orthern Ireland Troubles Advert from early 90s

Tha Gopher

Its Friday night,Im unemployed and saving money up for christmas drinking,so what a better thing to do than peruse the retro forum and live the good old days,when everyone was unemployed but beer prices meant it didnt really matter..........

Anyways,****in about in an empty lecture room in college the other day playin CDs on the PC with the speakers on,someone was playin Cats in the Cradle by Guns and Roses. We are all only 18/19,but when someone said "remember that ad this was in" we all did.

Presume yis all remember it,albeit CATC was a different version by someone else(dont think twas the Cat Stevens one,think it was one done to fit in slightly more with the ad,with an irish singer.). It starts off in Belfast in the early 70s(think it gives a captioned timeline e.g "Belfast 1972") with a man of about 20 sayin goodbye to his baby son and girlfriend as he walks out the door with a bag. Turns out hes carrying a gun,gets caught and is locked up until the kid is roughly 10. Yet again,when the boy wants to play football the dad has some business to take care of(namely,driving one of his mates to a pub for a machine gun attack on the staff as graphic as anything you would see in a Schwarznegger film). Anyway,this stunt gets him locked up for another decade. When he gets released he calls up his now grown up son,as the songs lyrics tell of it at the same time. But while this is happening,the son,who has become involved in terrorism himself, is being machine gunned to death infront of his own toddler son in a stairwell.

And then,probably the most memorable part,he is being lowered into the ground at his funeral with the dad watching,and the line "the boy....was just like me" in the background,with the dad realising he had wasted the past 20 years and it had most probably led to the death of his son. This ad was out 11-12 years ago,I was at most 6 or 7(I remember distinctly,because a girl in my class told me her uncle,a local pub singer,sang this in his set,and she went to a different school nearby after 1st class )but its a testament to how brilliant it was that all these years later kids who were in senior infants at the time can still remember it. Anytime I hear Cats in the Cradle,that ad just plays in full in my head. Im not an easily emotional person or whatever,as bad as they are I could watch the Iraq hostage videos while eating my dinner,but this song,and the ad playing in my head always puts the hairs on my back and face up,it has to be said.
Simply excellent work though,particularly managing to base the entire events of the ad almost entirely around the song lyrics,sheer genius. If an ad aimed at adults manages to get 7 year old kids talking about it it has to be good. It also brings to mind the whole issue these days of what kids should and shoudlt see-this was on when we were little kids. It showed a barman taking several machine gun shots to the chest-iirc it showed blood flying back as they impacted. It mightnt have been pretty,but we saw it,and we werent the worse for it. In the early 90s this was the reality in Belfast,and reality is what some of these media morality and standards tools could do with a dose of.

Mind you,they could probably do with re runnin this ad,aimed at this area of west Dublin right now.....

Blisterman

What was it an ad for?

Capt'n Midnight

well done ad.
Cats in the Cradle cf. http://www.birdsnest.com/catcrad.htm

gun's n roses ?? there was a cover by ugly kid joe but it just another reason I despise covers. So sickening that there are so many covers these days that have no artistic merit. Much as I dislike the beautiful south cover of the ELO song at least it's different from the original.

Dr. Dre

Yeah, it was the ugly kid joe version. One of the most memorable ads ever tbh.

klong

is the ad on the net anywhere?

The_B_Man

best ad ever. i'd say for some i the north, it really hit home the reality of wat its like for some ppl up there.

the song was great aswell.
/me goes off to OLGA.


ps did any1 remember the different version every1 used to sing at school about killin somebody and then rememberin he owed u money?
instead of:
"And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me,
He'd grown up just like me.
My boy was just like me."
it was :
"And as I pulled the trigger, it occurred to me,
He owed me 50p, yeah.
He owed me 50p."

CLASS!!

aidan_dunne

I remember that ad as clear as day, too. A very well done and hard-hitting ad. Think it was an advert for the "Confidential Phoneline" in the North or something, wasn't it? To try and get people to grass up people they knew were involved in terrorism. I could be wrong but that just popped into my mind reading this thread.

Everytime I hear "Cats in The Cradle" now, especially the Ugly Kid Joe version which came out about the same time, I always think of that ad. I suppose, when you think about it, that's the mark of a good advert, isn't it, when you hear a piece of music somewhere and it makes you think of the ad. The drink-driving ad where your man crashes and rolls the car into the garden, killing the child, is another good example of that. Every time I hear "Man Of The World" by Fleetwood Mac now, I instantly think of that ad.