Do a commercial, you’re off the artistic roll call, every word you say is suspect, you’re a corporate whore and eh, end of story.
Bill Hicks
When you’ve not recorded anything worth listening to since 1983, your most recent musical highlight is guesting on Leftfield’s first album and you spend your summers playing nostalgia sets at festivals you know that your creative moment has passed. From that it does not necessarily follow that you end up doing adverts for Dairy Crest to enhance the pension fund.
There is a deep bathos in John Lydon’s fate. Dairy Crest’s marketing people gush:
We have announced a new high profile marketing campaign featuring British icon John Lydon in his first ever TV ad. Created by Grey London, the ad forms part of a £5 million relaunch campaign.
The campaign celebrates Country Life butter’s British provenance and the ad sees Lydon gallivanting around Britain questioning why he enjoys Country Life butter, before deciding that he buys it simply because he thinks it tastes best. It ends with the strapline ‘It’s not about Great Britain, it’s about Great Butter’.
U2, and a search under the “wankers” tab on this site reveals my views on them, at least managed to sell themselves to Apple. I pods are indisputably wonderful and 21st century. Butter is good but there is a deep humiliation involved in being the front person for an advertising strategy for it. Market research has found that you have a special place in the nation’s heart and what used to be menacing and confrontational is now quirky. A man responsible for some of the most rebellious, anti-authoritarian music ever made has aged into Bruce Forsyth’s heir apparent.
What a predictable but tragic event but here is an example of genius.
Liam redux 
Leave a reply to Shelly Ainsworth Cancel reply