If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH6381QdwvY

I’ve just come back from a holiday where I drove my family through France, took a train to Barcelona, drove to Algeciras in Spain, took the ferry to Tangiers, took the overnight train to Marrakech, drove to Essaouira, returned to Marrakech, flew to Paris and took the train home.

So of course much of my time was spent thinking about the greatest band in the history of the world: Led Zeppelin.

I love Led Zeppelin.

From about fourteen I listened to them every day for at least ten years (gone), I have a picture of Page and Plant in their pomp on my living room wall and Achilles Last Stand is my ringtone. They wrote the best songs but they also had complete creative control over everything they did, which meant that they could do strange things like release an album with no title, disappoint many of their fans by following up a massive rock album with an acoustic one, and pretty much never release any singles.

They also had a producer who was a minutely detailed sound freak who obsessed over the placement of microphones in unusual spaces, pioneering the use of non-musical sounds and creative overdubbing. He was also their guitarist, Jimmy Page.

Who was also a reputed occultist whose groupie girlfriend was fourteen years old.

Very rock and roll…

As were many of their legendary antics on the road, one of which involved fishing for a shark out of their hotel window, then making use of said shark with a groupie.

Anyway, here are my ten favourite Led Zeppelin tracks in order, because lists that aren’t in some kind of order are boring:

1. Tea For One. This is a rather overlooked track from the end of side two of Presence, but I love it. It has this oddly irrelevant opening that soon moves aside for a bluesy journey into Robert Plant’s sadness at being away from his wife and kids after they’d all nearly died in a car crash. Happily, I’ve never taken heroin, but I imagine it feels a little like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWvsdhuWVBU&feature=related

2. Achilles Last Stand. Epic, over the top madness. Zeppelin at their best with Page and Bonham trading ridiculously bombastic thunderbolts of drum and guitar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20XfsejPQXE

3. Ten Years Gone. Another woozy, trippy one, this time from Physical Graffiti. A slow builder that heads off in all sorts of different directions, all of which feel just right:

4. Heartbreaker. This one saw me though ages 14-18. The best riff in rock, with an insane guitar solo to follow. ‘Hey, fellas have you heard the news, you know that Annie’s back in town…’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq_sCDYCGwU

5. For Your Life. Another under-appreciated monster, funkily examining the downside of drug addiction, “With the fine lines of the crystal payin’ through your nose”. This version is the one they played at the O2 in 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa_pGC80PCc

6. Dazed And Confused. This often took half an hour to play live, mainly because Page was having fun playing his guitar with a violin bow. In the middle section it’s quite easy to forget where you are, but then that riff comes back in:

7. Kashmir. The favourite of most Zep Fans. Page and Bonham are playing in quadruple meter, while Plant and Paul Jones are playing in triple meter, and it all meshes perfectly, like an army on the march, but an army you’d quite like to go for a drink with:

8. When The Levee Breaks. The best drum beat in rock, followed by screaming harmonica, slide guitar and crazy overdubs. It sounds like a brontosaurus on its way to its first shag in a decade, hence the lyrics:  ‘Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good…’:

9. The Ocean. It’s the live version on How The West Was Won that does this for me. The ‘La la la-la-la-la’ bit is quite a chance to take, but is the cherry on a great big cake made out rusty girders:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2QX7GZJRpE

10. Bring it on Home. Also check out the HTWWW version. It’s that point where the slow beginning gives way to the riff that’s amazing, but also the cracking double drum beat that Bonham puts in straight afterwards that grabs you by the guts and turns you into a yo-yo:

So the fun of having this blog is being able to put this out there and see what comes back.

Whether you love them, hate them, copped off to Tangerine or were beaten up to Immigrant Song, let me know your Zep thoughts in the comments section.

The only ad I can remember from the time I was on holiday is this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffHLIZh0PHg&feature=youtu.be

I would imagine a five-year-old could think of cars as an analogy for internet speeds, but it’s so lovingly crafted with such charming touches that it gets away with it.

Most of us have forgotten about the bad old days of dial-up connections and the like, so this gentle reminder of how far the internet has come is a pleasant way to make the present/future seem even better.

John Cleese has made dozens of excellent ads but not many in the last twenty years.

