Credit: Found On Internet

02 are still using electronica but they’ll come round.

Yesterday evening I found myself listening to Traffic’s folk tinged album, John Barleycorn Must Die.  Not unusual in itself, I’ve always been a fan of anything Stevie Winwood touched (up until about 1979 obviously) and Peter Capaldi is an influence on me as a drummer.  However, as I listened to the title song I found myself wondering if I needed a new mobile handset.

Which immediately led to the question, what the Dickens does my beaten up old Blackberry have to do with a centuries old folk song about the yearly harvest.  It was at this point that I glanced up at the TV to see some chap sticking his arm through a window to get the attention of a female friend.  In this instance the glass went all wobbly and his hand slipped through, when my friend Clive tried to do similar he got lacerations, an injunction and as a result, currently resides in Broadmoor.  Still, enough about my friends, the point here is that this mobile advert has a folkey-dokey sound-track, and with the extensive research that writing an article like this requires (a quick look on youtube and a chat with my ever-loyal flatmate) it became apparent that loads of mobile ads use folk music.  There’s tonnes of ‘em, T Mobile, Orange, Vodaphone all using folk music.  02 are still using electronica but they’ll come round.  Besides, I want whatever the creatives at O2’s agency are on – chasing transparent globules whilst running on water? That’s the good shit.

But enough of me stealing druqs of ad execs…  The real question here is why folk?  What the hell does folk music have to do with mobile telephony?  The only answer I can think of is that when the ad agencies turned up to do their research they farcically went to the room next door which was hosting a Greenham Common Protesters’ reunion.  The next generation of handsets will be called ‘Cloud’, ‘Peace’ and ‘Lentil’ no doubt and the Nokia logo will slowly morph into a CND sign.

Regardless of how this has come about, it’s had a profound effect on how I listen to music.  I can’t hear a mandolin without thinking about my tariff these days, tales of maidenly lament get me all frothed up about the Blackberry Pearl and morris dancers give me priapic thoughts of a new PDA which synchronises with my PC - IN REAL TIME.  I’m a folkey-dokey-mobile-telephony mess, and I think there’s a part of me that likes it.