The Money and the Magic: Brian Banks

Hosted by IPA Commercial Leadership Group Chair Jason Cobbold, The Money and the Magic is the newest IPA’s Podcast series and will explore the intersection of creativity and commerce, and how businesses can turn ideas into profit. In the first episode, Jason is joined by music industry legend Brian Banks. Together, they explore Brian’s thoughts on musical creativity and his career working on Michael Jackson’s Thriller and developing iconic scores for some of the world’s biggest brands, including Apple and IBM.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hello, my name is Jason Kobold, and a warm welcome to the first in a new series of podcasts called The Money and the Magic. In the Money and the Magic, we'll be exploring the relationship between this wonderful thing we call creativity and the complex world of commerce. How do we turn creativity to our advantage and how do businesses turn ideas into profit? We'll explore how creativity brings benefits to an organization, but also discuss where there are tensions and challenges. Making the most of creativity is brilliant, but also quite hard. And so today I'm absolutely delighted to welcome the show's first guest, uh, a true legend of the music industry, Mr. Brian Banks. Thank you. Hello, Brian. Hi. Uh a quick word about Brian. So, Brian, you started playing the piano at the tender age of five and have since been uh completely immersed in LA's music scene. And you got a bachelor in music, found yourself in huge demand and working in records and music for films. Um, and your I suppose your musical talents, coupled with your um understanding of technology, led you to work with some of the hottest artists in LA, very notably working with Quincy Jones on Michael Jackson's thriller. I look forward to hearing more about that. Um, and a particular note is your long-standing relationship with the amazing Giorgio Morodi. You worked on uh films with him such as Cat People. Um you worked on the hit song Putting Out the Fire by David Bowie and Over the Top by with Sylvester Stallone. I don't know that one. Sounds again a good film. Um, and then later in your career, you went on to uh move into the commercial space where you partnered with the likes of Joe Picker, scoring over many years countless spots for Apple and IBM and many of the famous advertising campaigns that we're all uh still very familiar with. And uh you've been you know lucky enough to be part of uh developing some of the most famous and iconic uh campaigns and therefore brands um in the world. So great to have you here. Thanks for having me here. This is hilarious. This is great. Pleasure. So, Brian, I guess what makes your career just so interesting is you've crossed over from this world of film and music into commercials globally. And so why kind of commercial creativity? Why advertising?

SPEAKER_01 2:40

I was working on movies, television shows, theme parks, commercials, records, everything. And uh I I loved them all. And along the way, the the my exposure to synthesizers was what sort of propelled me. You know, I I I was very good at all the traditional uh plug-in, plug-in patch chord, you know, Mogan ARP synthesizers that everybody's seen pictures of. And around the in the early 80s, the digital synthesis revolution started, and I got introduced to the synclaver uh by a series of of lovely events, and I started carrying that around to uh various recording sessions. And on one of those recording sessions, uh one of the guys I used to work with a lot, Tom Baylor, um, saw me working on it, was really impressed. Ultimately, I was actually part-time selling these out of the back of my house and working sessions. You know, you do anything you can do to make a buck. And so I was I was the Southern California sales rep for this very esoteric machine, which cost like 10 times what any other machine cost more. And he saw how cool it was, and he ended up buying one for himself from me, and I was like, great, I made a sale, and yeah, I made, you know, and I was gonna help him with it because we're friends. I mean, I'd worked with him for years. And um he also happened to be Quincy Jones' vocal arranger and uh good friend for years before I knew any of those guys. And uh, I mean, uh he uh Tom wrote, you know, She's Out of My Life, which was on off the wall. I mean, he's he's like a huge talent in his own right. So he went and showed this machine to Quincy Jones, and Quincy was just starting Michael Jackson's thriller album at that time, and Quincy basically, I I'm paraphrased because I wasn't there, but basically said, Well, we gotta have this thing on Michael's new record because it's the newest, coolest thing, and I've never heard sounds like this before. So Tom called me up and said, Hey, uh Quincy wants to know if you want to work on Michael's next record. And I said, sure. Now you gotta remember one thing really important. Michael Jackson is is and was a very big pop star. But we look back on Thriller now as the iconic mountain that it is. But then it was just Michael's next record. It was off the wall, and now it's gonna be thriller. I don't even know if they'd named it yet. They probably had. I don't know. I'm not involved in that. But it was Michael's next record. So um went in and set up shop uh uh at the the studio at Westlake Audio for the next three or four weeks and worked every day on various songs on the record. And but the the key to it was the Sinclavir. I was doing working with other synthesizers as well, more traditional synthesizers, and there were other fabulous synthesists, synthesizer programmers on the gig as well. And I played a little bit, but most of the stuff was played by the keyboard player that did all that stuff, Greg Fillengaines, master master Greg Fillengaines.

