Here Come The Girls

Sometimes I despair at advertising. Ad execs are always ready to pick the bones of real artists' work and regurgitate it for mass consumption. How many pieces of classical music does Joe Public know that weren't discovered through some media campaign? Not many I'll bet. Mind you if that's the only way we're gonna find out about it, perhaps that's not so bad. Anyway how else would we get to hear about fantastic new products like Cillit Bang. Three cheers for TV ads.

Watching the new Boots commercial (below) got me racking my brains trying to remember where I'd heard the music from. I'm sure I must have heard it in Bar Rumba or somewhere, but never new the name. One google later and there it was. 'Here Come The Girls' by Ernie K-Doe is the funky track in question, reasonably familiar to the old Northern Soul crowd but most famous for his 1961 R&B hit, 'Mother-In-Law'.



Anyway I tracked it down on New Orleans Funk Vol.1: the Original Sound of Funk 1960-1975, and was pretty easy to find on Soulseek. It's a good collection (not exceptional) of solid funky grooves, with many recognisable as Hip Hop breaks. Highlights for me were Chuck Carbo's 'Can I Be Your Squeeze', and Aaron Neville's 'Hercules'. If you collect funk compilations then you'll already have most of these tracks but if you're looking for an introduction to the New Orleans funk sound you can't go wrong with this.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form of.... Theft?

The story of the Sony Bravia Bunnies has done the rounds recently. In a nutshell, Sony launched the advert which shows a New York street becoming overun by hordes of play-doh bunnies to a Rolling Stones soundtrack. Kozyndan, an illustration company, claims that this concept is a complete rip-off of one of their panoramic paintings. You can read one version of the story here.

Detail of the Kozyndan painting

You'll have to make up your own mind on this one but personally I'm just happy to hear one of my favourite Stones tracks, 'She's A Rainbow'. However it should come as no surprise that this song was hardly original, itself being heavily influenced according to Keith Richards, by the magnificent 'She Comes In Colors' by Arthur Lee's Love (from the classic 1966 album 'Da Capo').

Have a listen to it here with accompanying animation from iwait4u, and see if you can also detect a similarity to Madonna's 'Beautiful Stranger'. Come to think of it The Walkmen's 'We've Been Had' reminds me of 'She's A Rainbow'. Seems there's nothing new under the sun.