Have the doors of perception been gently but firmly closed?
I was reading an interview with Damon Albarn the other day where he mentioned the extent to which heroin improved his creative output:
‘For me it was incredibly creative. It freed me up. If you’re talking about an odyssey, that was definitely an odyssey… I can only say (heroin) was incredibly productive for me. Hand on heart.’
Then I read an interview with Jeremy Thomas, Oscar-winning producer of The Last Emperor, Sexy Beast and The Naked Lunch. He lamented the change in the way films were made because it used to be de rigeur to provide beer at the end of a day’s shooting, whereas this was now very much frowned upon:
‘I’m not condoning drunkenness. I’m just saying that that part of the creative process is no longer there… There are many constraints on (freedom and creativity) now and my best films were made in an era of wildness.’
This left me wondering what we might now be missing that could be enhancing creativity. The possibly apocryphal stories of yesteryear agency boozing and drugging are legion, and only a myopic prick would try to argue that the work wasn’t commensurately gargantuan in quality. So did the booze and biftas bring on the brilliance, or was it somewhat coincidental?
It’s easy to see a connection between the looseness of mind that comes with inebriation and the random leaps and collisions that bring on the most original ideas. However much the sensible part of my brain would like to dismiss the relationship, the part that’s now two large glasses of delicious Summerland Chardonnay to the good/bad can only see a brick-hard logic in suggesting that one can certainly lead to the other, after all, the work of Hemingway, Huxley and Lennon does seem pretty persuasive here. But does more drinking bring on more creativity? Harder to argue, and besides, one then has to deal with the attendant problems a greater ingestion of alcohol often creates. In addition, we have those pesky tee-totallers, Carty and Campbell and their peerless creative output, proving that A doesn’t necessarily lead to B.
Of course, many other factors have repressed advertising creativity over the years, but I do recall a suggestion from the aforementioned Walter Campbell, who told me years ago that he sometimes liked to come to work at 2am because the mind worked in a completely different way at that time of night (I once tried this theory out and discovered that he was right, but then I was too knackered to continue the experiment and unlike Walt I couldn’t just fail to turn up to work during daylight hours in the service of a thought experiment). So the altering of the brain’s conventional workings, whether conventionally, illegally, or otherwise, has been consistently proven to bring on the good stuff that makes the great stuff.
But how do your own experiences bear this theory out? Does Courvoisier equal Cannes Lions? Can a bit of ketamine bring you a Kinsale Shark? Or is a messy mind entirely unrelated to the creative process?
Answers on a forthright caramel tree house.
when i worked on Budweiser, it didn’t hurt that they wheeled round a cart of ice cold Buds every day. of course being in an altered state helps with ideas.
i remember a superbowl spot i did was inspired by a Campaign magazine cover that I saw when i stumbled into my office one morning the worse for wear.
It was about some big dog food acount move in the UK. And it featured a still from every dog food ever. A golden retriever and his loving owner.
I saw the cover and immediately thought it was for Bud. And then figured out how a reverse dog food commercial could work for a beer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7dgPYv63gk
Love that ad.
Agreed. I’ve said before, but often get shot down for it: the more professional advertising gets, the less valuable and interesting its thinking becomes.
Interesting post ben.
Maybe it should be encouraged in the ad world. What if Dylan had never introduced pot to the Beatles, would they have never reached such lofty heights?
Eric Clapton’s best guitar playing years were at the same time as an unholy reliance on heroin. Screw Hendrix, watch his playing in this video. He passed out swiftly afterwards. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJfeLkw7-ck
I reckon it mainly comes from a heightening or at least alteration of the senses that comes from drugs. This is often touted as a route for good advertising or creativity more generally and drugs simply encourage that state.
That is good, but this is better (especially from about 4:00):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SFNW5F8K9Y
I’m not sure it’s about a chemical correlation between drink/drugs and creativity as much as a tolerance for ‘playing hard’ going hand in hand with a tolerance for risk taking in the work.
I still remember my first four pint advertising lunch, on placement at what turned out to be my first agency. I thought it was a special occasion, but it was pretty much par for the course most days.