unknown 6:11

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Um and so we were creating sounds and and and doing things, you know. Uh one of my favorite stories. Uh Quincy is was sadly passed away recently, um a master at putting his finger on the pulse of what people like to listen to and how to get there. Um and we were working on or we were about to work on the intro to the thriller, the song. And Quincy said, Look, I I I wanna I have this sound in mind, and I I wanna I wanna play it to you. It's a you've never heard of this guy, he's he's a new artist, he plays all of his own instruments, he's he's really super talented. Um and uh I want to play you this thing, and so listen to it, and then I'll I'll tell you about it. So he puts down this record by a guy you've never heard of called Prince. Song you've never heard of called 1999, which starts off with that dun dun da, those big chords, those big chords at the front. And Quincy says, Okay, so you hear those? I want something that bites and that's big like that, but I want it bigger and more powerful, and that's what turned into the ja-da, ja-da, you know. So that was, you know, just how that came about. This little unknown artist at the time, up-and-coming artist, little artist named Prince, who had a germ of an idea for Quincy, and Quincy said, I it sparked his imagination. You know, and we all get sparks. I'm not Quincy Jones, trust me. But we all get our sparks of inform inspiration from all kinds of things, you know, a core a carhorn honking or a song that you heard. And we get these inspirations in in advertising all the time. I mean, all the time we get we get stuff from uh from creators saying, you know, I want um, I always giggle, you know, I want something original and contemporary. I always call it the C-word contemporary. I want something original and contemporary, just like I heard last week, which sort of I always giggle at. But you get that a lot because um there's always reference points. Anything, you know, any artist has reference points. You know, you look through art history and you see the the you know the chain from you know from Michelangelo all the way to you know whoever today. Um you can see the progression of the you know the the classical artists and the romantic artists and the you know the minimalists, and you know, you you see the progression, whether it is in art or in music, you can see everybody's taking from, and nothing happens in a vacuum. Um and so uh that was his little spark that he communicated to us, and we had to translate it into something real. Such a good story.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

I don't even know where to start on on drawing the parallels into our industry, it's such an amazing, but I think it's that it's that sense of like even for one of the most iconic tracks of time. It's interesting that at the time, of course, you don't know that. So you're just you're just doing your job. But I love that idea that it's it's those little fragments that um have been picked up and heard. It's how you you the art is how you those things are reassembled into something, a reassemble of existing stuff. And then also the thing you're describing, which you see in, I think you see in lots of great um creatives and creative businesses, is the ability to understand intent. So you you you are able to read the intent of Quincy Jones in this case, and I think there's so much of that happens in creative businesses, which is translating intent into something which is real. That's a real skill, you know.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Yeah, it it it it's it's funny how that works. You know, I I I got a call from my uh the creative guy that I was working with on all the IBM and stuff, and he had a new a new client called iShares and uh and Chris Wall, who I've mentioned before, called me up and uh said, I've got this idea for this company. It's it's a boring thing, it's just you know, stocks and shares, it's not exciting, but I think we could have fun with it. They're called iShares, and it's all about people controlling their own um investments and having the flexibility. And I want to do something with uh the word uh I and um he said, you know, you know that song by Laurie Anderson, uh Oh Superman, and she goes, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I said, yeah, of course I know. And we knew because we're friends and we've worked together for 30 years and we know each other's experiences. And I said, Yeah. He says, Well, I want to do something with I that's vocal and that has that sort of mesmerizing thing that we can get out in 30 seconds that will do something. I said, Okay, great. When do you need it? Uh I need it in two hours. I wasn't even at the studio. So I'm in the car, I said, okay, fine, bye. Um, I called my favorite singer, Els Bailey, and I I called her up because she lived nearby and she was brilliant at that sort of thing. And I call her up. I said, Els, um, be at my house in a half an hour. I'm writing something, we're doing a jingle now. And she said, I said, I didn't really even ask if she was available. I just said, I need you now. And she said, Okay, I'll be there in half an hour, because I had a home studio where I could just bash in. I was in the UK at the time. And I was living in in the UK. So she came over, we did the thing, I kind of wrote it on the spot, sampling her voice and put the whole thing together, sent it off to him in his two-hour window. He loved it, the client loved it, and I ended up remixing that original demo into, I don't know, 20 or 30 spots in various different styles and lengths and intents, but always a remix from that original thing. And again, I am no Quincy Jones, but it's the same thing. I had I was given an inspiration of a sound and an idea and an intent, and asked to transform it into something that was reminiscent. Nothing happens in the vacuum.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Completely, completely. And it I think it it is an interesting point because so much of that magic is happening, I I think almost at the end at the end of a price. If you look at typical commercials process or advertising development, you've got all of this stuff up front, and then right at the end, often it's concertina down into this kind of small period of time, but all this magic kind of happens, and if only we could open that up. Well, mind you, you did it in two hours, so maybe we shouldn't complain. Well, you know, but it but you know what I mean is that it's it's weird how time time doesn't work in linear ways in creativity. And I think the businesses that really uh get creativity and know how to make it work for clients understand how you know how to create space in unexpected places because that's where the good stuff happens, where the phone call happens and the singer comes, you know, the drop of a hat sometimes. Sometimes. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. And it really does. I was interested when you were talking a bit about the uh if I got it right, the sync clavier, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Yeah, sinclavier, sinclavier. Even the people who created it would pronounce it differently. Okay, and I've definitely pronounced it differently again. But that's fine.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

