Living in the overlap

Everyone knows the Smoky Robinson song “Tears Of A Clown”.

But did you know who wrote it?

Turns out it was Stevie Wonder.

Apparently he was only about 13 at the time.

But that’s not what fascinated me about it.

There’s a line in it: “Just like Pagliacci did, I’ll try to keep my sadness hid.”

Now a lot of middle class English people hear that and scoff at the grammar.

Because of course, the last word shouldn’t be “hid”, it should be “hidden”.

But that wouldn’t rhyme, so he went with what was good rather than what was correct.

The interesting thing for me is that the same people who scoff at the grammar usually don’t know who Pagliacci was.

Or what he’s got to do with that song.

And yet a 13 year old black kid from Detroit took it for granted that Pagliacci’s story was so well known he could use him in a pop song.

The opera about a clown whose heart is breaking behind a painted-on smile.

I think that’s brilliant.

Think of it as a Venn diagram, two overlapping circles.

The circle on the left is people who only ever listen to pop music, watch football, read The Sun, drink beer, and watch TV.

The circle on the right is people who only ever listen to classical music, watch ballet, read The Guardian or Telegraph, drink wine, and read books.

And the part where Stevie Wonder lives, like all truly creative people, is in the bit where they overlap.

The part where new and surprising connections can happen.

The part Faris Yakob calls ‘recombinant thinking’.

Faris Yakob is a new-media guru, and he makes the point that all new ideas are actually just new combinations of existing things.

If we accept that, then what we should be doing is making sure we experience as many different things as possible.

We should make an effort to experience things that don’t go together.

So we can make new combinations happen.

This happened in America’s big cities naturally.

Because they didn’t grow gradually over centuries, like the rest of the world.

They were thrown together, and grew rapidly due to immigration.

So previously incompatible things were constantly side-by-side.

But a growing boy didn’t know they were supposed to be mutually exclusive.

He’d just experience it all as natural and put it all together.

He’d hear Italian immigrants playing opera from their windows, and on the next street rhythm and blues, or boogie woogie.

Martin Scorcese makes the same point about his childhood in New York.

He would watch from his window and see fights in the streets below.

At the same time opera was playing from the open windows above.

If you’ve seen “Raging Bull” you’ll recognise this use of that unexpected combination.

I once read a book on mathematics by an Indian professor.

One point she made resonated with me.

She said we need to study ourselves.

To find out what side of the brain we are dominant in.

 (Left brain being the rational side, right brain being the emotional.)

Then we need to spend as much time as we can exposing ourself to influences from the other side.

Because whatever side is dominant is our comfort zone.

We’ll naturally gravitate to that.

But anything we learn in our comfort zone won’t give us any new combinations.

Whereas whatever we learn on the other side of the brain gives us a completely new set of possible links to our existing side.

So we should force ourselves to experience whatever we’re not comfortable with.

If you’re a numeric person, force yourself to experience art and music.

If you’re a visual person, force yourself to read more books.

If you like fiction, make yourself to read non-fiction.

If you like rock music make yourself listen to Classic FM.

Explore.

While we’re in our comfort zone we’re on auto pilot.

We’re relaxing and letting it wash over us.

But when we move out of our comfort zone our mind is forced to think.

Forced to try to find something good in what we don’t like.

Staying in our comfort zone just means staying with what we already know.

There’s no growth there.

No possibilities for new combinations.

Paul Arden used to say, “It’s good to feel uncomfortable.”

We shouldn’t be frightened to feel uncomfortable.

We don’t need to live in either of the two big comfortable, predictable circles.

We can live in the overlap.

There's a whole other world out there

A woman I know, called Helen, is a hippy and loves going to India. She likes to get up early in the morning and watch the dawn on the banks of The Ganges.

She told me about the funeral pyres. She was watching a man whose job it was to make sure the bodies burn properly. You see the bodies on the pyres burn from the centre. So the extremities overhang the fire and may not burn properly.

This man had a long metal pole. He used the pole to fold the feet and head in to make sure they burn, too.

