Mike Sammes & the Mike Sammes Singers "Dulux Super 3"

Mike Sammes and his backing vocal quintet The Mike Sammes Singers are best known, if known at all, for their session work during the late 60s, when their crystalline, virginal harmonies graced recordings from Shirley Bassey, Burt Bacharach, and Frank (and Nancy) Sinatra. They also somehow ended up supporting Ringo on The White Album’s “Good Night,” and were roped into a film scoring gig (of sorts) by composer Krzysztof Komeda for Rosemary’s Baby (they were the moaning voices on the soundtrack, so imagine these guys next time you see the film). Not like it’ll pull them out of pop-footnote status, but the proprietor of Trunk Records (subtitled “Music, Nostalgia and Sex” on their website) managed to salvage several boxes of the Sammes’ ad-jingle recordings from his home after he died a few years back. He’s compiled 29 of them on Music for Biscuits (along with some sessions from a film called Youth), and listening to the disc for the past few days has revealed many things to me about modern pop music and advertising. First, advertising culture has gotten much, much more treacherous (in the ad biz, they call it “conceptual”) over the past 40 years. Commercials have always straddled that uncomfortable line between entertainment and product shilling, but the Sammes jingles sound innocent and refreshingly unironic compared to the meta-textual pandering of so many ads today. Which brings me to point number two, which is that the occupation of “jingle writer” seems to have gone the way of the telephone switchboard operator, with most commercials these days recycling pop music from an era specific to its demographic (you know how it works–Zeppelin for Cadillac, The Who for Range Rover, Nick Drake for VW, etc.) in an attempt to curry favor with the omnipresent resource of consumer nostalgia. Long gone are the days of intricately crafted jingles created solely for the sake of selling something, unless I’m missing something by never watching television or listening to the radio. Sammes seems to have been a master of the craft of making widgets to sell widgets; check out “Dulux Super 3” (mp3) for example (and no, it’s not also the title of a Stereolab song, I checked). Over a bed of factory-standard lounge pop (xylophone, fanfare trumpet, hi-hat/snare, upright bass), Sammes et al set the dial to house paint, and not without an ear for concept. You see, the trio has a rather storied history, incorporating Groucho, Chico and Harpo; Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego; Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; and Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong into its numerical fold. Hell, you could even throw Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt into the mix—the Sammes Singers do. Over the course of a scant two minutes, they manage to locate Dulux Super 3 house paint within the pantheon of world leaders, comedic legends, and Old Testament characters, only by virtue of a common numeral. I would call it ironic if I thought there was a single ironic nanosecond in this song, which I don’t. Instead, it comes across as sleek, clever widget-pop from one perspective, and a stone relic of standalone shilling from another.

Buy Music for Biscuits from Trunk Records here, because listening to only commercials for the length of an entire CD is like hearing the opposite of radio.

ET AUSSI: Apparently, when it comes to online indie rock band tour diaries, there is being established a style of white-van-in-front-of-red-awninged-gas-station pictures. Here’s Mission of Burma’s picture, from their Pitchfork diary, and here’s Magnolia Electric Co.’s version (ahem, earlier) from Jason Groth’s diary here on my little thing. I like Roger Miller’s idea of having the sliding door open.

AND LOOK AT THIS: And you thought the Hezbollah/Israel conflict only resulted in bad things. Here’s your silver lining, called The Northern Band. According to the article, lyrics include: “Hey, you, hawk of Lebanon. Hey, you, Nasrallah. Your men are from Hezbollah and victory is yours with God’s help.” Roger Waters on line two.