That's fine. Okay. But so when you look at because in a way you were at the cutting edge of technology at the time within the creative world that you were operating in. Obviously, now if you look at what's going on in the music world, what's going on uh going on in the commercial world, AI is is affecting everything hugely, and you see it in in music composition. And so is is what's happening now just another version of you know get getting on board with the sing clavier back in back in the day. Or is it different?

SPEAKER_01 15:03

I mean, no, I well it's it's the same, but it's this one, you know, and it's like any historical event. Things are sometimes uh uh they move things faster. You know, back in uh in the 70s or in the 80s, really, when the when the synthesizers could start sampling sounds, recording sounds, and you could play them back on your keyboard so you could record the sound of a violin or a trumpet or a timpani or a voice, there was a lot of angst in the music industry about synthesizers taking away jobs from quote-unquote real musicians. And it's like, well, wait a minute, I I am a real musician, I happen to play this thing, and there was a lot of stuff that went on, and in fact, the union scales in the States, I don't know what happened here, um, and I was heavily involved in that, they created a whole new scale pay scale for producers who were using synthesizers in this manner because it was it was a uh a game changer, it was it was a whole shift in how music was starting to be produced. Um and AI is the same thing. Um, you know, and everybody will always say that, you know, well, you know, this is gonna take jobs away from actors, it's gonna take jobs away from music. And there is some job shifting and job attrition that will happen. Uh, I think the the the difference here is about IP, you know, um, and uh and and personal, you know, IP. You know, if you are some famous musician or actor or face or whole body, and they start to just throw you up on the screen dancing like Gene Kelly, all of a sudden, you know, uh that's not right if you if they don't have your permission and if you're not getting compensated. And AI can do a lot of that, and you know, and there have already been some court cases, and it's it will run amok and it will find it, it will find its place because it's an amazing tool to be able to shortcut it's like, well, what would it sound sometimes you if you want to say, well, what would I do if it if I did it in this kind of style, and I'd have to go and create this whole kind of style. Well, I've already had the idea. What if I wanted to do it in the style of Laurie Anderson? Or what if I wanted to do it in the style of of uh John Williams from Star Wars? Or what if I wanted to do it in the in the style of you know um you know, anybody? Well, AI can help you mock that up really quickly, and you can make a quick decision. I like this, I don't like this, I like this, now I'm gonna go and do that properly, you know. But as a creative tool, as a as a shortcut tool, uh I think it can be and and also as a stimulus tool. You know, it's like, wow, I hadn't thought of that. And then to finish it off. I I I think we do have to be very, very careful, however, about protecting IP and and and all that surrounds that. And you know, we've always we've already seen you know um large industries um take advantage of of music. And I'll I'll just get on my uh high horse for just a moment. Ever since Napster in 2000 uh commoditized music to the value of zero, uh music in particular has lost a lot of its value um as a thing, um and as uh uh sample libraries and as music libraries um and as streaming. First it was downloads on iTunes and now it's streaming with subscriptions where most the songwriters aren't getting paid a pittance and they created this in the first place. It's it's it's a it's a bad thing that's going on. Um and that all needs to be reined in and it's not gonna be easy because once something is free, it's hard to tell people to pay for it. Um and but when you see now the you know, uh and I'm I'm greatly simplifying it, but all up until eight or ten or fifteen years ago, bands and recording artists uh were focused on selling records. And with downloads that started becoming really more focused on singles, but up until then it was albums and singles and and because that was their major stream of income, and they would go off and do tours to promote their albums. Now they have their singles and their online presence to promote their tours because the money is in the tours and the merchandise. It's a complete flip. Different model. Yeah, it's a complete flip. It's it's not a good thing, and it needs to be corrected. And there are, you know, there is legislation in various countries being proposed to rein this stuff in and and regulations, but you know, will it happen?

