The legendary adverts scored by Kate Bush and Cocteau Twins
In the early 1990s, the Coca-Cola Company decided to capitalise on the success of fruit-flavoured drinks, such as Snapple, by releasing Fruitopia. Sergio Zyman, former marketing chief at Coca-Cola and inventor of Diet Coke and Cherry Coke, was the mind behind the fruity non-carbonated beverages.
Upon the release of Fruitopia, TIME magazine labelled it as one of the top ten best new products of 1994. The beverage, which came in flavours boasting youthful names such as ‘Lemonade Love & Hope’, ‘Raspberry Psychic Lemonade’, ‘Pink Lemonade Euphoria’ and ‘Citrus Consciousness’, was marketed towards teenagers and young adults.
Although Fruitopia’s success waned in the early 2000s, it had a successful run in the previous decade, partly due to its commitment to aesthetics. The drink had a $30 million marketing budget, which was used to create memorable commercials that marked Fruitopia out as an alternative, ‘cool’ beverage. Not only were neo-psychedelic, trippy kaleidoscopic visuals used to sell the drink, but some of the most prominent voices in alternative music were employed to score the advertisements.
Most notably, avant-garde pop musician Kate Bush created music for nine different advertisements for the drink. Creative director Marty Cooke and executive producer Andrew Chinich gave Bush free reign over the score, with the former sharing, “She said she was interested in providing a lot of variety, from Japanese drummers to Moroccan music… and she came through in spades.”
According to Graeme Thomson in his book Kate Bush: Under the Ivy: “It seemed an incongruous move. Bush had consistently turned down advances of this nature. The motivation for her changing tack wasn’t clear but was probably varied: far from the commercial ingenue she sometimes appears, certainly, the financial rewards would have been extremely significant; perhaps she liked the tone of the ads, which were relatively innovative and visually stimulating and over which she was given complete artistic control.”
Furthermore, he wrote: “She may also have recognised an opportunity to cast the net of her music a little wider, while also finding a home for all the melodic waifs and rhythmic strays that had never quite found a home in her “proper” songs. … [each melody hinted] at a longer piece, several reminiscent of the kind of odd, rhythmic, electronic pop she was making around the time of The Dreaming.“
Described by Zyman as “the first truly global launching of an alternative product,” it made sense to have the experimental musician on board. However, Fruitopia also boasted a commercial scored by the Scottish dream pop outfit Cocteau Twins. Although they only composed one piece compared to Bush’s nine, it’s certainly memorable, playing over highly saturated hallucinatory images. Elizabeth Fraser’s hazy voice melts into the visuals, each blending into the next in a psychedelic feast designed to emulate the drink’s function of “unleash[ing] your full imagination” (according to one of their slogans).
Fruitopia used other slogans such as “if your mouth can’t say something nice, put something nice in it” and “Lemonade, love, and hope — ⅔ appear in the Old Testament”. Eventually, the line of drinks failed to compete with rival Snapple, and Fruitopia’s most popular flavours were absorbed into Coca-Cola’s Minute Maid line. Although Fruitopia still exists in certain Canadian and Australian stores, it is now primarily remembered as a ’90s relic.
Watch some of the unforgettable adverts below.
