up in the lift of a financial services office block, drove over to the desk of his girl, gave her a pair of Levi’s to slip into, before the two of them rode out of The Man HQ and off down the highway – all to the tune of ‘The Joker’.
So that’s the ad. The song is your standard ’70s US blues-rock number, but what everyone remembers about it is the flamboyant first verse: various people are calling Steve the space cowboy, the gangster of love, and an exceedingly camp “Mau-riiice” respectively – the last one of those because he himself speaks of… the what of love? The “pompatus” of love, a made-up word by Miller but one that stuck in everyone’s head. As the title suggests, this is all done light-heartedly and, even though the rest of it falls back into drabness, that initial breezy charm and striking playfulness has already sold us the song – and the trousers.
