And so the Christmas rush started in earnest, with Lily Allen’s prettily dittyfied version of Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know apparently on-screen, on-line, on the radio and in the charts virtually on day of release. And all thanks, of course, to John Lewis’ ubiquitous The Hare and Bear spot which broke on November 11. The single duly debuted at Number Two in Week 46, leaving its mid-week rival, Lady Gaga’s Do What U Want – from the latest iteration of O2’s Be More Dog campaign – effectively trailing in ninth place.
After last year’s success with Gabrielle Aplin (whose Power Of Love was back bobbing about the bottom of the Top 200 through most of November ) the pressure was on for John Lewis to deliver another Number One and - ho hey! - it came to order in Week 47 when Allen climbed that final step to celebrate her third chart topper since her debut single Smile first took her there in 2006.
But anybody putting their money on Somewhere Only We Know still being market leader come the Official Chart Company’s Christmas countdown was in for a disappointment when it slipped back down four places with three weeks still to go. In retrospective Allen’s new record label Warner might have preferred to release Somewhere a week or two later to be in with a chance at the year’s most prestigious prize, but had their hands clearly tied to John Lewis’ master marketing plan.
Down the road at Universal the Polydor team behind Gary Barlow will certainly have had their fingers crossed in the hope that teaming him with Aleksandr Orlov and the Meerkats might be enough to garner the Take That man his first solo Number One (See adbreakanthems’ December Sync Of The Month). And, if only for the ingenuity of the campaign and the enthusiasm with which Barlow embraced it, Let Me Go deserved to..er..go the distance. Sadly it didn’t quite make it. After entering at Three and moving up to Two, it was kept from the cream by a debuting Calvin Harris floorfiller (which, to our knowledge, has yet to feature in a TV spot so won’t be discussed further here.)
Instead it’s Rod Stewart who captures attention with Forever Young, a meagre hit from his 1988 album Out Of Order – and close enough to a Bob Dylan song of the same name to merit giving Mr Zimmerman a share of the copyright and the royalties. Now attached to one of the home movie-styled spots which make up the major part of Tesco’s holiday TV offer this year, Forever Young has crept stealthily up the listings to Number 55 in Week 48 after first surfacing at 70 a fortnight earlier.
Making a similarly secretive return to the upper reaches of the charts are Stewart’s glam rock contemporaries Slade. The Black Country boys’ beat ballad Everyday – originally a Top Three hit in 1974 when it was first released as the follow-up to their evergreen smash Merry Christmas Everybody – has been licensed by Google for a number of ads which make up its Nexus 7 tablet campaign. Slade were never a band known for taking themselves too seriously but Noddy Holder and the lads were not afraid to tug at the heartstrings as they do on Everyday. The Google films make the most of it, of course, and Slade slip back into the sixties as a result.
Sadly though Bronski Beat’s iconic gay disco anthem Smalltown Boy has so far failed to get much of a hold on the Top 100 despite the substantial exposure it has received from Boots’ Young Santa spot. A top Three hit when it first came out in 1984, Smalltown Boy is the last of the new entries into the adbreakanthems’ chart this month and sits at Number 95 in Week 48 three weeks after entering at Number 118.
Finally, enjoying slightly better fortunes is Arctic Monkeys’ latest single Do I Wanna Know, which is the source of a dark guitar riff at the musical heart of Bacardi’s big budget commercial Procession. This broke in the second week of November since when the song has gone from 87 to 79. Not the most spectacular performance, perhaps, but let’s see what happens in December?
