Pat Murphy:
Hi and welcome to the MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising and production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of advertising production for the future, and we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today we’re speaking to Simon Elms, founder of Eclectic Music and Bark Soho and one of the most respected composers and sound designers in the advertising world. Simon’s work is all about emotion, texture and honesty, and his approach has helped define some of the most iconic ads in recent memory. He’s also a passionate musician and has appeared on numerous records. Whether you know it or not, you’ve almost certainly felt the impact of Simon’s work.

Simon, welcome to the Prodcast.

Simon Elms:
That is an incredibly generous introduction. I think I’m going to start, if you don’t mind, just by saying that there’s been a lot of people helping me along the journey. First and foremost, it’s my business and writing partner, Colin Smith. We’ve been together for over 30 years now and I’ve got the most fantastic team at Eclectic and Bark who are so resourceful, talented and brilliant. So without them it would be a hollow sham, but thank you!

Pat Murphy:
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you here, and the first thing I want to say is that it’s known that you love a lunch, a very long lunch. Is that true?

Simon Elms:
It is! Lunch is like bunking off school. It’s one of those things, the first time you ever bunked off school and you go to your rich friend’s house and you have the most fabulous afternoon of messing around and talking rubbish. It’s like that. A sense of freedom. You know there’s going to be retribution at the end of it. But for that moment, those few hours, you’re having the most fantastic time and I love it. I love the theatre of it all. It doesn’t have to be flash. I’ve been in really, really flash lunches, you know, at La Colombe D’or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, with advertising glitterati and Murdoch sitting on one table and Roger Moore on another table, I think even Richard and Judy at one point, and it’s the most brilliant few hours of chat, meeting people, and I think that’s actually that’s the key thing is that I’ve met some of my favourite people in this industry. Our industry is quite a small community. I’ve met them at lunch and after a few hours our relationship has been cemented. I know that I want to work with them and I really enjoy their company and I’ve really enjoyed the last few hours with them, getting to know them. It’s a brilliant, brilliant thing.

Pat Murphy:
I think also, not only do I agree with you, but I think also with all the technology and the innovation and stuff that we’re seeing in the industry, nothing beats one-to-one relationships and meeting people so it sparks magic.

Simon Elms:
Yeah, completely, and I’ve been so lucky in that respect I’ve had yeah, probably far too much fun, but they have been very constructive. Promise!

Pat Murphy:
Now, we met last year when we were doing an LBB session on music together along with other people. Luminaries like Sir John Hegarty, and it was great to be on there, so it’s also terrific to be able to return the favour to you to come and join me on my podcast. But let’s start at the beginning, Simon. What triggered your love for music?

Simon Elms:
Do you know what? I think my earliest memory really important memory was going to see West Side Story and I must have been about seven years old and it was the original cast and band from Broadway that came to London to do it and it was sensational. I mean, obviously I was only seven, it was going to be sensational anyway, but that kind of music I’d never heard. That kind of music. The Bernstein score is ridiculous and I think the trumpet section fascinated me actually, because the lead trumpet part in in that particular show is a complete and utter roast-up. It’s ridiculously difficult and high and complicated and the guy that was there, was incredible and I think that, yeah, that had a major impact on me.

And then I think it’s the usual things, it’s things like the things your parents listen to. So I think it was Elvis. Actually one of my one record my mom, the only record my Mum ever played which she was obsessed with was a Roberta Flack album and it had a cover of Bridge over Troubled Water, which is really an amazing uh recording actually. And then I think it was just the fact that I started playing with people, I started playing in orchestras, so orchestral music was incredibly important. And then my first proper girlfriend introduced me to Earth, Wind and Fire. All in All and I Am those two albums, iconic albums, and I was completely lost in a world of soul after that, you know. And Rufus, Chaka Khan, Donny Hathaway you know, I mean endless names.

Pat Murphy:
You mentioned that you played in the orchestra and in all sorts of other groups, but you started playing trumpet, wasn’t it? That was the first thing you started playing at the age of eight.

Tell me a little bit about that. My son, Lucas, has been learning trumpet now since he was eight as well, so there’s a bit of commonality there. Did you drive your parents crazy with that practice at home?

