A Kentish Town songwriter is asked to compose a theme tune for a flying Tesla and three royal number plates, and finds all four very difficult to rhyme
Monday, 26 October 2026. Kentish Town. Clocks back, dark at five, a keyboard on my knees under a duvet, 9.40pm.
An Unusual Commission
A friend of a friend who works at a small advertising agency in Shoreditch messaged me today to ask if I wrote jingles. I said I write songs about teenagers, buses and the F chord, so technically yes. She said they had been asked to pitch some music for a fan event about the new flying Tesla Roadster, and could I come up with thirty seconds of something futuristic, optimistic and ideally delivered by Friday.
I said yes before I had read anything about the car. Then I read the report on how Elon Musk unveiled the flying Tesla Roadster nine years late. It can drive upside down. It can hop over a row of other cars using compressed air thrusters. It does nought to sixty in about a second. And production is targeted for 2028, eleven years after it was first shown. I realised I was being asked to write an optimistic jingle for something that has mostly existed as a promise. That is not a jingle. That is a hymn.
The Problem Of Rhyming Roadster
Roadster is a difficult word to rhyme. My options, in order of usefulness, were toaster, poster, coaster and boaster. Boaster felt a little too accurate. Toaster felt a little too domestic, although the report does mention a survey in another story where a malfunctioning toaster identifies itself as a chatbot, so I briefly considered a crossover. Coaster is no good because the whole point of the car is that it does not coast, it jumps.
In the end I wrote a verse that goes: zero to sixty in the blink of an eye, zero to your driveway in the sweet by and by. My friend at the agency said she loved it. Then she said the client might not love the second line. I said the second line is the truth. She said that is why the client might not love it.
A Second Commission Nobody Asked For
Having warmed up, I decided to write a theme tune for something else I had been reading about, which is the report on Prince William’s three personalised number plates. NOTYET on an Aston Martin, NOTHARRY on a Range Rover, DISTASTEFUL on a Bentley. One car for waiting, one for avoiding his brother and one for disapproving of nearly everything.
These are, musically speaking, three moods in three keys. NOTYET is in a suspended chord, the kind that never quite resolves, because the whole point of NOTYET is that the resolution is being held back by somebody still using the monarchy. NOTHARRY is in a minor key with a little brass fanfare that keeps getting interrupted. DISTASTEFUL is a slow string section, perfectly in tune, with every player looking very slightly disappointed in the conductor.
The Royal Garage Suite
I now have a three-movement piece called The Royal Garage Suite, written entirely on a keyboard balanced on my knees under a duvet. It lasts nine minutes. The final movement ends with all three themes playing at once, which the report suggests would happen only if all three cars were parked outside Windsor Castle, at which point motorists could safely conclude that Christmas dinner had been cancelled. In my version, it ends with a single triangle note. That is the Christmas cracker nobody pulled.
The Advert Industry And The Truth
The interesting thing about writing music for adverts is that the music is not allowed to tell the truth, but it is always secretly about the truth. A jingle for a car that has not arrived has to sound like arrival. A theme for three moods has to sound like confidence. The best jingles sound joyful and slightly desperate at the same time, like a children’s party entertainer in the third hour of a booking. If you listen carefully, every jingle is crying for help in a major key.
My teenage pupil Ruby listened to my Roadster jingle on Saturday and said it sounded like the music in a lift in a hotel where something bad is about to happen. I said that was the brief. She said the brief was wrong. I suspect she will be running an advertising agency by the time she is twenty-five, or possibly the country.
On This Diary
Anyone who wants more of my opinions on technology, music and the people who sell us one using the other can wander back through older entries like the one on AI versus superheroes and cartoon characters, in which I argued that no machine will ever replace a teenager writing a song in a bathroom. I still believe it. The machines have become very polite this year. They have not become teenagers. That is the one thing they will never manage, which is why teenagers will always win.
Friday Deadline
I will send the agency the Roadster jingle on Friday. I will not send them The Royal Garage Suite, which I am saving for a future concert in a church hall in Tufnell Park, assuming the church hall’s piano is ever tuned. If the client rejects the jingle, I will release it myself on the internet with the title Zero To Your Driveway, and it will be heard by eleven people, nine of them related to me. That is a perfectly respectable audience. The Roadster, after all, has waited nine years for less.