SPEAKER_00 20:19

It's such an interesting debate. So maybe we should just talk a little bit because I think it's super interesting about the when we talked before about the phase in your career when you started working with you know Steve Jobs' team on on the Apple spots in the US and I IBM. So some of the most famous work that that you know people over this side of the Atlantic would talk about. And in and in the US, now it was obviously a really special, special moment um to be a creative in music, creative generally. But tell us a bit about I'm interested in how that team worked, actually, and and like what made that so special.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

It was one of those special things. Um uh it worked with a very at the time, with the same age as I was. We were all very young at the time. Uh this creative team came in to do a a little spot. They were working for a little tiny local agency. It was a very creative spot. And uh the creative team was uh Chris Wall, who has sadly passed away a few years ago, and Susan Westra. Um and we did this commercial and it was great. And then they said, Hey, do you guys write lyrics? Can you do songs? I was like, Oh, hell yes. And so we did a a jingle for a local supermarket, which then ran for 13 years with all of the SAG and and AF of M uh residuals. It was probably the most profitable thing I've ever done. Crazy. And we just got this really good thing going, and then they changed agencies, and at one point they were working on their first broadcast AppleSpot. And I guess whatever happened with the because they were new and young, and so they were handed a composer by the producer. And for whatever reason, I don't, I still don't know because I never heard the music. I don't even know who the person was. Uh, it wasn't working out. And they said, hey, you know, uh, I was still with my partner, I said, Well, we got uh we there were these guys we worked with a couple years ago, and they were really great, you know, should we call them? So we got the call. And then for the next eight years, we did all of the music for all the Apple appetite advertising. Uh during that eight-year thing, my partner and I split up and I ended up keeping the account. Um and Joe Pitka, who's legend, um shot nine well, I think all of them. I mean, th they were they were unique uh in uh Chris and Susan were unique in that they really wanted to create uh a good team. Um because they they they saw the benefit in that. I mean, today, uh and increasingly you will see that there's like, well, who's new on the block? Let's try this editor, let's try this composer, uh, let's try this director, you know, he just out of college and did some really cool stuff, you know. Um, which has its merits too, because you sometimes find hidden gems. I mean, I like to think that at one point I was one of those guys. It's like, there's the young guy, and you know, try let's try him out, you know. Um, but there was a lot of that. But Chris and Susan really wanted to, and Steve Hayden, who was their boss, legend, um uh wanted to create a team and saw the benefits of shared experience and shorthand and communication and you know going really fast with everything and being able to come up with, you know, you just you build a rapport, you know. It's like in a band, you know, it's like songwriters that work together again in a band plays, and they get hopefully they get better as they you know work together until they fight and leave. Um but so we did these spots, and then and and it was a very tight-knit thing. And then various things happened, and their boss, Steve, got poached by Ogilvie to go run the IBM campaign, which was still running that Charlie Chaplin stuff, and it wasn't doing well, and so and then little by little he brought Chris and Susan over. He brought them and and some of the other creatives that were also associated with that. And all of a sudden, we're back. There was about a two-year lull, and all of a sudden we're back, and we're doing IBM and Lotus and stuff like that. And I I went with that team, and we had a brilliant editor, uh Adam Liebowitz, and uh, and we uh just we did IBM for the next 13 years together.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Yeah, and I love what you're saying about um sort of habit and shorthand because it it's a sort of I suppose an underrated benefit of that familiarity you have with a small group of people that means that you can very quickly get to a shared understanding, which means you are freer to do more interesting things. I mean, you talked to me before about you know getting a brief with a matter of minutes by the style of it to come up with a response. Yeah. And actually because that that relationship was established through the organizer or your personal relationship, it just went quickly. And I and I wonder if that we've lost a bit of that, you know, um long-term partnership that happens in the creative industry in order to be freer and better and more creative.