She was watching him doing this when another man emerged from the Ganges. He’d been bathing and the bottom part of his clothes was wet. So he took them off and wrapped a towel around his waist.

Then he gave the clothes to the man with the pole. He put the clothes on the long metal pole. Then they both chatted while he dried the wet clothes over the funeral pyre.

When they were dry he gave them back. The other man put them back on, said goodbye and left. No one thought it was anything about it. Except Helen.

The western side of her was uncomfortable at the disrespectful way they treated a dead body. The other side of her was impressed with such a matter-of-fact approach to life and death.

Hindus believe in reincarnation. So the body was just something that the soul had finished with.

It had no more use. In our world a soul is hypothetical. The body is the only proof that anyone ever actually existed. So we treat it with the respect we’d show that person.

Other cultures look strange to us. We can’t help feeling that our culture is right and theirs is the odd one. The world either shrinks to where our mind is. Or we expand our mind to encompass the world.

Usually though, we can’t help taking our way as the norm and everyone else’s as a variant. For instance, all over England during the Napoleonic wars everyone feared an invasion. In Hartlepool, on the north east coast, a ship was wrecked during a storm. The only living creature to be washed ashore was the ship’s pet monkey. A small creature in a frilly waistcoat.

In those days most people didn’t travel more than ten miles from where they were born, during their whole lifetime. So the people of Hartlepool had no knowledge of the world outside their immediate vicinity.

This creature was similar to most Englishmen: it had ten fingers and ten toes. And it wore a waistcoat. But it was smaller, and hairier, and jabbered away in a language they couldn’t understand.

They’d never heard about monkeys, or apes, or chimpanzees. There was only one conclusion. They thought it must be a Frenchman. So the people of Hartlepool hanged it as a spy.

We forget that the world we know isn’t all that exists. We interpret the world based purely on what’s going on in our minds. You can find it even in the everyday world of advertising.

Years ago, at GGT, we did an advertising campaign for a credit card called Access. We wanted to make it as accepted as Barclaycard. So we used a Louis Jordan track, “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My baby?”

And we changed the words to, “Does you does or does you don’t take Access?” We had an animated lobster on a plate in a restaurant. He was singing the song to a diner wondering how to pay.

While the voice over told us seven million outlets worldwide took Access. And we ended on a picture of the earth. Supered over it was the title “The world does.”

Gordon said to me, “Should the W in World be in upper case or lower case?” I said, “Good question. If it’s ‘the world’ as in everyone on the planet, then I guess it’s lower case. But if it’s ‘The World’ as in the name of the planet, the I guess it’s upper case.”

We didn’t want to get it wrong, so we got the account man to check. He called up Cambridge University and spoke to the professor of English.

He repeated the entire script and asked him if it was more correct for the W to be in upper case or lower case. The English Professor spluttered, “You can’t possibly say ‘Does you does or does you don’t?”

Fair point. We’d forgotten that the whole entire ad was grammatically off-piste. We’re all so much in our own heads we forget there’s another world out there.

Freedom equals responsibility

Recently, GMTV asked me to go along and talk about alcohol advertising on morning TV. When I got there I found it was a bit of a stitch-up. The interview was actually about banning alcohol advertising. And I was supposed to be the bad guy.

The government claimed advertising was to blame for binge drinking. So, being interviewed alongside me, there was a very nice 23 year-old woman who had a history of binge drinking. She said that one of the things that caused her to start was the advertising for Bacardi Breezers.

The interviewer asked me if I felt responsible. I said, “The job of advertising is to sell product or brands when, where, and how we’re legally allowed to. My relationship with my client is to do the best job I can to take sales away from their competitors.”

He said, “So what you’re saying is that you think it’s okay to encourage young people to drink more?”

I said, “I don’t encourage anyone to drink more. I’m not legally allowed to and that’s not my job. It’s my job to make sure that, if you are allowed to drink, you drink the brand I’m advertising.”

He turned to the young woman on the sofa and said, “So basically he’s perfectly happy for young people drink to excess as long as they drink the brand he’s advertising. Do you think that’s a responsible attitude?”