Simon Elms:
Well, yes and no. My mum bought that trumpet, my first trumpet. It was a Chinese trumpet cost 24 pounds. I do remember it because she told me quite regularly how much it cost and told me I had to go and play it! So she insisted that every day that I go and practice it. I don’t think the neighbours were quite so keen. Well, we lived in this tiny flat and there’s no soundproofing at all. You could hear someone having a bath two floors down and so I mean I must have driven the whole street mad with the sound of this new instrument.

But yes, that was the start. But I say my mum was incredibly insistent I do it every day and then actually I was lucky, I got quite good at it quite quickly. I could make quite a decent sound early on and I got into the school primary school orchestra where we massacred the classics on a regular basis. But you didn’t hear that as any young musician. As soon as you start playing with people, you start playing on ensembles, with groups and everything, that’s it! The fuse is lit. It’s suddenly brilliant, and especially if there’s lots of people, because no one can hear all the spare or bum notes you’re putting in there and it’s just, that’s what makes things progress. The desire to do more of that!

Pat Murphy:
My son, uh, said to me ‘Daddy, I think I was born in the wrong age’ because he also wanted to be in Earth, Wind and Fire. You mentioned them earlier. He loved In the Stone was one of his favourite tracks.

Simon Elms:
What a great opening that particular song has.

Pat Murphy:
But talking about kids, kids learning musical instruments. How important is it for people at a young age to learn music?

Simon Elms:
I think it’s essential. I think you learn so much, you’ll have so much fun and you will carry those memories throughout your life. One of the biggest regrets you hear from people is that they say ‘I never learned an instrument’ and I think it’s and it’s such a, you know, overpowering emotional experience and also it teaches you very, very quickly about practicing / working. If you want to be able to play that particular part, you play it over and over and over again and then suddenly you can do it, which I think for kids is brilliant. It’s quite immediate.

The thing about playing an instrument: You can’t hide. You go into an ensemble and there’s a part in front of you and if you can’t play it it’s a bit awkward. There’s no talking your way out of it. No, do you know what I mean? It’s, it’s, it’s very functional. I think that’s very good training for everybody, but for kids. But the other thing is the importance of the music business to the British economy cannot be understated. You know we earn 10 times more than the fishing industry. We’re so we’re so good at it in this country. You know we have been for so many years Some of the best bands, best musicians, some great you know, opera, ballet, lots, lots of different things. We’re very good at this stuff. So on that level alone, just for the economy, it should be really supported. You know, nourished, I think.

Pat Murphy:
What advice do you have for kids who getting stuck into learning an instrument but find there’s sometimes a bit of a blockage? Do you think that there is a kind of a tipping point where you go from it being really tough and hard work to being just fun and enjoyable?

Simon Elms:
Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s that thing when you start playing with other people, because you know, sitting on your own in your bedroom you can only get a certain amount done. And then when you can go out and play with other people, that’s when the alchemy happens, that’s when the magic happens, whether it’s in reality, sounds awful or great or whatever it sounds like, but the feeling you get from it, the rush, the endorphin rush from playing an ensemble, a group of people; orchestras, I mean, you know, if you’re playing in a big orchestra, that is one of the biggest rushes you can ever experience, it’s so exciting! Or a band, proper big band on stage, horn sections, rhythm sections, percussion, you know keyboards, singers, that feeling and it happens from a very early age.

And when you’re older and it happens, there’s that kind of sweet spot when you all turn up for a gig and suddenly the drummer and the bass player have really turned up and you’re thinking, ‘oh, okay, hang on a minute’. So we start to play a bit louder, a bit higher, a bit more aggressively, and then the singer goes ‘oh, hang on a minute’, and then suddenly the whole band are just cooking. You know, and it happens with orchestras. It just happens. It’s a thing. I think ‘alchemy’ is the perfect word actually.

Pat Murphy:
It’s a great way to describe it. So you went on to study music composition at University, the University of Sussex in Brighton. Is that the one near Falmouth, because I might have seen you. I was working around the corner in TV studies at the same university!

Simon Elms:
Well, I listened to your podcast with Kai from RSA and you mentioned that! Yes, I was there, but I think I was there from 83 to 86. Great place, actually. Music degree there, and I did my practical lessons at the Royal College, which was terrifying because I had a fantastically talented trumpet teacher whose name was David Mason. He had been the principal of the Philharmonia, but he was most famous for being that trumpet player on Penny Lane, the Beatles record!

