The topic this week is how Neil Diamond singlehandedly caused the international collapse in jeans sales. But first a word about the recent, short-lived Levi's advert.
For those of you who may have been on holiday at the time, I had better explain that this controversial ad featured a hamster called Kevin, who spent all his waking hours running on a treadmill. Then one day the wheel of the treadmill fell off, as a direct result of which, in the words of the voiceover: "Kevin grew bored, and died."
There are other possible explanations of what might have killed Kevin, one of them being that if his owners weren't around to put the wheel back on, they may not have been around to feed him either. Perhaps they went on holiday, forgetting all about him; then they returned and - in the scene which caused angry complaints from hamsters and the subsequent withdrawal of the ad - prodded Kevin with a pencil, finding him dead.
But the cause of Kevin's death aside, this commercial raises a number of curious issues. One is that, for reasons scientists can't explain, the word "hamster" has an innately comic quality. There are many domestic pets more worthy of being laughed at than hamsters, but you never see headlines saying "Freddie Starr ate my French poodle," for instance. I bet if you surveyed all the jokes in the world at the moment, the word "hamster" would come near the top of the list of animal references, along with "chicken" and "wombat," and, of course, "Buddy," the White House retriever.
Another thing about the ad is that it is an example of the modern trend for commercials to be meaningless. Apart from an implicit threat - "Buy our jeans or the pet gets it" - it does not offer a single reason why anyone should purchase the product. It makes a case for buying reliable equipment for your hamster. It even underlines the value of regular exercise. But of the virtues of denim, it has nothing to say.
Presumably the manufacturers felt they had to try something different, and shocking. It used to be that you could shift denim merely on the promise of easy sex, often in a laundrette. But the bottom has fallen out of jeans recently, and this time it's not Nick Kamen's. The reason for the decline, as you probably know, is that in teenagers' eyes denim is now too much associated with parents, and sad old people in general. Jeans are just not cool any more; in fact, the contemporary young person's idea of what is cool in trouser-wear is something so baggy, two full-sized adults could fit inside it without having improper relations of any kind.
Which brings me back to Neil Diamond. I haven't got any figures to prove it, but I'll lay any money the denim industry's troubles set in around the same time Neil recorded the song Forever in Blue Jeans.
No doubt this ditty has its fans. But on a scale of one to 10, where one means "really cool" and 10 means "really, really sad," Forever in Blue Jeans scores at least 13. In little more than the time it took Nick Kamen to unbutton his fly, it did more damage to the denim industry than Monica Lewinsky has done to the dry-cleaning trade. Even people who wouldn't have known "cool" if it jumped up and bit them heard that song and realised it was time to get out of denim and into something more trendy, like corduroy.
I was analysing the lyrics the other day (as the jeans companies' lawyers must have done when it first came out). And what strikes me, as it must have struck them, is their shocking arbitrariness. The song starts innocuously enough - Money talks/But it don't sing and dance and it don't walk - a reasonable observation. But then without any warning it continues: If I could only have you here with me/I'd much rather be/Forever in Blue Jeans.
It will be obvious even from a glance that there really is no good reason for mentioning jeans here, never mind putting them in the title. Even if Neil was restricted to words rhyming with "jeans" (and there is nothing in the lyric to justify this restriction), he could just as easily have written "Forever eating baked beans" - in which case the Heinz Corporation would now be the ones putting dead hamsters in their ads.
Here's the second verse: Honey's sweet/But it ain't nothing next to baby's treat (Yeuch!*) If you'll pardon me/I'd like to say/We'd do OK/Forever in blue jeans. Still no justification for mentioning jeans or trousers of any kind, and that's the only other verse apart from the "bridge" (a technical song-writer's term, so called because if you're not a Neil Diamond fan, you'll want to throw yourself off it) which goes like this: Maybe tonight/Maybe tonight by the fire all alone you and I/Nothing around but the sound of my heart and your sighs.
So, no reason for mentioning jeans at all then. It could have been "forever in New Orleans" or "Pass my mug of Ovaltine," (more logical, that one) as easily as the line actually committed to record. Maybe the Louisiana tourist industry and the makers of Ovaltine just paid up in time, I don't know.
As it was, the "sighs" Neil was hearing in that last line were those of the denim industry as it saw years of carefully cultivated hipness going down the (as it were) drainpipe. It's not hard to understand why the jeans companies might be bitter. But why take it out on a poor hamster, when Neil Diamond is the one who should be on the treadmill?
(* Editorial comment. Not part of lyric).