Remember when no self-respecting rock or soul music fan would be caught dead listening to MOR? And your parents’ favourite supperclub sounds were enough to make you want to throw up?

Well, those days are over. Sometime during the chill-out boom of the late 1990s crooners became cool again – and it was the late Andy Williams who led the charge when his 1967 hit Music To Watch Girls By was featured in an award-winning Fiat car ad.

Now Andy is back again, heading up a list of smoochers and schmaltzers who have been dominating the ad breaks over the last few weeks.

Williams’ evergreen It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year underpins The Co-Op’s somewhat surreal – or apparently counter intuitive – summer food campaign. Surreal in that the song – specifically written for his 1963 Christmas album by a pair of tinseltown tunesmiths named George Wyle and Eddie Pola – tells of traditional yuletide delights like toasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories whereas the film focuses on a little girl reveling in the sun during a family barbecue!?!

Although record label Columbia opted for White Christmas as the single taken from Williams’ album, It’s The Most Wonderful Time … has subsequently become one of America’s Top 10 Holiday songs of all time, according to collection society Ascap. And yet it has never been a hit, despite dozens of covers by artists ranging from Johnny Mathis and Barry Manilow to Rosemary Clooney and Diana Ross.

Whether this ad will help break that duck and return Andy Williams to the UK charts is highly debatable. Admittedly The Co-Op’s ad agency Leo Burnett has done its best to edit the song to avoid as many overt festive references as possible. But, to our ears, there will always be something Christmassy about it. So clever or clumsy, inspired or irritating, it contributes to a commercial you probably won’t forget in a hurry. Which, of course, is the general idea.

Next up among the erstwhile easy listening stars who have been brightening up the breaks recently is the inestimable Dean Martin. The renowned Rat Packer and bon viveur came to fame in the late 1940s as half of a comedy duo with Jerry Lewis before developing a highly successful solo career as a TV show host, a Hollywood actor…and a serial drinker!

We can only wonder where in there he found the time to be a pop star, let alone one who was bigger in the UK than he was at home. Between 1953 and 1969 Frank Sinatra’s bezzy enjoyed 11 top ten hits here – compared to just three in the US – with titles such as That’s Amore, Sway, the chart-topping Memories Are Made Of This, Gentle On My Mind and, of course, Volare, now licensed by Virgin Rail for a heavily Mad Men-influenced spot in which a nerd stalks a woman on a train.

Volare could well be one of the most successful Italian-language pop songs since charts began. Under its original title of Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (literally translated as In The Blue, Painted Blue) it won the 1958 Sanremo Song Contest as performed by co-writer Domenico Modugno whose dramatic gestures shocked an Italian audience more accustomed to singers standing motionless with hand on heart. It subsequently came third in that year’s Eurovision and when Decca released it in the US a couple of months later it went straight to Numero Uno in only three weeks!

As 1958’s top selling single, and recipient of two Grammy awards, Modugno’s Volare effectively dwarfed Martin’s Capitol cover, which, even with English lyrics, could only struggle to Number 12 stateside. But in the long run it’s Vino Dino’s version which has in effect become the benchmark by which every subsequent recording, by such as Bobby Rydell, The Gipsy Kings and, of course, Sinatra himself, has been judged.

Which brings us to Charles Aznavour the man against whom every French singer songwriter is measured…and most found wanting. Only a year shy of his 90th birthday Aznavour is still regularly seen in public, either in concert or at the United Nations in his guise as a humanitarian and diplomat representing the Armenia from which his parents fled to avoid genocide immediately after WW1.

Charles Aznavour’s big break came when he was discovered by Edith Piaf in 1946 at the age of 22 years. More of a romantic than his rather more earthy Belgian contemporary Jacques Brel, he has to date written over a 1000 songs in five languages and sold in the region of 100 million records.

The majority, it must be said, have been in the Gallic chanson form rather than more Anglophile rock and pop styles. Consequently Aznavour is best known on this side of the English Channel for She: a bittersweet ballad which was a UK chart topper for him in 1974 – and which Elvis covered for the 1999 movie Notting Hill starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts.

But it’s an earlier effort, cleverly titled For Me…Formidable, which provides the soundtrack to a big budget Wall’s Magnum ad. Here a film starlet secretly leaves the set and the studio and cycles halfway across Paris to share a choc-ice with her boyfriend. With another big French name Paul Mauriat leading the orchestra, Formidable was recorded for Barclay in France in 1965 and released on Jeffrey Kruger’s Ember label in Britain.

1965 was also the year in which the legendary Hollywood comedian Jimmy Durante cut Make Someone Happy for a Warner Brothers’ Way Of Life album. Famous for his big cigars and even bigger nose – from which he earned the nickname Schnozzola – Durante worked his way up from New York’s Lower East Side in the 1920s to become one of America’s favourite all-round entertainers before his death in 1980.

Although he started off fronting a jazz band, Durante clearly couldn’t sing to save his life. But his gravelly voice could bring audiences to tears by wringing the humanity and the humour out of a song.

His version of Make Someone Happy – written in 1960 for a short-lived Phil Silvers Broadway show called Do Re Mi by the On The Town and Singin’ In the Rain team of Julie Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green – certainly brought a lump to the throat in 1993 when it was heard over the final credits of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan’s Sleepless In Seattle. Twenty years later it very nearly does the same again beneath an endearing computer animation for Hotels.com which is currently on heavy rotation.