Pat Murphy:
And then you stumbled into the commercial industry. It was a bit of a mistake, wasn’t it? You got offered a load of cash to do an ad?

Simon Elms:
It was, it was, it was complete… Well, I left university. I was doing lots of different bands and there’s one particular band called- It was an advertising band and they were a bunch of talented amateurs and for some of the gigs they wanted to pick up extra horn players just to fill out the horn section a bit, and they were called the Stevie Cook Soul Band and Stevie Cook was then owned Magmasters was a very successful dubbing company and lead singer was Jerry Moira. Magmasters was a very successful dubbing company and lead singer was Jerry Moira and the rest of the band were, you know, all very senior creatives or editors, and so I basically did a few gigs with them and persuaded Jerry that he should let me have a go at doing one of his adverts.

Pat Murphy:
I remember the Stevie Cook Soul Band so well. You used to play at the awards ceremonies, I think at the Grosvenor House. Is that right?

Simon Elms:
Every year, yeah, yeah. Did a few years of that. Yeah, that was good, good fun, but that introduced me to this whole world that I never even knew existed. I mean, literally I turned up for those Grosvenor House things and it was so glamorous, there was so much money being spent and I was thinking, ‘my God, what’s all this about’? So, yeah, eventually, after much persuasion, Jerry said, ‘okay, then you can do this, try and have a go at this one’. And yeah, and then I did another couple for him. And then, yeah, we got picked up later on by another big music production company. Yeah, off it went!

Pat Murphy:
What was that first ad that you did for Jerry?

Simon Elms:
It was for a spot cream called the Triac System, which…. The only way you would have heard about it was because of the advertising. Unfortunately, they didn’t manage to get the product into the shops in time and the whole thing just fell over. But it was a very the commercial. I’ve been trying to find it. It was on YouTube up until recently and it was that he – Jerry – wanted to recreate the jingle. He wanted a proper song about a spot cream, which made it funny, and we just did this massive sort of Matt Bianco was very big at the time and we did this massive sort of Latin American thing.

Pat Murphy:
I love Matt Bianco.

No, but yeah, and also his band were awesome brilliant, absolutely amazing musicians, in fact, I mean half the people in his band did this commercial. So, yeah, that was the first sort of outing and I think it was quite interesting actually, because there was two magazines in advertising at the time there was Campaign and another magazine called Direction and one of them said it was ‘one of the best and funniest pieces of music they’d heard in years’ and the other one said it was ‘the worst thing they’d ever heard’.

Pat Murphy:
Oh, 50-50,. There you go, yeah. Now, as I said earlier, I’ve worked in this business for about 35 years, but it still frustrates me Simon, that music and sound can make or break an ad. It’s often left to the last minute. But what drives that behaviour? What needs to change in the industry? What are brands missing out on?

Simon Elms:
A lot of us have been having this conversation for about the last 30 years, really. I mean, what drives it is that trying to get a treatment over the line budgeted, a director signed off, is a time-consuming and often quite fractious period, isn’t it? There’s a lot to do. There’s a lot to, you know, be discussed. Countless meetings are had. People you know pore over the detail of treatments and it’s a, you know, it’s a stressful moment. And I think I’ll say the fractious thing because I think often it gets quite punchy at times and the idea of discussing anything else apart from what’s on the table becomes tricky. They don’t want to discuss the music. Maybe that’s going to be another argument and they’re missing a trick really.

First of all, I think agencies have lost so much of that sonic branding market over the last 10 to 15 years because of issues like this. In the same ways they take control of the production, they were to take control of the sound of the production. I think it would placate clients. I think clients now have been approached by sonic branding agencies saying, ‘look, agencies don’t do this, we can do it’. And they do do. And we’ve had quite a few fantastically good experiences over the last few years where we’ve been in the room with the agency and the client right from the beginning and the agency wanted us there. They wanted us to kind of I don’t know demystify music, make it sort of accessible, explain the reasoning of why we did what we’re doing. You know what we think we should work, what would work better here, and as soon as you do that, even if you have a very general conversation about what you’re going to do, you know ‘we’ve got an advert here. It’s full of action. The sound design is going to be full on, comprehensive’. ‘What places does the music have’? ‘Well, maybe it could be incredibly gentle and quiet and it could be up here, so you know, so that all the bottom end can be for bass drops and all the rest of the all that good stuff’.

