As far as we know Sky Sport’s Every Goal Matters spot marks the first time a Rolling Stones track has ever been re-recorded for a TV commercial.
And every note certainly matters in Sniffy Dog’s masterful rendition of the choral section of You Can’t Always Get What You Want, the final track of the group’s 1969 album Let It Bleed.
“The Stones are one of a tiny handful of bands whose songs are virtually impossible to replicate because they have so much history attached to them,” says Soho Music’s Kate Young, who supervised the project on behalf of ad agency Brothers & Sisters. “Sniffy Dog did a fantastic job.”
The London Bach Choir’s performance on the original of You Can’t Always Get What You Want created a mix of the puritan and the profane which was controversial at the time.
Some 40 years later this faithful re-record adds a near-religious intensity to a Sky Sports’ film showing the agony and ecstasy suffered by football fans on club terraces up and down the country.
All rights to The Rolling Stones’ 60s and early 70s catalogues are controlled by the New York-based legal firm ABKCO, notorious for striking the tightest of deals.
“Licensing the original would have been just too expensive,” says Young. “And ABKCO don’t normally grant re-recording rights to their songs. So from the moment Sky decided they wanted to go down that road, I told them there would little or no room for manoeuvre on contracts and everything would be on ABKCO’s terms.”
Not surprisingly ABKCO retain full rights to the new recording, which was completed only two weeks before the ad broke on August 14.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want marks the fourth Stones’ title to be tracked by thesyncsurvey over the last two years.
In October 2010 Chanel aired a Martin Scorcese-directed mini-movie around the band’s 1965 recording of a Beat Boom staple She Said Yeah.
A clever remix by producer Don Was of the opening guitar riffs to The Stones’ 1981 Top 10 hit Start Me Up was a feature of Omega’s Olympic 2012 timekeeping campaign.
More recently the BBC took advantage of blanket licence agreements to use Gimme Shelter, the opening cut from Let It Bleed, underneath an elaborate Eastenders trailer Hurricane Sharon.
