8 January 1972
Shannon Airport’s role as the site of the real-life inspiration for Coca Cola’s “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke” jingle will turn out to be one of Ireland’s more benign contributions to our chart-topping singles of 1972. Irish coffee was invented in the ’40s at the nearby Foynes transatlantic seaplane port, so at least Shannon Airport can claim lore in another sickly, inexplicably popular black drink.
Sickly and inexplicably popular also sum up ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’, on which the simpering, saccharine New Seekers make the folk-singing flight attendant in Airplane! seem like Steve Earle. It being a short-form soda pop jingle, there’s only a minute of substantive content before this shower must resort to thinning it out with laps of harmonising. I can’t prove for certain that this infantile, contrived, hippie-wigs-in-Woolworths anthem for peace n’ love actually caused all wars and terror campaigns at the time to drag on for an extra few years from pure spite, but neither can we rule it out.
So, that’s Shannon Airport’s influence on the top of the 1972 charts. Our very next number one single that year also has its real-life inspiration in contemporary Ireland, albeit further north, and is also a folk ballad calling people to come together for a common cause, though without the minerals.
