So though there were a lot of great people, the next step may have been for a lot to start their own thing. We knew that there were a bunch of maverick people – me included – that just might not function anywhere else. I got that feeling, but it wasn’t necessarily completely clear. Was it clear when you were in a creative department like HHCL that most of you would go on to run agencies or departments? Part two: initial insecurities, growing up a geek and why every creative needs a thick skin…
To do that you needed the Zlatan Ibrahimovic mindset – you had to believe you were the best. Al and I knew we had to be the best team there. Dave Buonaguidi was there, Naresh (Ramchandani) was there, Liz (Whiston) and Dave (Shelton) who did all the Ronseal ads were there. They were genius, and that was just our creative directors doing some stuff on the side. Even Steve and Axe had just done the Holsten Pils ads. That’s not a bad response! HHCL really was such an amazing agency at the time – were you conscious of just having to always hit such high standards? We knew after that we had to do something big to survive. It was a 40-second commercial and we wanted to die.
I remember watching it on TV and found it hard to watch. It was awful and I thought that was already the end of us. So then we had to get trained comedic people to laugh in order to make it work. It was really odd and we couldn’t make it work. But the issue was that when you laugh, your face and laugh don’t actually fit together. In the end, we decided to individually get the same people back to laugh. Al and I looked at each other and went ‘fucking hell, we’re going to be fired’. I think that in the end, he came to us and said, ‘I’ll be honest, none of this works, I fucked up, I’ve put some music over the top to try and make it work’. And afterwards he kept doing these really weird edits to try and make it work. I remember it was a hot day and we were getting little pockets of laughter that felt real, but you could see the director was struggling with it. Like animals in a cage.ĭid you know it wasn’t going to work, even at the shoot? When we heard the sound back, it just sounded like this high-pitched, squealing sound. He said ‘nah, you don’t want to kill the atmosphere’. So we got these people in a room and we thought we should probably throat-mic them, considering how many there were. He wanted eight people all together laughing. We wanted the ad to involve a couple of people laughing. And at that time, let’s say he had a bit of a rock star way of living. Al and I loved him as a comedian, so Steve suggested we asked him to direct the commercial. When we needed an alternative, a famous British actor turned director came up in conversation. And then we couldn’t get the director we wanted. Well first, we had all these different straplines on it, and eventually the line ended up being ‘Pepe – because one day you’ll die’. I’m sensing something awful is going to happen… That was all the idea was – to capture it in a 30-second commercial. It’s normally something you can’t really share with anybody else – so we wanted to capture the essence of sitting around in your jeans, having a laugh with your friends. When you have hysterics for no real reason. And Al and I had this really simple idea, where we would capture that moment when you really have a laugh with your mates. We were at HHCL and we had just managed to win Pepe Jeans. They and the other founders – even Rupert (Howell) were the energy of ‘punk-rock era’ in our industry. Steve (Henry) and Axe (Chaldecott) were quite open about ‘hating everything typical about advertising’. Everything they were doing was really ‘anti-establishment’.
And HHCL was Agency of the Decade at the time. Part one: a terrible start with Pepe Jeans, forming the industry’s most infamous creative department and the need for a Zlatan mindset…ĭo you remember the first time you really fucked up?Īl (Young) and I lucked our way – well, I say it was luck, we spent a lot of time on the dole and worked bloody hard – to get into advertising, and we got into HHCL.