It’s just that simple conversation you have. It’s early on, and then the heat’s taken out of the room and people are kind of going ‘okay, it’s not something we necessarily have to have a point of view about’. It’s about ‘what does this music need to achieve’, not ‘what do we like’, and that’s. And soon as you do that, it’s it. It all falls away and it becomes cheaper, so much less time consuming and I think creatively, better.

Pat Murphy:
And it is so important because you know I think we’ve heard the phrase, you know 50% of the effectiveness of an ad is also the sound and the music that, uh, yeah, is created for it.

Simon Elms:
That was a famous Tony Kay quote, wasn’t it? He’s saying you know, it’s 50 of an advert if he could make the most amazing visuals, but the sound wasn’t right, the advert would be disappointing. Exactly, yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And uh, yeah, it’s yeah, when it, when you do, when you take charge of it early on, it’s so much easier and better.

Pat Murphy:
You’ve talked about imperfection in music and the fact that you can ruin things by being a little bit over polished. Is that the old passion for jazz that’s coming out in you there?

Simon Elms:
Well, that’s the thing about music, isn’t it? It’s not necessarily about perfection or striving for perfection. So much of brilliant music is about dissonance, or it’s not perfectly recorded, it’s got a vibe, it’s got character.

I listened to a podcast with Rory Sutherland the other day, and he was talking about his book called alchemy, interestingly enough, and the thing is he talks about the vagaries and imperfections of human perception, which is a flash way of saying there’s no accounting for taste, and he uses the brilliant example of Red Bull.
He said: so a bunch of entrepreneurs decide to get together and take on the might of Coca-Cola and Pepsi and they create this drink called Red Bull, and it’s got a few issues. It’s expensive to make, so it comes in a much smaller can than a Coke can, which is even more expensive, and it tastes awful, but you can see the vagaries and imperfections of human perception. That drink is loved by millions, probably billions, of people all over the world, and it’s not just about the marketing, which is also impressive, but it’s about people genuinely liking that, and music is very much the same. Really, it’s about, you know, for a while we got one sort of sound that’s really, really popular, and then suddenly someone comes along and completely turns it all on its head. They do something different, you know, and the rule book’s chucked away. So I think, when it comes to advertising, you get into situations where someone may well find the most perfect track. It’s beautiful, neoclassical bit of sonic wonderfulness, it’s a kind of sonic cuddle. A bit like that kind of Sony Bravia balls moment, when that advert just opens up, doesn’t it? And you might have had a big advert before it and a big advert afterwards, but it’s during that moment everybody goes, ‘oh’, just lets the tires out, doesn’t it? It’s just, it’s kind of a beautiful moment! And you get there and of course you can’t afford it, so you’re going to have to recreate it. But if you talked about this piece before you made the advert, you could have started taking steps towards y diverting the fact that everybody now falls completely, falling in love with it.

And anyway, 15 composers spend the next two weeks trying to write something that can recreate that fantastic piece of hip German loveliness, and eventually they may well get there. But in that two or three weeks the agency and the clients gone from being really happy to being really miserable and they’re going ‘but we’re back to being happy again’. We’re there, we think we’re all right, and then someone goes and it’s lovely, it doesn’t do anything, it’s just this kind of ‘whooooah’.

And then someone decides that maybe the front should have a ‘tah-dah’ you know, just to kind of wake up the audience and say here we are, and you kind of go ‘yeah, but that’s really going to ruin the whole character and what’s fantastic about this piece of music’. And they go ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, but maybe just have a go’. And then you do that, and then someone else comes along and goes, ‘maybe around eight or nine seconds we can ask a question, a moment of doubt, and then there’s the answer, and then it gets more and more positive and it maybe the pace picks up slightly. We have a much bigger ending’. And then you’re going to go what, like every other piece of advertising music that’s been created in the last you know, 50 years? And they go ‘no, no, we don’t, you know, obviously want to keep the integrity of the original composition’.

And then it goes off to the client and the client turns around and goes ‘I hate pianos, it can’t be a piano’, and the whole thing just kind of gets squashed. Again, client’s not being prepared. He’s not been part of this conversation for three and a half weeks, or you know however long it’s been. And it’s just, it’s just if something is really good. Sometimes, as Rory suggests, just leave it. You do something interesting and different and the public often reacts really well to it. I think that’s it really.

