The degree of excitement engendered by a supposed leak of the soundtrack to this year's John Lewis Christmas TV advert has been quite a sight to behold. Music Week's story that it would be provided by Lily Allen singing Keane's Somewhere Only We Know was picked up by everyone from Cosmopolitan to the Independent. It underlines what a big deal the department store's marketing campaign had become, not just for John Lewis – which last year set a company trading record of £133.1m in the week before Christmas – but for the profile of the anointed artist: 2012's soundtrack song, a version of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's The Power of Love, went straight to No 1 and launched the career of singer Gabrielle Aplin.
The agency responsible, AdamAndEveDDB, declined to comment on the Lily Allen rumour. It seems unlikely to be true: a source close to the company claimed an element of surprise was so important to the strategy behind the adverts that if details were leaked before the advert was released, the soundtrack might be changed.
Nevertheless, the biggest surprise would be if the soundtrack to the advert didn't involve a familiar song covered in a toothsome acoustic style. The adverts are invariably designed to pull at the heartstrings: of course, one's emotional response to music is entirely subjective, but it seems fairly safe to say that in general, heart-strings are more easily tugged if there's a familiar ballad on the soundtrack rather than say, Feast on Dismembered Carnage by Carcass.
There's long been a belief in advertising circles that folky music automatically lends your product a warmth and humanity, which is why José González's acoustic cover of Heartbeats ended up flogging Sony TVs rather than the original electro-pop version by The Knife. Indeed, you could argue that the soundtrack to the John Lewis Christmas advert is essentially a musical equivalent of "wackaging", a concept pioneered in the UK by Innocent Drinks. The premise is that if you plaster your packaging with enough twee little messages about calling the makers on their bananaphone and how it contains only yummy stuff (and no concrete!), people will assume that they're buying an artisan product handmade by a lovable eccentric in a garden shed, rather than something mass-produced by a company 90% owned by Coca-Cola.
John Lewis's previous incarnations have been variously lambasted as sickly sweet and unbearably cutesy, undermining the impact and meaning of some genuinely beautiful songs by, figuratively speaking, hanging Cath Kidston bunting off them. The 2011 ad had some Smiths fans wondering aloud why Morrissey and Johnny Marr – usually quick to lambast anyone hamfistedly repurposing The Smiths' music – didn't have anything to say about Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want (as lambent, beautiful and perfectly-nuanced an examination of frailty and failure as rock music has produced), being repositioned as a song about buying a present from a department store.
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But the makers of the John Lewis ad are aware that the commercial impact of their Christmas adverts for artists they feature suggests plenty of people genuinely love them. The cover of Guns N' Roses Sweet Child O' Mine from 2009 has thus far proved to be the solitary UK chart entry for Taken By Trees. Slow Moving Millie's version of Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want was a hit: her other singles, featured in adverts for Virgin Media and Orange, were not.
Ellie Goulding's debut album Lights had done OK, but it was the version of Elton John's Your Song from the 2012 advert that turned her into a major star: tellingly, it was that, rather than one of her own songs, that she was asked to perform at the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's wedding. Under the circumstances, the makers of the John Lewis Christmas ad might be forgiven for declining to fix something that doesn't show any signs of being broken: sadly for anyone who finds the whole business a little too sickly, the chances of a John Lewis Christmas involving Carcass's Feast on Dismembered Carnage seem slim to say the least.
