One of my favourite cinema adverts dates from a good few years ago, and promoted that 'interesting' alcoholic confection, Southern Comfort. Whenever I saw the ad, it always prompted a yearning for me to be up there, on the screen, as a part of it. You may well remember it, yourself…
It’s late, on a balmy summer’s evening in New Orleans. A young couple are walking the streets, arm-in-arm, when a sudden cloudburst of almost Biblical proportions threatens to drown them. Fortunately, the neon lights of a jazz club beckon, and they are able to seek refuge, with all the others escaping the rain, in the warm bosom of the basement bar.
For an hour or two, everyone has the kind of spontaneous good time that we all dream of, dancing and cavorting the night away in a display of hedonism fuelled, we are invited to believe, by copious amounts of Southern Comfort. When the resident MC informs the crowd “It’s OK folks – the storms over!” it’s the cue for a collective groan, as everyone realises they’ll have to return to normality.
It’s always stuck in my mind that I’d love to experience that kind of wonderful, spur-of-the moment freedom, finding shelter from the storm in the warm embrace of a buzzing jazz club.
Well, the best I could manage when the heavens opened late on a chilly, Tuesday night (in a city which discretion prevents me from mentioning), was to dash into the doorway of the Liverpool branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken, where a sodden busker was gamely bashing out the hideously inappropriate Undertones classic, Here Comes The Summer, which young Justin played to death when it came out in 1979. I was able, at least, to reflect for a moment on the wide gulf that sometimes exists between imagination and reality. And watch the water, as it dripped from the end of my nose.