And yet, somehow, the work got done. And some of it pretty good work, too.
Nowadays, when you’re deemed to have a dangerously rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle just because you don’t cycle 15 miles to work every morning on your fucking fixie, nobody seems to want to do anything that’s in any way extraordinary or challenging.
We’ve turned into an industry of conformists that’s totally averse to risk in any form. Which weirdly, is about the riskiest place you can be.
I don’t believe drugs open the mind of the artist particularly. But they do open the mind of the audience.
Many years ago after a truly long lunch I wrote a script for a wallpaper manufacturer. The next day, I couldn’t really believe that through my hangover the CD actually liked it. Got made and won awards. Not sure it shifted wallpaper but, hey, here’s to about 15 pints of Stella on a Wednesday afternoon.
What was it that Hemingway always said? “Write drunk, edit sober”? It’s always worked for me.
I have had a theory for a while that heroin really helps bands particularly after their 2nd album.
The first two albums you’ve probably got 25 years of life experience to write about. The real highs and lows of life and struggle.
After that you’ve spent the last 3 years in hotels and airports and it’s not the stuff that feeds song writing. The battle of life have been replaced with the life of a rockstar, so heroin gives you the big highs and lows to enable you to have something to write about. The Stones did some of their best work as smackheads.
Now let’s all break out the brown and make some ads…
In short heroin gives you material
It does for most people after a while. The list of agency legends->liabilities->lushes->lates
is a long and horrible one and frankly, not worth it.
The fact that people don’t do this anymore is a symptom not a cause. Careerists have taken over. They suck the fun out of everything. I have just had a meeting about fluffy animals and biscuits was as po-faced and gloomy as it shouldn’t have been.
I should imagine there were more failures that we don’t hear about using this inebriated technique.
Geoff “100 Grand” Seymour was pretty much forgotten by anyone under 50 by the time he died at quite a young age. Indeed, things were so bad that his kids only found out he’d died by reading the news in Campaign.
You create this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRL9P99EOBs
this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fABzM0lPhsM
and, of course, this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mq59ykPnAE&list=PLAD6C508EE6C6B076
..and for what?
I once did hallucinogenic drugs while trying to crack a brief. I didn’t crack the brief, but I did decide I wanted to be a postman instead.
@ George: but look how many sober ‘failures’ there are right now.
As kids we’re less inhibited and more ‘creative’ in a way. And over time society drums out of us the mindset of challenging rules, asking why, being different.
Partly because we don’t want them to take risks and die. Partly because it’s easier.
I think boozing in agencies is just part of challenging what society thinks is right or proper. It encourages a mindset of fuck it, let’s just do what we want.
It can probably be a double edged sword, just like the example above.
Just saw a bearded man with a can of Super near Hoxton square, not sure he was a Creative though?
When I started work in advertising in the late nineties, I heard about the Nine By Nine Club. If you were able to sink nine pints by nine a.m. in the Smithfield Market boozer, then stagger into work, probably throw up, punch a couple of suits then fall asleep under your desk, membership into this exclusive club was granted. I’m not sure if it still existed at that time, or if it was just advertising folklore, but a wet-behind-the-ears new-to-the-industry creative who’d spent a fair share of the previous five years off his tits, shuddered at the prospect of not being able to do the job with a clear head, make a good impression and hopefully go on to be successful.
After only a few weeks in our new positions, the CD would appear in our office doorway each day at noon and demand that we assisted him in his daily quest to get arse-holed, and, after much umm-ing and ahh-ing about workloads, etc., and still eager to please, we’d shuffle off round the corner, down three or four pints, and after leaving the CD in the pub, stumble back into the office, incapable of producing anything approaching a coherent idea for the rest of the afternoon.
Graft and Guinness – or gear, or both – has never worked for me, and when I did use a bit of puff to get the creative juices flowing, I only ever produced the kind of ideas you have if you crack a brief in your sleep – that is, they seem like a good idea at the time, but on reflection turn out to be complete horse shit.
Though I do think that a carefully controlled experiment to gauge how a creative department of Straights versus Smasheds would fare on a brief, would make for excellent viewing, though only if you worked in advertising, I think.