She said, “Well no, I don’t think you should be able to encourage young people to drink to excess.”

I said, “We’re not legally allowed to encourage young people to drink to excess. There are many controls in place to ensure we don’t do that. My job is to make sure that people who the law says can drink, choose my client’s brand over the competition.”

He said, “But you must take some responsibility for the results of people drinking to excess.”

I said, “I don’t make the law. What I do is sell my client’s brand above their competitor’s brand.”

He said, “And you’re willing to sell as much of your client’s product as possible?”

I said, “Yes of course. That’s what I’m paid for. That’s how democracy and capitalism work. I work within the law to take sales from my client’s competitors.”

He said, “Well you’re very successful at it according to the governments figures on young people binge-drinking.”

And so the interview went on, in a sort of Daily Mail style. With him purposely misunderstanding what I was saying in order to have a scapegoat. The part I found confusing in all this was that at no point did anyone consider the young woman’s role.

She was just assumed to be a passive recipient of mind-altering advertising. As if she herself had no responsibility in choosing to binge-drink. She was just a victim. Does the same thing work with all advertising?

Mark & Spencer’s advertising makes their food look utterly seductive. In fact it’s Y&R’s job to make it seem irresistible. So, if I eat too much food and become obese, can I blame advertising? Or do I have any free choice in the matter of how much to eat?

Audi’s ads make their cars look better than their competitors. In fact it’s BBH’s job to make them utterly desirable. So, if I buy a car and drive too fast and kill someone, can I blame advertising? Or do I have free choice in the matter of how fast to drive?

All advertising agencies try to make the products they’re selling look desirable. That’s their job. Whether it’s holidays, toys, clothes, furniture, computers, telephones, newspapers, chocolate, or lawnmowers. That’s what selling is.

So, if I rob a bank to get the money to buy all those things, and get caught, can I blame advertising? Or do I have free choice about what I can afford or not? I thought the whole point of a free society was to let everyone know what their choices where.

Then let them choose. If we don’t let people choose, they’re not really free are they? But, there’s another side to that coin. If we are free to choose, we have to take responsibility for our choices.

So it’s a simple equation:  more freedom = more responsibility. And that’s hard for people. To take responsibility for the bad choices they made.

As Sartre said, “We are condemned to be free.”

It’s better than real, it’s fake

Kenwood House in North London is impressive. The exterior, the interior, and the gardens. As you approach you notice the perfect symmetry of the house.

Both wings match exactly, windows delicately balancing each other either side of the entrance. Once inside, you’re impressed by the library. Both the extensive collection of books and the large marble pillars.

Looking out over the grounds you’re impressed by the almost perfect view. A Constable-style landscape gently rolling down to a meandering stream, disappearing under a wooden bridge. It all seems too perfect to be real. And it is. It’s all fake.

A huge, beautiful, elegant, impressive fake. Robert Adams did the house, in the late 18th century. Capability Brown did the gardens.

Take the beautiful marble pillars in the library. They’re actually made from wood, and painted to look exactly like carved white marble. There are no books in the impressive library either. Just the spines stuck to the wall.

The beautifully symmetrical windows are complete fakes on one side. Stuck to the outside wall of the music room, which requires solid brick walls for its acoustic qualities.

The beautiful view of the gardens is worth investigating. When you walk down to the stream it’s actually two ponds and, on the left, the cut-out shape of a bridge stuck next to them.

A clump of trees between the ponds connects them in your eye, and the ‘bridge’ confirms the direction the ‘stream’ goes in.
The whole of Kenwood house is an exercise in trickery and manipulation. The late 18th century was the height of The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was born out of The Reformation. The idea that man wasn’t just a slave to fear and superstition anymore.

For the first time, with reason and logic, man was able to work out and control his own destiny. And Trompe L’Oeil was a visual manifestation of that. Trompe L’Oeil just means “trick the eye”, what we’d call an illusion.

It became very fashionable in the late 18th century. A way to demonstrate that the eye, and consequently the mind, could easily be fooled and manipulated. Our senses couldn’t be trusted. We needed to stop ‘believing’ in things and make the effort to think for ourselves.

