The Comedy of Errors: Th’ Faith Healers - Coffee Commercial Couples [Peel Session] (9 May 1992)

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There’s something about Peel Sessions that made Th’ Faith Healers a more interesting band to listen to than their studio output, or at least most of the examples that Peel played, suggested that they were.
On 20/3/92, their second session offered inspiration to Erasure.  But a year earlier, their debut Peel Session, which had been recently put out in an EP by Strange Fruit showcased a tune of their own which brilliantly poked fun at one of the UK’s great cultural phenomena of the late 80s/early 90s: coffee advertisements.  Not just the adverts in themselves but particularly the way in which coffee was advertised as a way to demonstrate the customer’s immaculate good taste, a gateway to suave urbanity and, at its root, a chance to get it on with the opposite sex.

The brief vignettes played out amid the bouncing racket of this tune are primarily parodying the high point of coffee adverts at this time, namely, the will-they-won’t-they narrative of the Gold Blend couple who spun out 6 years of romantic and sexual tension over the coffee beans.  From borrowing coffee for a dinner party through home delivery via mystery visitors all the way to business trips in New York, they were masterpieces of advertising - simultaneously establishing an ongoing narrative while never losing sight of the fact that it was GOLD BLEND COFFEE that was underpinning all this romance and luxury. If you buy GOLD BLEND COFFEE, you can share in this.
Understandably , it was ripe for parody and piss-taking - not least by Ben Elton:

“God, I wish those two would just do it and get it over with.  I mean, I’ve heard of foreplay, but this is getting perverted, (Knock.Knock.Knock) ‘Shall we have it off?’ ‘No, let’s have another cup of coffee’” (Ben Elton - The Man From Auntie, BBC, 1990).

Th’ Faith Healers pastiche is a little more affectionate, but it knows its target well with its repeated refrains of “Can I have another snog?/Can I have another coffee?”  It’s just a shame that they abandon the idea halfway through, in favour of an extended play out, though in their defence the Gold Blend story still had another two years to run at the time they recorded this for Peel’s show of 27/4/91.

There’s a degree of nostalgia underpinning this selection.  The track is perfectly good, but it also parodies something that’s harder to pull off now.  A long running ad narrative like the Gold Blend couple could work in the days when there were only 2 commercial channels available to most households, but it would get lost in the jungle of today’s multi-channel world.  If they went to streaming services or YouTube, they would be affixed with those 5 little words we’ve come to despise, “Video will start after ad”.  30 years ago people would genuinely say, “I think the adverts are the best thing on television - better than the programmes, most of the time.”  Now they are streamed out or jumped past at 16>>.
And 30 years ago, Gold Blend may have led, but there were other coffee ads to rival it, fight for our
attention and sell us the dream that we too could have all that if we bought those beans.  It might be Gareth Hunt doing the Nescafe shake, or Red Mountain with its hawk and spit antics for us proles who couldn’t afford a genuine coffee-maker.  But the one that speaks to us now, in 2019, is probably Cafe Hag, which with its rudeness towards German windsurfers, can be held up as one of the first logs in the Brexit inferno.



Videos courtesy of Dernis Vallier (Th’ Faith Healers) and LittlePixel (Cafe Hag)