Pat Murphy:
I like your use of the words ‘sonic cuddle’. I’m going to steal that.

Simon Elms:
I just thought of that. I was quite pleased with that.

Pat Murphy:
In my first series I spoke to Steve Keller, who is the strategy director at Studio Resonate with SiriusXM. He talked about the important role music and sound play in our everyday lives and how it helps brands connect. He also talked about a fascinating psychoacoustic experiment he was involved with where hip-hop music was played to cheese and it actually made it age differently. I understand, Simon, that you’re also interested in the crossover between music and neuroscience.

Simon Elms:
I am, and I have been for years. In fact I read up about that cheese experiment. They played the cheese A Tribe Called Quest, apparently that was the track. I mean I wondered if the researchers were stoned a lot, because that could have explained something.

But there’s a great quote that I completely overuse. But I think it’s brilliant to talk about music-to-picture it’s by Sir Thomas Beecham. He said ‘the function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought’, and that’s what this whole neuroscience thing is all about. It’s been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. Bach knew it, Mozart knew it, Beethoven knew it. Earth, Wind and Fire know it, but particularly in those old classics. You know, when Beethoven wrote a pastoral symphony, you could sit back there with your eyes closed and you could vividly see the undulating hills and the sheep and the cows. It’s, you know, programmatic. I think they call that kind of music it’s meant to be vivid.

Funnily enough, in the 60s, that kind of a whole notion of trying to do an audio description of a place you know: Bombay Sunset or I don’t know, Lunch in Paris or whatever it was, that was a really big thing again, because people they didn’t have tv in the way we have it now, you didn’t have that kind of imagery. And you know, um, I mean, even Miles Davis, the notion of Sketches of Spain, you know those kind of it was a real thing. So I, I think that’s been around. I don’t think it’s a real thing. I think that’s been around. I don’t think it’s a new phrase that I, I think that connection with music and sound music and maybe images, is it’s a very powerful relationship. But it’s been going on for a long time and funnily enough, um, I mean, this whole kind of sonic branding things is massive now and there’s a huge amount of research goes in by brands on what music to use for their particular advert. Do you think, in your experience, music has got significantly better in the last 15 years, in advertising?

Pat Murphy:
I think it goes in phases of things like the jingle was very successful for a great period, now it’s out of fashion and I think it’s coming back into fashion again. In the last couple of years we’ve seen more and more jingles come back in, like We Buy Any Car jingle, which is very my kids sing it to death at home. It drives me crazy.

So I think we see some types of music come in and out of fashion. Whether it’s got better or not, I’m not sure. I have concerns around the future of music and, in particular, you know we can talk a little bit about this. You know the innovation of music, and not to we have to we talk about this. You know the innovation of music, and not to we have to we talk about this. We have to also mention the word AI. Is it a blasphemous word or not? Does it help enhance the creation of great music and the use of sound in advertising, or is it a hindrance? So that’s a question I’m going to throw back to you.

Simon Elms:
I think that composers and musicians have been dealing with AI since the mid 80s, when Akai released its first digital sampler. Every time something like this turns up, certain musicians work less. I mean, that’s definitely true, but it’s also quite a liberator. You know lots of people that didn’t have any sort of formal education suddenly are capable, are given a bit of technology and they can do amazing things with it.

I remember that whole sampler revolution resulted in people that weren’t musically literate like DJ Shadow in America, and he just started doing these amazing collages of sound and they were beautiful and really interesting and questioning, you know so in that respect, and also those, all those hip-hop guys. They just started chucking things together, unfortunately nicking other people’s music on a very regular basis, which actually, in the end, no one cared because they all got sued to death afterwards anyway. But so the answer I think James Brown made more money suing a hip hop artist than he made probably in his whole career. So I think it’s always been there and I’ve been looking a lot of it recently and some of it’s really interesting. It lowers the bar, so it will enable some people that don’t know anything about music to kind of put a semblance of a track together, but it’ll also make people that know a lot about music do more interesting things and give them a freedom. I think at the moment. Ask me any year’s time I may be crying into my lager, but at the moment I think it’s quite I’m quite confident that some good things will come from it.