This is what separated the cultured individual from the merely wealthy. Previously, a person’s worth was based on wealth.
If you wanted a beautiful house, you just built it. And the cost demonstrated how rich you were.

The Enlightenment signalled a change from money as the main indication of someone’s worth. Now intelligence was a much higher value. Intelligence was demonstrated by an understanding, for the first time, of the mind’s importance.

That the mind actually in fact determined reality. Trompe L’Oeil was a visual manifestation of this. If you trick the eye you trick the mind. This was far cleverer than merely spending money on something that just looked like what it was.

How dull. How wasteful. It was better to use your brains rather than just throw money at it. Far more clever to out think someone rather than just out spend them.

Take a look around at the advertising we’re doing today. Where million pound commercials are no longer anything unusual.
Where people brag in print that their commercial is the most expensive commercial ever filmed.

Do we think advertising could learn anything from Robert Adams and Capability Brown? From Trompe L’Oeil and The Age Of Enlightenment? Anything?

All the real Englishmen are in America

My brother-in-law is from Indiana. One time we were in a bar discussing something over a few cold beers.

I forget exactly how the subject came up, but he made a remark that resonated with me. He said, “All the real Englishmen are in America. The ones that stayed in England are just the wimps who were happy to let the King tell them what to do.”

Now okay, that’s over-simplistic (well we were in a bar, and cold refreshment had been taken). But is there a nugget of truth there?

In the early days America was peopled by England’s rebels and Europe’s rejects. Englishmen that didn’t want to put up with the centuries old status quo went to the colonies.

Oliver Cromwell was preparing to emigrate to America when he was persuaded to stay and lead the revolution. Possibly the last real revolutionary we had.

After Cromwell died we had The Restoration. And everything went back to pretty much the way it had been.

A while ago I read a book on Industrial Design. What’s interesting is the concept of design itself started in America. Because there was a need for it.

There was no need for it in Europe. It was mass production that caused a need for design. A standardised product that could be reproduced to an exact format.

Americans needed mass production because the immigrants were Europe’s poor. People who had nothing because they were unskilled. So they tried to make a new life.

The skilled classes were happy to stay in Europe where they had a relatively good life. This meant that America had a massive, unskilled workforce. What could they do with it?

They created the production line. Products made by unskilled workers. Contrary to belief, it wasn’t Henry Ford who invented the production line.

The first time anyone in Europe had ever seen a standardised product was Samuel Colt’s pistols at The Great Exhibition half a century earlier. It was an amazing concept. Every piece on every pistol was exactly the same.

So, if you found two broken pistols on the battlefield, you could cannibalise one for parts to fix the other. Previously they’d both be useless because they were both built separately. So nothing from one would fit the other. You’d have to send both pistols back to the manufacturers.

Standardisation was a revolutionary concept. And Ford wasn’t even the first car manufacturer to employ it.

In 1905, Oldsmobile shipped three horseless carriages to England. They drove them from Southampton to London. Then they took them apart, mixed up all the parts, and rebuilt three new horseless carriages.

Then they drove them back to Southampton. (Wouldn’t that still make a great demonstration commercial today?)

At the time everyone was gobsmacked. How could a country that was made up of unskilled workers, who couldn’t get jobs in Europe, build something better than skilled craftsmen?

Worse, standardisation was something that would eventually make skilled craftsmen redundant.

Take ordinary horse-drawn wagons for instance. Before standardisation all wagons, had different sized wheels.

So, if your wagon needed a new wheel, you’d take it to the wheel-maker and he’d measure all your other wheels and make you a new one. With standardisation, you had a man doing nothing but making identical wheels. When you needed a wheel, you’d just go along and buy one.

So the American revolution reversed the whole process. The country made up of unskilled immigrants became innovative and powerful. The country made up of skilled workers became complacent and traditional. Because America was forced to invent itself.

So getting a jump on the competition became mandatory. For survival, they learned to constantly reinvent themselves. To never rest on their laurels. To accept that they always had to be looking for an advantage.

