Nothing You Can Sing That Can’t Be Sold (Sunday Telegraph, 2008)

So, Beatle songs are to be used in commercials for babies’ nappies. Clearly nothing is sacred anymore.
          It could be a worse, I know. The copyright holders of the songs, Sony/ATV Music, could be planning to licence them to companies who want to flog us beer, burgers or even violent computer games. At least we associate nappies with smiling, healthy, beaming babies.
          All the same, the news that bids have been invited for the Lennon and McCartney catalogue so that they can be exploited in TV adverts has to be pretty depressing. It’s so un-Sixties. So un-Beatles.
          Apparently the first song to be so abused will be All You Need Is Love, a song specially written by John Lennon to celebrate the pioneering worldwide TV link up, Our World, in 1967.
The phrase and the song caught the ethos of the time perfectly. Now it’s to be used in the marketing of a Procter and Gamble advert for their “all you need is Luvs”---nappy campaign.
Sony/ATV, who don’t need the Beatles’ or their heirs’ permission to licence the songs, think it’s very tasteful. I think John Lennon will be biting the heavenly Axminsters in fury.
With his knack for turning out catchy phrases and slogans such as  “a hard day’s night,” “give peace a chance”, “all you need is love”, “a day in the life”, “imagine” and so on, Lennon would, no doubt, have made a  brilliant advertising copywriter.
          That he didn’t is because he had the wit to do more with his talent than simply sell soap with a cute rhyme, a couple of guitars and a backbeat. What’s more, both he and Paul McCartney knew how valuable their work was---especially if they kept it scarce. Thus the Beatles’ Apple organisation has so far guarded the licensing of the group’s recordings zealously.
          Unfortunately neither McCartney, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono, nor Apple own the actual songs ----although McCartney and Yoko Ono still earn royalties from them. Having been contracted as songwriters to music publishers Northern Songs at the beginning of the Beatles’ fame in 1963, Lennon and McCartney lost any control of their work when Northern Songs was sold to ATV in 1969.
Following that, after a series of missed opportunities to buy them back, McCartney and Yoko Ono let the songs fall into the hands of Michael Jackson in 1985, who, when times got tough, called in the giant Sony corporation. And now, after years of self-restraint, it seems Sony/ATV Music are about to cash in big time.
          Now, personally, I don’t care who makes the most money out of these songs, certainly the most valuable collection in popular music. What bothers me is that if they are used to sell consumer products they will inevitably be debased, and the personal images that you and I associate with them will be erased and replaced with those of the hard sell.
And, to my mind, this can’t be right. Because no matter who wrote them, or who owns them, culturally the songs have now become ours, the people who have been humming them for the past forty odd years, who have invested little parts of our lives, our loves and our memories in them.
When I hear All You Need Is Love I think of the hippy summer of 1967, of the flat I was living in when I first heard it, and how within a few weeks all London was blooming with flower power. I know that the “Summer of Love”, as it was called, was very silly, but it was the moment, and Lennon was writing about it.
          What he was not writing about were babies nappies. And once a global campaign for All You Need Is Luvs has been launched we can all bid goodbye to our own mental videos of what the song means to us. After that it will forever be about nappies. Our brains will, quite literally, have been washed of their old associations. The song will have been devalued.
          It happens all the time. The classics, conveniently out of copyright, have been pillaged brutally. Can we ever hear Bach’s Air on a G String without conjuring up an image of a smoking cigar? Did Dvorak really think he’d be advertising brown bread when he composed his New World Symphony; did Elgar dream up Pomp and Circumstance so that he could promote HP Sauce?
I don’t think so. Yet, through commercials, the legacies of all these composers has been contaminated. So will it be with the Beatles. Once the precedent is set how long will it be before Yesterday is used to sell some old fashioned biscuit or sauce? 
I know there will be those who disagree, but to me the Beatles’ songs, not only represent some of the best popular music of the last half century, they define an era, too, and a peculiarly British one at that.
          To traduce them by turning them into mere jingles is little short of heritage robbery.

Sunday Telegraph, January 6, 2008   

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