Pat Murphy:
You’ve worked on some of the greatest ads of all time in the UK. Hovis, with us, was actually one of the ads that we worked together on when you re-recorded the Ashington Colliery Band for the restoration of that amazing Ridley Scott ad ‘The Boy on the Bike’ An iconic ad. And if you could pick three of your favourite ads that utilize music in the most astonishing, brilliant way, it could either be radio or TV. What would they be?

Simon Elms:
Ooh, I think, first things first. Mad About A Boy. Mad About the Boy, infact: Levis. I think that’s amazing choice, Dinah Washington, amazing choice of track I like. Again, it’s kind of a bit periodist. I thought the British Airways use of Delibes’ Flower Duet was genius. I think it’s one of the best bit of branding exercises ever. It’s so sort of descriptive. And a third one oh, Lynx – Undressed, I think, is again, it’s just really clever, really wish. I mean there’s other ones I really like, not Levi, the one where they smashed through the walls of Jonathan Glazer, but I mean, yeah, it’s, there have been a lot.

Pat Murphy:
Those three, then, are from quite a long time ago. So your to your question that you asked me just a while back was has music got better more recently? What’s your answer to that?

Simon Elms:
No, I don’t think it has! I think there’s still moments of brilliance. I think, again, it’s like when I mentioned before when someone does something different. I love the recent KFC adverts with the kind of zombie apocalypse sort of groovy dancing thing, which I think is just so…. that took a lot for KFC to do that and I think it really, really resonates. It’s really clever. I think generally people take less chances now. So the music is. And also we mentioned we talked about this before over a drink once is that whole notion of having one piece of music to for a worldwide campaign. I understand if it’s, if it’s, I don’t know, for something cool, but if it’s something functional, it’s a financial services thing, it’s. You know, I think you could have different pieces of music for the same advert. So many people access adverts online, don’t they? So if your cookies, know that you like Latin American music or thrash metal, suddenly that financial services advert comes on with a soundtrack that’s much more the kind of thing that you like to listen to. So I think what’s happened is advertisers are trying to create tracks which are all things to all people, which end up being really nothing to anybody. I think that’s what happens. If you bland it out, you try and make it acceptable for everybody to listen to, it’s going to be boring, isn’t it? I think that’s what happens.

Pat Murphy:
I think, as we move more and more into much more personalized advertising, advertisers and their creative partners should be thinking not just about personalising the visuals, but also personalizing the music and the audio as well. So, I’m sure the technology will allow that very soon, and I know it’s happening already.

Now I discovered, Simon, that you worked on the BBC’s Perfect Day, that very iconic Lou Reed thing. How did that come about?

Simon Elms:
Do you know what? That was a time we were at Amber Music and I only vaguely remember I think we had to play some stuff on it or do an arrangement over one of the singers, some brass or string arrangement. I really – I’m so embarrassed to say don’t remember.

Pat Murphy:
Were you drunk? Was it one of those long lunches that you had just before?

Simon Elms:
There were lots of long lunches in those days. It was a very exciting time! I do vaguely remember that, but I cannot remember. I think we got asked to do. A few of the composers at Amber Music at the time got asked to contribute things, and so there was quite a lot of different artists on it weren’t there. But if you ask me what we did, I don’t remember. Yeah, sorry about that.

Pat Murphy:
You did mention Amber Music just there, and you were working for a long time with Amber and Michelle, from about 93 to 2008. How was that experience? And you were working, I think, on both sides of the Atlantic, weren’t you?

Simon Elms:
Yeah, I mean that was the amazing thing about the success of Amber and the success of Michelle really was that she managed to. She successfully went to New York and took it on. Americans – not just Trump – they can be quite isolationist at times and but they took. You know, she was a character and they warmed to her and it opened doors. So we did. We did some massive campaigns over the time at least two or three Superbowl campaigns and over the time, at least two or three Super Bowl campaigns and it was great. You know, there was a great team at Amber I mean quite incredibly competitive, as you would imagine. But there was some exceptional composers and musicians and sound designers. You had sound designers who did music at Amber as well. Sound designers do music at Amber as well. So it was a really interesting eclectic, I would say, selection of individuals. It was brilliant. It was brilliant. Started us off really.

Pat Murphy:
Now some of your more recent awards and accolades have come in long form. For instance, the winner of the Grierson Award for My Name is Happy, a major accolade in the UK’s feature documentary space, and others as well. I mean, how did you make that transition?

