Which usually means sending for the coolhunters, because organisations, brands and products aren’t always born with quite enough youthful personality to cut it.Coolhunters, ex-journalists, magazine stylists and designers from the sharp end of medialand work by trawling their own milieu of inventive, opinion-forming, early-adopting folk to identify habits, enthusiasms, language, music and new people who can give the right resonances to brands that don’t have enough of their own.New, very small cars are a case in point There’s been a lot of invention in this category. But Frank says Madison Avenue practically invented “rebellious” cool in the first place, because they saw its potential to sell new goods and services to new people. Melly saw youthful idealism being bought off and exploited over time, battles won and lost, breakthroughs that ended up as smart consumption. Melly, not surprisingly, did it from a 20th-century art-history perspective. The brilliant thirtysomething American polemicist Thomas Frank tackles the same issues through a forensic semantic analysis in his The Conquest of Cool (1997). Looking at what advertising copy and scripts actually said from the early 1960s to the early 1970s he comes to a different conclusion from Melly. Clever, annoying old George Melly – not so old then – was the first to describe how capitalism appropriated the style of youthful revolution to sell things.
Revolt into Style (1970) showed how strong feelings and loopy ideologies ended up as the Mao cushion-cover with a lot of big gestures along the way. In 1986 Phoenix became his second wife, in a ceremony in a Manchester hospital, days before she died of lung cancer.Shortly after she died, he says, she appeared to him in bed at the cottage.”She said: ‘Do you want to ask me anything?’ I said, ‘Yes. What’s going to win the Cesarewitch on Saturday?’ I am totally serious. She said ‘Number 23 at 40-1.’ “He catches a look of doubt in my eye (omega). The idea of somebody who was clean of that, and highly intelligent, was very attractive.”After canvassing for Tony Blair at Sedgefield in the June 1987 General Election, Rose and Booth had to share a bed in Blair’s house.”We lay there naming the women we could call as witnesses if the Mail accused us of impropriety,” Rose recalls. “One list was slightly longer than the other.”Tony Booth speaks of his six years with Pat Phoenix as one of the happiest periods in an otherwise turbulent existence. In those days, remember, the leader was chosen from 160 votes And Tony is the best canvasser I have ever seen.
He was driving all around the country, working for the day when Tony Blair would become leader, long before anybody gave the idea credence.”And yet – given that a list of Booth’s soulmates would begin not with Blair, but with Benn, or Bevan – you do find yourself asking: why?”Because,” Rose explains, “we had observed the union-boss-led, ugly face of old Labour. It was a calculated act by Tony Booth, with the aim of having his son-in-law lead the party. This was in the early 1980s, before Blair was even on the political radar.”Their tactic, Rose says, was to “attend every by- election and say we’d come because Tony Blair sent us. When I began canvassing,” Rose continues, “he was already telling people about his son-in-law, who was going to be leader of the Labour Party, and prime minister.
