This article by DLMDD Co-Founder Max De Lucia first appeared in Campaign Magazine, June 2024.
Things Can Only Get Better has returned to the ears of the nation after prime minister Rishi Sunak called his snap election just a few weeks ago. Be honest, you’ve probably found yourself subconsciously humming it, too.
Some decades after New Labour used the song as the soundtrack to Tony Blair's 1997 election victory, political activist Steve Bray used the track to "troll" the prime minister by drowning out his announcement of the general election during the live broadcast.
And troll him he did. The track did its job, with a rain-soaked Sunak visibly and audibly thrown off course and every subsequent headline reading “Things can only get wetter”.
So it would seem the perfect time for Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer to resurrect this ubiquitous piece of British political sound branding and deliver the punch his campaign for "change" needs over the coming weeks. But any such hopes from Starmer and his comms team were quashed this weekend when D:Ream’s band members, Alan Mackenzie and Peter Cunnah, told LBC Radio, "our songs, politics, never again”.
The band revealed their dismay at hearing the song bellow out over Sunak’s speech and went on to express their regret at letting Labour ever use the song in the first place.
Mackenzie went on to say: “I don’t think politics and music should be linked.”
While this may well be the artist’s outlook, it won’t be the view of any political campaign guru. I get it from the band’s perspective, the song became an anthem for an emotion and a message that it was never intended to be. Its latest virality only adds a further cultural weight that the band have likely been wanting to forget about for years.
But in a world where using audio alongside visual elements increases brand recall by 86% and where distracted people are 20% more likely to remember what they hear than what they see, a prolific soundtrack would have a major influence on the way people vote. And voters will vote in the same way they buy, on emotion and familiarity – the golden properties of music and sound.
Brands all over the world are now in the race to find their sound identities – because the power of finding an earworm achieves the most enviable levels of brand power and fame. Modern politics would do well to follow suit. It has been some decades since we’ve seen British politics harness the power of music to influence a campaign. The last major moment of note was Theresa May’s Dancing Queen moment. Iconic, but not necessarily for the right reasons.
D:Ream have put their stake in the ground and it’s clear you won’t be hearing much more of Things Can Only Get Better (at least officially) over the coming weeks. But the story goes to show the power of music and sound to deliver a potent message and emotion at scale. Get it right and you’ll have everyone humming their way to the polling stations, get it wrong and you’ll be humming yourself to court with a group of angry artists and rights holders.
That said, there might be just one more twist in the tale. D:Ream are due to play Glastonbury just days before the election.
Are you seriously writing off Worthy Farm singing those famous words? Let’s just hope it’s not “Things can only get wetter”.