In the UK we were more skilled, so we learned to carry on doing what we were good at. Craftsmanship.

Maybe there’s a parallel with current advertising there. The proportions of good to bad are roughly the same in both places. But the best of American is fresh and raw, powerful and crude, innovative and polarising.

British is slicker, better crafted and executed, but lacking life. Nothing too challenging, nothing outrageous, nothing to upset the status quo.

Something we can all nod along to, made with great skill. Maybe an analogy would be Bauhaus furniture versus Chippendale furniture.

Bauhaus was controversial, original thinking, adequately executed. Chippendale was predictable, traditional thinking, beautifully crafted.

Maybe my brother-in-law was right in the bar all that time ago. When all those Englishmen went to America something else went too.

Spanish English v Italian English

In a tiny little village in Umbria I found the only place that had an Internet connection. I stopped in to use it and bumped into the only Englishman I’d seen since I got there.

John Cigarini used to run BFCS. That was the production company that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes five years running.

That’s like a football club winning the European Cup five times in a row. I hadn’t seen John for ages, and the temperature was 42 C, so we popped into the nearest bar for an ice-cold beer and a chat.

Because John lives in Umbria, I asked him, “Why are the British so well-liked in Italy, when we’re not popular anywhere else?”

John’s answer was interesting. He said, “It’s a very different sort of Brit who comes to Italy from the ones who go to Spain.”

Now that may seem obvious, but it had never occurred to me. I thought Brits were Brits.

But, as John pointed out, that’s not necessarily true. A lot of Brits who go on holiday to Spain are an entirely younger crowd. Singles on package holidays, the Club 18-30 crowd. They want two weeks of booze and laughter, clubbing and sex.

Those sort of Brits don’t go to Italy because that isn’t on offer there. The Brits that do go to Italy are a different sort.

They want two weeks of peace and quiet, good food, good wine, lazing in the sun. Maybe the occasional cultural trip to a Duomo to see a Piero della Francesca in its natural setting. Maybe a classical concert in a medieval hilltop town.

I knew we all liked different things. But I hadn’t previously realised that there were two distinct sorts of Brits. And then I remembered a TV programme I’d seen years ago.

It was called “Holiday Swap” I think. They took a middle class and a working class family and got them to swap holidays.

This meant the middle class family had to go to Butlins. Obviously this was a disaster waiting to happen. Non-stop noise, pop music blaring out everywhere, never left alone for a minute.

Constantly being pestered by organisers to join in games at the swimming pool. Forced mass-enjoyment, when all you want to do is lie in the sun and read a book.

The middle-class wife was surprised when all the other women left the pool at around 4pm every afternoon. She found the reason for this was while she was having a G&T, they were changing into jewellery and floor length evening dresses. Ready for the evening’s organised entertainment of pop music and stage shows.

For me the middle-class family’s youngest son summed the dichotomy up best. He said to his dad, “How come you’re the only father here who hasn’t got any tattoos?”

So, no surprises there.

I knew they’d hate Butlins, everyone would wouldn’t they? Apparently not.

What surprised me was the next part. The working class family went to a villa in Tuscany.

It was everything you’d want: secluded setting, beautiful pool, no neighbours. Everything for the perfect holiday. They hated it.

They said, “We don’t know what to do with ourselves. The whole place is dead, there’s not a sound anywhere. There’s no one here but us, so there’s no one to talk to. And there’s no one around to organise any games or entertainment.

Nothing to do but lie in the sun and swim in the pool, it’s really boring. Maybe people who read books would enjoy it. But we’re not great readers, so there’s nothing here for us.”

They were so bored and fed up that they packed up and came home early. The wife said, “This has been the worst holiday ever. We’ve just been down to the travel agents and booked up next year’s holiday at Butlins to cheer ourselves up.”

I thought the Brits were all just one sort of people with slightly different tastes. But maybe I’m too close to it.

John Cigarini’s remark, and that programme, made me think.

Maybe we actually are two different sorts of people.