With Elbow and The Beatles, John Lewis have played it safe with their Christmas Advert song - review

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With Elbow and The Beatles, John Lewis have played it safe with their Christmas Advert song - review
By  Alice Vincent
10 NOVEMBER 2017




The speculation began on Wednesday morning. Two days before the John Lewis Christmas advertisement was released on to YouTube and into the hearts of a public filled with the vague dread of November, people were wondering what the soundtrack would be – and with increasing ridicule. Jessie Ware covering 2003 Pop Idol victor Michelle McManus? Laura Mvula taking on Yazoo?

They were partially correct: this year’s heartstring-plucker is a cover by a Mercury Prize-nominated (and -winning!) act. Alas, the rest is all too familiar after such surreal expectations. Gentle giants Elbow have delivered a keening rendition of Golden Slumbers, a Beatles song written by Paul McCartney in 1969.

Elbow have always erred more on the side of poetry than provocation, but recently frontman and homely hero Guy Garvey has become so etched into the national consciousness that he has become a regular figure on CBeebies’ starry Bedtime Stories slot.


Joe, the star of the John Lewis Christmas Advert CREDIT:  JOHN LEWIS

After years of softly crooning about the beautiful banality of divorce, your mother’s cigarettes and kitchen tables, Garvey’s Lancastrian burr has become as familiar and comforting as a favourite pair of socks recently removed from the radiator. His voice has the heft of feather pillows and is well-trained in deploying a winsome falsetto. It’s a refreshing thing after a run of whimsical female vocals gasping melancholically at beloved ballads, and conjures exactly the satisfied sigh John Lewis hope we’ll emit after watching Moz the Monster impart little Joe with a starry night light.


Elbow performing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in November CREDIT:  NBC

Golden Slumbers, too, is a safe choice and fitting for the nocturnal micro-drama: McCartney based it on a simple 17th-century lullaby by Thomas Dekker, and tailored the dramatist’s words to a melody of his own creation. The song, just one verse repeated twice and a chorus, is so minimalist that The Beatles used it only as part of the medley that appears on Abbey Road.

In fact, John Lewis have developed the specification for their Christmas Advert song to such an extent that Elbow’s cover is barely unchanged from The Beatles’ orchestral original. The string arrangement has been more deftly deployed and the bass guitar left behind along with Ringo’s percussion, but in essence, you could swap in the Fab Four's version and turn it down a bit and people wouldn’t really notice.

Which all rather begs the question of where the fun has gone. When Norwegian teenage waif Aurora covered Half the World Away in 2015, it maddened Oasis fans while making them misty-eyed. Ellie Goulding’s 2010 Your Song cover was nothing on the original, but landed a slot at the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding reception. Even Lily Allen’s feeble take on Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know, in 2013, boosted the relevance of both ailing Noughties acts.

This time around, John Lewis have given us a song that is undeniably lovely – and wildly uncontroversial. Few will be furiously reaching for the mute button as the festive season goes on. The Beatles will remain unbesmirched and Garvey will still read bedtime stories (perhaps humming this to himself after the cameras have stopped rolling). But daft arguments about the John Lewis Christmas advert song have become as much a part of Christmas as daft arguments about when the turkey goes in. And this year, I fear we may miss them. If only Wake Me Up Before You Go Go had been considered.


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