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Yeah, I'm I'm sure that there are still probably a few groups like that that work in the ad ad industry. I I'm not part of any of those at this point. But, you know, um, yeah, I mean, uh if if Chris or Susan would come to me with an idea and I'm thinking of this, I could take it at less than face or at greater than face value because I I know how they see things and how they hear things. And you know, they wouldn't have to say a lot to say, well, this is what I want to do. You know, nowadays you'll get the brief, it'll go out to six music houses, each music house will send it out to eight composers, each composer is gonna come back with their own version of that. It's gonna come back to you, you're gonna get what, six times eight, 48 versions of the same idea, probably done by very good people. So you're gonna get like 48 versions of the same thing. And now you're just throwing darts at the wall. Well, we'll pick this one. And you don't know if the finish will ever be as good as the start. And very often in commercials, you guys know this so well, you start off with an idea and you think it's gonna go this way, and the director has an idea about music in his head about how this is going to be, and then you shoot the commercial, and it gets into the editorial phase, and you realize it's slow. It's just, you know, it's just not punchy enough. So the music that they th were playing it in the background and always in the edit, it's just dying. Well, you can't do that anymore. So you can't always uh rely on the fact that the original idea, because music is, you know, we're the makeup. Uh um. When you go to live theater, there may be interstitial music between scenes. If you go to a musical, then they sing about what's going on, or they may sing the whole thing like an operetta. But they don't typically underscore theater because you're in the room with the live actors and you feel them. People feel people were in the room. We even discussed doing this podcast remotely. And after talking about Jason, I said, No, no, no. I want to be in the room with you because it's better. When you're in live theater, you're you feel the people, you feel what they're doing. When you're on screen, that's been cut. And that's where uh underscore makes up for the emotion. I mean, you know, and this is like the this is film scoring 101. Dark night, man pulls up in a car, parks in front of a house, walks up the little path to the front door, fiddles with the front door, opens the front door, huge dog leaps up in front of him.

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Oh, you're talking about my dog.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

Well, maybe my dog. Now, and I'm gonna be, again, music 101. If I score it, do ba da da, this is the bad guy breaking into the house and the dog's gonna rip his throat out. And if I score it, dum-de-dum-ty-dum-de-dum-de-did-di-dum-da-da, it's dad coming home and the dog is just gonna lick his face off. Same picture, same, same, same, same, same, same. They've been doing it in horror films for years. What they call red herrings, where they scare you and it's just a cat. Um and so we we put the emotional makeup on a given scene. We tell you how to feel. And we guide you through a scene. And when you're when you're working on films or when you're working on uh when you're working on films, you know, you have to spot the film. Like, where where where are we going to put music? Where do we need music because the scene isn't working as well as we thought? Where do we want music because we'd like to enhance what's going on? And what should the music direct the audience to feel? Same thing in commercials, you know. Uh we want people to buy stuff. And and and and this is, I think, with commercials, advertising, um where advertising becomes its own thing. And some people are gonna send me hate mail. Some people probably won't, but some people send me hate. You know, when we're doing advertising, we're not making Gone with the Wind, we're not making Thriller, we're not making The Beatles' first album. You know, we are creating a media product to sell cheese. That's what we do. And if we don't sell cheese, we have failed. I don't care if the music is glorious. I don't care if you got the biggest actor on the planet to pimp your product. If it doesn't sell, you failed. And that's different than an a record album where you are saying, Well, this is who I am, this is what I want to do. If it doesn't sell, okay, you failed again, but you failed on your own merits. But you you know, I'm not working for somebody else. I'm not working to sell somebody else's product, I'm working to sell my own product. You do a feature film and it is a big hit or if it's a flop, that's your problem and the studio's problem, but it still comes back to the you. If I fail to sell your product because of my contribution or the entire contribution, um, then we've failed. I don't care how beautiful it is. It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_00 32:04

