21 November 2013
They said it couldn’t be done. However, on a TV commercial just now I’ve heard a sad cover version of the ultimate ’90s dayglo Eurodance banger, 2 Unlimited’s ‘No Limits’. I think it was an ad for some telecommunications product and its generous user tariff, hence the connection. (Correction: it’s actually for a car.) Truly, is there no song beyond the scope of a sad cover version? And why, especially in the run-up to Christmas, have sad covers become such an advertising staple? Perhaps those marketing johnnies reckon that the average office-working consumer, flopped down on the couch in front of the evening TV after a hard day’s commute and already a few glasses into the IPA or lady petrol, is sufficiently tired and emotional to cop a hit of some maudlin yet recognisable tune right in the feels. Ka-ching!
Anyway, where the pre-Christmas number one in Ireland had been the recent preserve of British charity collective singles to support the British Army from a British TV series shown only on a British TV channel, here it changes ownership to a British single from a British commercial screened only on a British TV channel to promote a British department store. Okay, we all like a bit of soup in winter, but had November become the most West Brit month of the year? Let’s see how the rest of the decade turns out.
Here in 2013, a sad cover version of ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ isn’t as much a stretch as that of ‘No Limits’, Keane’s organic piano original already being maudlin and dreary. Lily Allen’s more robust persona at least takes this away from Keane’s Enid Blyton pastoralia into something closer to the chilly, star-dappled frostiness of real-life personal sadness and seasonal melancholia. Undermining those positives is the fact that you’re probably only consuming this track via the medium of a cartoon rabbit and bear in a television commercial for a department store. Maybe you’re sad because you live in Ireland and can’t shop in John Lewis, or simply because you live in Ireland.
Now that ‘No Limits’ has succumbed, it’s not even a challenge to expect some future Christmas TV ad will go for a sad-cover ‘Ice, Ice Baby’ – or if you support local at Christmas, a plaintive piano and acoustic guitar accompaniment to the meek indie voice singing: “Life, it has no meaning / Yeah, yeah, funky yeah”. Tell you what: just give me a sad-cover ‘Fairytale Of New York’ to advertise—I don’t know—John Bull 100% Brexit Gammon Lager, but throw me a bone and use the non-slur version. Now that’d be a wonderful Christmas-time!
