10 guitarists who've starred in ad campaigns
Keith Richards
Most French fashion houses recruit leggy sexpots to model their wares.
Not Louis Vuitton, who felt its 2008 campaign would be best fronted by a 64-year-old human walnut, photographed in a hotel room full of skanky coffee cups. “Some journeys cannot be put into words,” runs the promotional tagline, which makes about as much sense as the legendary Keef after six vodkas.
Paul Stanley
KISS have never been shy of the corporate dollar, but it was a shock to find the blood-belching rockers done up for the 2014 Varvatos Spring Collection.
Apparently, Paul Stanley wears a ‘black wool one-button peak lapel tuxedo and black spread-collar French cuff dress shirt’...
Lemmy
His acting was bad enough in Hardware, but the Motörhead man stunk the place out as a crisp-munching Hell’s Angel in 2005.
“I don’t live in England anymore, so I don’t even know the flavours,” Lem later admitted. “The advert wasn’t great, and Gary Lineker never spoke to us.”
Jack White
The White Stripes man only supplied the Coke jingle in 2006, but still elicited a choice put-down from Noel Gallagher: “Jack White has just done a song for Coca-Cola. End of. He ceases to be in the club. And he looks like Zorro on doughnuts...”
Willie Nelson
In 1986, while Levi’s reeled in da yoof with its smart, snappy, streetwise ad campaigns, Wrangler went the other way, enlisting an unlikely poster-boy in the form of country warbler Willie Nelson, who was already in his mid-50s by then and already looked like a mad granddad.
Bob Dylan
Back in 1965, as a firebrand protest singer, Dylan deadpanned that the one product he’d consider selling out for was “ladies’ undergarments”. 40 years later, it came to pass, with the Angels In Venice ad finding the folk icon skulking around a lingerie model’s apartment like a pervy caretaker.
Jimmy Page & Jeff Beck
In 1966, an embarrassed-looking Yardbirds line-up appeared in mag ads for Miss Disc perfumed hairspray. “It holds your hair in swinging shape,” trilled the copy, “even on drizzle-damp days!”
Jon Bon Jovi
In which the Jove struts down the street high-fiving strangers, while cars full of families with absurdly good teeth lip-sync to It’s My Life. Mitsubishi didn’t give him any actual lines, presumably because they’d seen his turns in Ally McBeal.
Joe Perry
It lasted 30 seconds: ample time for the Aerosmith hardcore to cringe themselves inside-out, as Perry and Steven Tyler clattered away in the name of Easy Fit Jeans. “Doing the Gap commercial got Aerosmith more credibility than some of the albums we were doing,” mused the guitarist. “The times have changed.”
Slash
Equal parts brilliant and disgusting, 2008’s Guitar Hero advert saw the Velvet Revolver man burst out of a teenager’s mouth like the xenomorph from Alien (but with better headwear, of course). “I’m not very good at it,” he admitted of the video game. “I think there’s something innately awkward about being a guitar player trying to play Guitar Hero.”
