So. Neil French is dead.
Don’t rush to the end of this piece looking for the punchline, because there isn’t one.
There never was with Neil. Just a very long, very sharp point that took its sweet time arriving, and when it did, you realised you’d been happily impaled for the last five minutes and hadn’t even noticed the blood.
He wrote the way other people breathe: slowly, deliberately, with the occasional theatrical sigh and a cigar or a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth that somehow never fell into the whisky.
Long copy, they called it. As if length were the point. It wasn’t. The point was that he refused to talk to you like an idiot. He assumed you could read, that you possessed a vocabulary larger than a tweet, and - most scandalously - that you might actually enjoy using your brain while being sold something.
Revolutionary stuff.
He once ran an ad that was nothing but type on a page. Thousands of words. No picture. Not even a logo until you were halfway down the second column, by which time you were too hooked to care whose beer it was.
People bought the beer anyway. Clients fainted, then counted the money and fainted again, this time with delight. Awards committees ran out of gold.
Of course, he upset the right people. Said women couldn’t be proper creative directors because they went off and had babies.
Got himself sacked from the top of WPP faster than you can say “human resources intervention.” The professionally offended howled. The secretly relieved grinned behind their lattes.
Neil just lit another cigarette and pointed out that he’d employed plenty of brilliant women who chose not to be mothers and were therefore, in his medieval taxonomy, honorary blokes.
Political correctness was never his strong suit. Being right, however, was.
He’d been everything before advertising finally noticed him: debt collector, club manager, matador (briefly, and badly), singer in a band that never quite made it.
By the time he wandered into an agency, he was already older than most creative directors ever get, and twice as dangerous.
He looked like a dissolute colonel who’d lost a war and didn’t regret a single atrocity. Clients loved him. Suits feared him. Junior writers worshipped him and stole his lines for the rest of their careers.
He taught us that the best advertising doesn’t shout; it murmurs in your ear at 2 a.m. while you’re supposed to be asleep.
He considered elegance as a weapon fired without a silencer. Wit without warmth apparently was just cruelty in a tuxedo. That if you’re going to insult the reader’s intelligence, at least have the courtesy to do it with perfect grammar.
And now the bastard’s gone and died on us.
There’ll be zero late-night emails written in that immaculate, poisonous prose.
Zilch appearances at awards shows, looking like he’d just stepped off a yacht he didn’t own, dispensing wisdom and contempt in equal measure.
And no more ads that make you read every bloody word because turning the page would be rude.
The world is suddenly shorter on style, longer on noise.
Raise a glass of something expensive. Chivas, if you have it. XO Beer if you’re feeling nostalgic. Hell, even a pint of bitter will do, as long as it’s poured properly.
To Neil French.
The only copywriter who could make you read his obituary twice.
(As posted by Prathap Suthan on Facebook)