It's uh I just to pick up on that, I mean, I think that's such an interesting area because I I feel like there's a there is a difference between US US culture and UK culture, for instance, which is quite interesting. You everyone says it, you know, it's a sales culture, the US. Like I'm gonna sell you something, I'm gonna be up front, I'm gonna I'm selling you that cheese, and I'm gonna, you know, here it is, and I'm gonna show it, and I'm gonna put it in front of your face, I'm gonna tell you why you should buy it. And you, you know, the UK is interesting because it's sort of more indirect culture quite often, but I think sometimes we've got a lot to learn from from the US. I mean, uh, I I re I really do.

SPEAKER_01 32:41

But I think there's there's there's a lot of cultural. I'm I'm married to an English girl. So I have been faced with the differences in our cultures for the last you know 30 odd years. Uh and so I'm I'm quite familiar. I lived here for a long time. I've I grew up in the states, you know. So there are a lot of cultural differences, and how you approach a given society, whether it be England, America, China, India, South, you know, Brazil, you you have to meet them where they are. Um one of the problems in advertising these days is that people are making international, more and more making international ads and just dubbing them or putting subtitles or whatever they have to do to get them out to other markets, and they're shooting them once. And they're editing them pretty much once. Maybe they have to do something for sensors or whatever, but basically they're shooting these one-size-fits-all commercials. It just doesn't work. And music now is more often than not uh licensed from a library, which basically sets a tone or a mood, but rarely directs you through the commercial. And you know, it's like we used to talk about having it just sit there like a rug. You know, it just sits there and says, you know, this is lovey music or this is tense music. But and yes, some commercials are still scored. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but the the vast majority of commercials are um the music is from libraries or it's licensed tracks. Um even licensed tracks with lyrics. I mean, 20 years ago, you would never have a lyric fighting with a voiceover or a dialogue because that's two things to listen to, and you're confusing the audience. And I still think you're confusing the audience and diluting the impact of the message you're trying to send. And that's why I say that, you know, in in advertising, we have a we have a job to do. And uh I I think you know, I think some of that gets missed. And I'm sure it will come back because when advertisers realize that advertising isn't working, they're gonna go, hmm, they either change agencies or they say, well, we're gonna put more money into uh online or we're gonna put more money back into TV and radio because, you know, or whatever, we're gonna put more billboards up, you know what, but and and what the character of the advertising is and how it's uh put forth to the to the public. So I mean, you you look at British humor versus American humor. You know, what makes Americans laugh? A lot of Americans will look at, you know, British comedians, uh, Ricky Gervais, and they'll go, huh? You know, and they don't get it. And a lot of Brits will look at American, a lot of not all, I'm making huge swathes of generalities and say, well, that's just too slapstick, it's too coarse, there's too many F-words or whatever it happens to be. We're different cultures. And um I I'm really, you know, kind of attuned to that because of how I develop my family life. But um yeah, uh there is a there is a difference. But you know, it's like when when Nissan introduced the Infinity car, you know, there they tried that complete tangential kind of advertising. They were pictures of uh videos of dolphins swimming and waves and crashing and no cars, zero cars in the advertising, and then it would like you know, infinity, you know. I don't remember what the strap line was, but it doesn't really matter. It didn't sell cars. And Infinity never caught up with Lexus, they were launched at roughly the same time. They never really recovered that sort of stature. They played catch up, and you know, I did a lot of Infinity commercials subsequent to I didn't work on those, but subsequent to that where they were selling cars, you know, and and you have to sell what you're you have to do that Jaguar, of course, would have a lot to say about that. Well, yeah, and that was that was a very thing, but that was a media stunt. And it was brilliant because they said, you know, this this is it. But it was pr, you know, first of all, we're you know, 30 years later, where you know, meme's the word, and you know, uh a media stunt like you know, the ice bucket challenge and all these sorts of things can can grab and trend. And the Jaguar thing was brilliant because everybody was talking about how stupid it was. And then it goes back to there's no publicity, there's no bad publicity, right? And they knew that it was brilliant. I thought it was brilliant. Would it sell me a car? No, but it reminded me that there was a Jaguar out there, and that's all I wanted to do.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