Simon Elms:
I’d like to say that it was a well thought out strategy. But it was one of my son’s best mates’ Dad was a documentary director and I never sort of asked him but he just sort of said. He’d just done this really interesting film about Russian prisons, really dismally depressing film. And he said ‘do you fancy scoring it and sound designing it’? And we kind of went, ‘yeah, I’d love to, it’d be a lovely thing to do’. And that actually got nominated for a Grierson as well. And then we did another one with them, which was an HBO production, really properly funded cinema release. Again, that went really well. We actually got nominated for an Emmy for that on that one.

And after that we just began to pick up gigs and it’s something we do, we love. Actually, it’s really good because it’s both part of the company to get very much involved. We’ve got Colin and myself doing the music and Marcus and the team doing the sound design and it’s brilliant having it all under one roof. We can compensate music or sound design for certain. You know, if we’re doing a track that’s far too large, the sound design can be reduced or vice versa. It’s just a really efficient and a great way of working.

Pat Murphy:
Now you like to give back and have been the music lecturer for a very long time now, for 20 years now, both at the APA and the IPA Producers Courses. Do you like lecturing?

Simon Elms:
No. I mean, I do. I find it stressful. I really do. For someone who’s spent a lot of time performing, I find getting up and speaking in public quite stressful, and the first couple I did I was awful. I was completely and utterly awful. I read a script and it was so boring. And then, the third time I think, I forgot to bring the script to the lecture and it was the best thing that could ever happen to me. So I just, you know it, just told the stories and I decided on the third one to make it much more interesting. So I talked about the car crashes and showed them you know examples of people when they’ve got it, when they’ve got it really badly wrong, and the law and the legal fallouts. And then, you know, I started stopped a lot less talking and showing, show and tell, and actually, as soon as I got the formula right, yes, I did enjoy it. I do enjoy it, it’s you know, but it took a while. First two were awful. I mean, I was so scared it was bizarre how scared I was.

I mean on and off, you know. But it was bizarre how scared I was. 20 years is good going though it is Well. I mean on and off, you know, but it was sometimes we just couldn’t do it. But yeah, it was. It is a long time, but I should get some more material.

Pat Murphy:
So, Professor Elms, what have been some of the most memorable recent projects that you’ve worked on or created recently?

Simon Elms:
I think one of the most satisfying one, which is not that recent, was the campaign we did for Kenco, but that was about almost 10, 11 years ago Coffee versus Gangs, where we had to recreate a Latin American hip hop track. And it was so satisfying actually, because we went off and did a lot of research. We were working with Johnny Harstaff and JWT and Johnny just didn’t want anybody else to do it, so it was only us on the gig, which gives you an incredible freedom, and we wrote a track which was pretty straightforward but, I think, but good. And then we found this amazing hip-hop group in New York and they got involved and just one of those projects where we sent it off, sent it to Johnny Hardstaff and it was, I think John Smith was cutting it and there was no comment, not a single comment! And then he went to the agency and the creative director, who is very good at commenting on things, didn’t say anything. He just just said, ‘yeah, great’.

And then they sent it to the client and client went yeah, brilliant, and…

Pat Murphy:
That never happens no, I don’t think I’ve ever had I’ve never had an instance of that in my whole history of working as a producer. No, amazing, it amazing. Maybe I was just a shit producer.

Simon Elms:
No, it was fluke, but it was also. It was one of those tracks. You wrote it and you knew that this had the touch. It’s one of those and you can hear it and often that’s the kiss of death – if you really like what you’ve done, it’s never going to go. That was an interesting project, really good. We did a Coca-Cola World Cup advert, which is really nice to be asked. We’ve done a lot of stuff with Ford over the years which they keep coming back. We’ve mostly been working with them since about 2012.

Pat Murphy:
You mentioned you had a really great experience not long ago with SK2.

Simon Elms:
Yes, that was where there was full integration with agency and client. The agency with the main creative on that particular job was brilliant. He’s brilliant and he just sort of said um, ‘look, you know, he said about himself. He said I talk bullshit about music, so I want you in the room with the client’. Actually, he doesn’t talk bullshit, he’s one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met and he’s incredibly articulate and he knows exactly again going to that original point what the music needs to achieve. That’s what he knows.

