‘Keep Talking’: The Pink Floyd song featuring Stephen Hawking
When you look at the success of bands such as The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Pink Floyd, you begin to understand the profit to be made within the music industry. Granted, it’s not quite as lavish as it used to be, but those who are working in music and successful aren’t exactly struggling.
With success come a lot of other things that can make you money. The most obvious source of income is record sales and playing in larger venues; however, there are other deals that begin to show themselves. One of the most obvious is advertising, as famous bands and artists are often asked to put together pieces of music that can then be used to advertise various products and services.
There are different ways that musicians can make money through advertising. Firstly, there is the option of writing a jingle. This tradition began back in 1908, when Johnny Marks, a dab hand with catchy tunes, came up with the song ‘In My Merry Oldsmobile’. Granted, this isn’t a track that has stood the test of time as a classic, but it had a ring to it that lodged itself in the brains of listeners and got the message of the product being advertised a lot.
While there are still plenty of ad campaigns that opt to use jingles, there are others that decide to use pre-existing songs as the backdrop. It’s fairly common for a song to begin playing and sound familiar, only for the listener to remember that they don’t actually know who performs it; instead, they have heard it from an advert.
The Rolling Stones were one of the biggest bands that profited from using their music in an ad campaign. When Microsoft decided to launch, they built an entire ad campaign around the word “Start”. This was a nod to the start button that would be used on all of their computers, which users would click frequently to navigate their devices.
In a bid to really get the word “Start” stuck in people’s heads, they reached out to the Rolling Stones and asked if they could use the word “Start” in the campaign. The band agreed, but whether it was because of their belief in Microsoft or the $3 billion fee agreed to use the song remains a mystery…
Regardless of whether you are talking about a jingle or an ad campaign using an existing song, they all have something in common: agreement and knowledge between the two parties involved. It’s very rare that a company will use a song without permission, as they know it would likely land them in legal hot water. Equally, it’s rare for people to use an advertisement in a song without needing to because who would want to listen to that?
Ever the band looking to push musical boundaries and continue to challenge themselves, Pink Floyd decided to use quotes from a popular ad campaign in a song for no monetary benefit. Why did they do it? Simple: David Gilmour loved the advert. On the song ‘Keep Talking’ from Pink Floyd’s 1994 record The Division Bell, there are clearly samples taken using the voice of Stephen Hawking. These become a pivotal part of the track and are still recognisable to this day.
The band loved using Hawking’s voice so much that they decided to take clips from the same vocal samples and apply them to the track ‘Talkin’ Hawkin’’, which appeared on their next album, The Endless River. What is interesting isn’t the band’s use of the scientist’s voice; as they had sampled speaking parts for music in the past, it’s where these vocal snippets came from.
All of the Hawking vocals you can hear in these Pink Floyd songs were taken from a BT television advert by which Gilmour was moved. While the band were never in talks with BT and wasn’t being paid for incorporating the vocals, Gilmour was still adamant about using them. When elaborating further on his affinity for the advertisement, he simply said it was “The most powerful piece of television advertising that I’ve ever seen in my life.”