Yeah, the car's still yet to appear, but um Yeah. Uh what in in insofar as you can buy it. I've got one last thing I just wanted to ask you, um, because so much of what you've been talking about is sort of this dance between being free, free to do the things that you think are most interesting, but also understanding that the world comes, particularly the commercial world comes with tram lines. It comes, you're in you're in a corridor, even if the corridor's a white corridor, you know. Um so I suppose my my my last question really is about like helping us to understand how you think about creativity but also constraint. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:43

I well I I I do think um I mean it's been said that you know creativity can't really happen in a vacuum because if you don't have any walls, you're kind of wandering and lost. Now, I mean, occasionally for a you know a musical composition, if you just you know wake up at three o'clock in the morning and you have some wild idea, great. But I think that most of the time you have to kind of know what you're doing. Am I writing a symphony for a traditional orchestra? Okay, those are the instruments, and I might you know add this or that, or am I writing for my band, which has a guitar, two keyboard players, a drummer, and uh uh a guy on you know uh some weird instrument, you know. Um and and and I've got this voice. He or she is our lead singer, and that's a huge amount of so you you know you you write for something in commercials, you know, we write certainly to a timeline, which is very strict. You know, it doesn't and and every frame is counted, you know, in a 30-second commercial, a 20-second commercial, a five-second blip, you know, skip here button on on online. You know, you want to make your point. Um and uh so you have to you have to understand how to work in short form. And and working in short form is different than working in long form. Uh and that uh we didn't really talked about that, but it it's a hugely different thing. You don't get to write a theme like Axel F, you know, it's longer than the commercial. You know, you just can't write a theme like that. You don't get to do that. You can't develop something that takes three minutes to develop if the commercial is over in 20 seconds. Now, they might do an extended version online, a three-minute something, and then you get to stretch out. And we all get to do that on you know, long versions, online versions uh that aren't constrained by broadcast limitations of well, you got 20 seconds, but there's a second dead here and a second dead at the end, and so you really only have 18 seconds and you know what what is it, or 30 seconds in an American commercial with, you know, i i you have to you have to respect those boundaries and you have to know how to get your idea out quickly and have it feel like a whole idea and not a truncated idea. That's I mean, to me, and if I'm good at anything, I'm really good at short form because I've worked on it for so many years, and that's the thing that I really love about being good at writing music for commercials is being good at creating something that has a beginning, middle, and end in 30 seconds.

SPEAKER_00 41:50

Yeah, absolutely. If I had more time, I'd write a shorter letter, it's that sort of thing, isn't it? Sort of uh Well, it's the editorial process.

SPEAKER_01 41:57

You it's easy to write 20 pages, yeah. Write it in two paragraphs.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

Yeah. Brilliant, brilliant. Well, what a fascinating uh conversation and and journey. I just have to ask you, when does Thriller get to appear in a commercial? I guess never. I I don't know. I mean, you know, that's up to the publishers. Maybe you get some royalties on that on the back of that one. But um, but listen, uh uh it leads me to say a massive thank you, Brian. It's been absolutely brilliant to listen to your incredibly uh varied and eventful and rich um stories uh of the past very and and the stories around Steve and Apple, just absolutely brilliant. Um, I think we we talked a bit about um the power of personal partnerships and sort of teams that have endured over time. Um, and I love the thought around you know it how to be creative, but with a really firm idea of what's the job that you're doing at the heart of it, what's the thing you're actually the outcome you're looking for. And I guess we we've got a lot learned, a lot of things to learn from the US, not everything right now, I have to say. Not everything, everything, and we're not gonna go there, we're not gonna go there to get me started. No, I'm not going to. Um, but um again, huge thank you. Thank you to Brian back. I loved it. Thank you. And just by way of a short footnote to this fascinating conversation with Brian, I just wanted to trail the IPA Business Growth Conference, which is taking place on the 2nd of July, Wednesday, the 2nd of July at County Hall Westminster. We'll be injecting some much-needed optimism uh into the world of growth and creativity. And you can uh find your tickets, get your tickets on the IPA website. Look forward to seeing you there.