On Pop

YOU know that music on the Ford probe advert? The ponderous blues riff with the gravel voice instructing you to 'go-o-o your own way' in a 19,000 pounds phallic symbol? Before you ring up and ask, that's Chris Rea, that is, and he's not going to release it as a single. In a radical break with the pop tradition that has seen record companies begging to get their back catalogue into Levi's ads, and has thrust previous no-hopers The Stiltskins into the charts with their music for the Levi's Amish picnic ad, car-loving Chris has put his foot down and said 'No'. He took time off from his busy schedule touring Europe (God's Greatest Banana Skin is massive in Belgium and Europe) to silence pleas from sports-car loving Dinky males in their late thirties that he put out the rest of the track.

You might perhaps think that all this was because advertisers have finally grown tired of cobnsumers settling for the soundtrack rather than the product itself. Nothing of the sort. Rea wrote the 45 seconds of music on commission and only bothered with two lines, the second being the rallying cry to individualism 'Doesn't matter whaaa-at the others say'. The fragment will remain in all its suggestive glory, to be completed only in the imaginations of wannabe sports coupe drivers everywhere. Typical Rea. Like the voice-over says, he dares to be different.

(Photograph omitted)