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Alex Clare; & the power of advertising
Topic Started: May 19 2012, 06:28 PM (236 Views)
Mobson
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This 26 year old guy, born in Southwark, is a 26 year old British singer-songwriter who's debut album, The Lateness of the Hour, was released in the UK last July on Island Records after a demo earned a record deal. Before he became known, Clare dated Amy Winehouse for a year when he was working as a chef and playing acoustic sets at her favourite pub, The Hawley Arms, in Camden; after they split he said they remained friends.

In 2011, despite being championed by people like Reggie Yates, who made Clare's cover of Prince's "When Doves Cry" his "song of the day", and the Dutch radio station 3FM singling out his songs, and touring various summer festivals, following the disappointing performance of his debut album here in the UK, Island dropped his record contract, leaving him to pursue work with a realtor friend in East London to make ends meet, essentially "acting as a slum lord," he says. "Obviously record deals are a finite bit of money, and I found out I kind of needed to make ends meet. But I kept getting emails from Island saying, 'We want to use your song for an advert,' so I said 'yes of course' even though I kept thinking nothing would come of it."

Cut to the week of March 5th, and suddenly Clare's song "Too Close" was getting the widespread exposure it never received in the U.K., courtesy of a new campaign for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9. The browser's multi-million dollar media outlay made a big impact its first week out when 60-second ads that made dramatic use of the dubstep-inflected power ballad started airing during broadcast prime-time and in movie theaters before major titles like "The Hunger Games." TV viewers and theater-goers started Shazam-ing the song on their smartphones and searching for the track on YouTube and iTunes. Apple even took the rare unsolicited move of buying keywords on Bing and Google to further connect the dots for fans of the song. By the week ending April 1, the song debuted at No. 68 on the Hot 100, and sales totaled over 100,000 downloads after the first weeks of release. Clare also saw success on the German charts too, topping the charts at No. 1.

On Wednesday of this week, Clare's song peaked at No. 4 on the UK Singles Chart, accompanied by a very smart video involving two sumarai-style warriors fighting in a abandoned building.....produced by Island Records....guess they've had second thoughts!

official video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYXjLbMZFmo&feature=related

unplugged version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OuvdzBt64RQ

Damn Your Eyes Etta James cover
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KoQf7_ISVE&fb_source=message
Edited by Mobson, May 19 2012, 06:42 PM.
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