And we get into the room, we’re with the client and we’ve written, you know, a few different options and she kind of goes ‘well, which one do you prefer’? And both luckily both me and the creative agree on the one particular track. They were all, I thought, all great. And she said, ‘well, that’s my least favourite track’. And I said, ‘okay, but you know, know, I know that’s important, but it’s not the most important thing. Is it really because we’ve got to appeal to this enormous group of people and this particular piece of music? The reason why I’m picking it is because it’s modular. It can be cut down from various different sizes. It’s got some delicate moments to it and it’s also got some real impactful moments to it and we can cut, and you know we can cut them around. It’s also thematically, really a real, really good earworm’ and she kind of went ‘okay and and and she went okay. Well, let’s, let’s develop that one and my favourite one, and then we’ll to.’ And that one conversation we had, and this project was immense. We had six six minute films, half live action, half animation, with five directors, four production companies, six famous female Olympians. One American pop star John Legend who was going to be had to be talked through a track. We had to find an up-and-coming Chinese pop star as you do Well, luckily, you know, in my youth, when I first left university, I was in that band that were big in Japan, the English band that were big in Japan.

It was a joke, wasn’t it? And I was in that band and we toured Japan a few times and I met a lot of record company in Japan and literally 35 years later, I called them and they’re still around and I said, look, this is my dilemma. And they said, well, they put me onto people. So having that contact from doing gigs in the late 80s, early 90s and it came back the contacts we were the only audio company across all six projects and it was incredibly time consuming, but I think the results were amazing. The first six months online it had 1.6 billion hits in six months.

Pat Murphy:
So there’s some amazing lessons learned from that specific SK2 project that made it work so well, with the client involved, the agency involved. That’s really that’s where it all comes together, isn’t it? Isn’t it? That’s a lesson for everybody if you’re creating music for advertising.

Simon Elms:
Yeah, it completely is. It’s and it’s simple. I think it’s not. It’s also not having too much choice. Get an expert, get someone you trust someone. I think you need someone who works at the coalface but is also a producer so you can do, can wear two hats. His composer knows how difficult it is to compose sat in a room on his or her own for many, many hours banging their head against the keyboard, going ‘what am I going to do’? Having that and then being able to look at other people’s work and kind of going ‘well, actually, I think you’ve really made the point here. I don’t quite understand this section here. That chord seems a bit misplaced’, you know, in the nicest possible way, because telling composers that you’re not sure about what they’ve done can be tricky. But we’re doing it all for the best possible reasons. We’re all on the same side here, you know. I think having that – someone you trust – it just literally just takes, you know, takes the heat out of the room.

Pat Murphy:
Sadly, simon, this podcast can’t go on as long as one of your lunches, so it’s coming very near to the end now, but we do have to ask that question that we ask all of our guests: what’s your favourite ad of all time and why?

Simon Elms:
Oh well, this is a long and hard one. I have two theories about advertising. I think advertising should be funny or it should look beautiful, and it should be uplifting and emotional. Those are the two selling points for me, and if it can do both, that’s just genius. But I think I mentioned the effectiveness of music and those, those particular adverts I mentioned. I love those adverts, but I think I’m gonna have to go back to my youth again.

I like humor and my favourite all-time ad that is probably not Heineken – Mallorca, but it’s Hamlet – Wig. I think it’s the most superb. Everything about it is not one wasted shot in that entire advert. It’s brilliant.

Pat Murphy:
I think it’s the same as all of those Hamlet ads at that time. My favourite ad of all time is the Hamlet photo booth ad, but again, the wig ad brilliant ad, well chosen! We’re going to stick it up on our website, The Prodcast website, and people can look at it and view it there.

Simon, thank you so much for being with me on the podcast.

Simon Elms:
It’s a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Pat Murphy:
Brilliant stuff.

Today we’ve been talking to Simon Elms, the creative mind behind some of the most moving and memorable pieces of music in advertising. His work is a testament to the power of sound when it’s treated as integral to storytelling.

If you’d like to feature on The Prodcast or have any comments, questions or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com. I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, of which all the links in the notes for this episode will be there. We’d love to hear from you.

Again, thanks to Simon, my team at MCA and to my production team at What Goes On Media. Thanks for listening. See you next time.