So it’s good to see him back with this lovely spot shot by Tom Kuntz:

Great editing, direction and performance to make what could have been a big fat nothing into something really very good.

It’s a big one this week. I’m off on holiday for a bit, so may not be posting. If your office life is a little dull, maybe you should ration this stuff like wartime chocolate:

Trailer for Drew: The Man Behind The Poster (thanks, P):

Here’s a social experiment: is Wank London funny? (Thanks, J):

Parisien apartment opened for the first time in 70 years.

The art of logo design (thanks, P):

The Humpy Awards (thanks, W):

A brief history of title design:

How Hitchcock got people to see Psycho (thanks, P):

Lego The Wire (thanks, C).

135 shots that will restore your faith in cinema (if you ever lost it) (thanks, C):

The Thick Of It’s nicknames:

Fantastic swimming pools (thanks, D).

Batman’s wonderful toys (thanks, P):

I’ve just been reading Steve Harrison’s excellent biography of Howard Gossage, Changing The World Is The Only Fit Work For A Grown Man (great title, and true).

(This is not a proper piece of film. It’s just the only way I can show the cover without uploading a picture, which WordPress won’t let me do).

It’s a rollicking good read, letting us briskly into the mind of a truly fascinating man.

He always did things his way, keeping his agency small to maintain quality (love to see anyone really brilliant trying that these days).

He developed interactivity in the 50s, always adding a coupon to his ads, even if it was just to ask the reader what was on their mind.

He created stunts fifty years ago that would put today’s efforts to shame. One of these involved inventing Beethoven sweatshirts to promote a beer. There had till that point never even been pictures on sweatshirts, but the demand for these was so great that it generated too many orders to cope with, along with thousands of press reports.

He also introduced us to wide scale environmentalism, first saving the Grand Canyon, the creating Earth Day.

My favourite part involves a story of a customer competition to name new colours for a shirt. Some of the suggestions were ‘Come And Get Me Copper’, ‘Medi Ochre’ and Statutory Grape’.

Top man, top book. Give it a read.

Last year I freelanced at 4 Creative for a month. Happy, happy times: great work, lovely people and an agency that is also a production company and (sort of) a client.

The CD at the time was Tom Tagholm, who also directed many of their best ads. He’s left to direct full-time, but is still producing absolutely brilliant work for them (the embedding is disabled because of some music rights hoo-haa).

It makes having a missing limb seem, well, cool.

Great track (Public Enemy), and brilliantly shot.

It feels like the ad Nike should have made.

Hats off.

After the sporty girl, party girl etc. campaign, Lynx has come up with another very well made ad with a strong central idea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRB0i9-AUQs

And Kiefer Sutherland.

Here’s Sarah Silverman offering to rub her groin on the groin of a man who wants to donate $100m to Mitt Romney:

It’s funny, but not as funny as The Great Schlep. Obviously it has lost the element of surprise that made TGS so fresh, but it’s also more gratuitous. Instead of offering some kind of solution to the issue (however many people actually schlepped), it’s just a slightly ridiculous bit of comedy styling.

Perhaps it’s an incredibly perceptive indication of the way the US political landscape has changed in the last four years. In 2008 many of us were praying Obama would get in (remember the alternative: being one old man’s heart attack away from President Palin) and the rush of hope that went with him was palpable.

This time the support for Obama has become somewhat jaded because he hasn’t delivered every single last thing he hoped he would, the swine. But he does seem to be much, much less of a crazy asshole than Romney, so fingers crossed he doesn’t need that guy’s $100m, because I don’t think he’s going to get it.

But thanks for trying, Ms Silverman.

Ever the innovator, Creative Circle has just released its 2012 Annual in the form of a magazine.

As you can see from this flick through, it is jam-packed with the wit and wisdom of many superlative creative types, including Dave Dye, Mark Denton and Nick Gill (and me):

I assume everyone was given the same brief I was, i.e.: write whatever you want but make it between 200 and 2000 words. That’s quite a peachy brief if you like to write, so you’ll find some great insights from some great people (and me).

I believe it’s available here, so grab one. It’s ridiculously cheap for what you get, and you can probably expense it anyway, so no excuses.