NME NAG NAG NAG - First Direct using Atmosphere

THE COLUMN THAT LIKES TO SAY NOOOOOOO!

YOU MUST have seen it by now: it's the most sickening advert on TV. The work of Beelzebub, the current ad for First Direct bank that uses Joy Division's magnificent 'Atmosphere' to accompany footage of middle-class stereotypes living their lives of quiet desperation and paying their bills by phone.

Advertising is nauseating: personally, I'm with Bill Hicks when he advocates that people in advertising and marketing just kill themselves. Surely all decent people are outraged by the way that ads plunder great music to sell banal products: Mozart sells motors, the Velvets sell tyres, The Clash sell Levi's...

But what the f— do Joy Division have to do with bank accounts?

Banks are institutions more dangerous than standing armies; bankers' decisions in Frankfurt kill millions in Africa. Banks are the paymasters of war, famine and pestilence the world over. Worst of all, they are currently pushing everyone towards a 'cashless society', a universal credit system where you literally must belong to a bank to survive.

At a more mundane high street level, banks are eager to loan you as much money as you like as long as you can prove that you actually don't need it. The time that the bank decide to call in your loan or mortgage unexpectedly will be the day that you get a redundancy notice or discover that you've got a baby on the way.

Then they're the bank who like to say, "F— you!"

Maybe the connection between banks and Joy Division is suicide and despair: maybe Ian Curtis is the perfect voice to advertise a service that will cause you no end of misery, possibly ending with you dangling from a rope. People do get driven to suicide by banks: I'm not suggesting that we hunt down and kill the advertising agency responsible — I think the Army should be doing that — but don't let it lie. Fight back against these banker scum: jam their freephone numbers, deface their posters and most of all, pay and get paid in cash whenever you can.

Squeeze the bastards where it really hurts.

Tommy Udo