Advert: Taylors of Harrogate – Welcome to Coffee
Music: Coucou (Listen To The Mocking Bird)
Download track from iTunes
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This impressively unusual TV ad for Taylors of Harrogate presents a ‘coffee cosmos’, created by director Frank Budgen and his Gorgeous production company for BMB agency ‘with complete creative freedom’. It features images and objects set up on wires and tracks, and presents an experience that seems to evoke snapping synapses inside a brain, perhaps referencing the fact that coffee is a drug, used by many to kickstart their brains into gear of a morning. The soundtrack also features something else that can wake you up in the morning – birdsong – as part of a version of a popular American Civil War-era song called Listen To The Mocking Bird. It was written in 1855 by composer Septimus Winner (under the pseudonym ‘Alice Hawthorne’), and first recorded by singer Alma Gluck, with whistling by Charles Kellogg, in 1915 – 99 years ago. There have been scores of subsequent recorded versions, including one by Fred Lowrey, ‘The Blind Whistler’. UPDATE: The version in the ad can be found on the soundtrack to the film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, which is a portrait of musician and performance artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his partner and collaborator Lady Jaye. The track is titled ‘Coucou’, and is credited on the soundtrack to ‘Unknown’. (iTunes incorrectly credits the track to Genesis P-Orridge’s Psychic TV & PTV3.) So we still don’t quite know who performs this version, but we do know that it is available to download from iTunes and as a download and on CD from Amazon.
