Stiltskin, ‘Inside’: The rapid rise (and rapid fall) of Stiltskin

Stiltskin
‘Inside’

Highest UK chart position: Number One on May 8, 1994

1.

This newsletter has previously questioned the idea of a one-hit-wonder. It’s a meaningless label that potentially lumps someone like Leonard Cohen, who only ever had one UK Top 40 single, with disposable novelty acts like Crazy Frog.

(Actually, Crazy Frog isn’t even a one-hit-wonder. He somehow had five Top 40 singles.)

That said, if anyone deserves to be labelled a one-hit wonder, it’s Stiltskin. Here is a band that didn’t even exist when their one hit was recorded, and vanished almost immediately afterwards. The people behind Stiltskin went on to do other things, but the band itself is a blip in music history.

How did a bunch of unknown session artists and journeymen achieve one of biggest hits of 1994? Well, it all happened because of hot guys in jeans.

2. Swing low in a dark glass hour

Levi Strauss & Co had enjoyed massive growth in the 50s and 60s. Levi jeans were originally marketed as workclothes, but then rock’n’roll happened and the young Baby Boomers adopted the blue 501 jeans as fashionwear. Levi’s became a countercultural icon, an accessible way to look as cool as James Dean.

But teenagers grow up, and the next generation of kids never want to dress like their parents. By the 1980s, 501s were deeply uncool and, in Europe, insufferably American. Levi Strauss & Co began to struggle so badly that they were forced to close 60 manufacturing plants.

Seeking to reverse their fortunes, the company turned to Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), a new and rebellious London advertising agency. BBH started taking Levi’s in an edgier direction, eventually creating a TV spot for the brand, which was titled ‘Laundrette’.

‘Laundrette’ features the singer/model Nick Kamen, who stolls into a laundromat while a cover of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ plays in the background. Kamen whips off his 501s, puts them in a machine, then sits in his boxers while he waits.

This cheeky, sexy ad was a huge hit and gave Levi’s the sales boost they wanted. But it also had a side-effect that neither BBH nor Levi Strauss fully anticipated. Marvin Gaye’s original ‘Grapevine’ was rereleased as a single by popular demand, and it shot straight into the Top 10.

Everyone was a winner. Gaye’s estate got paid twice: once for the ad and again for sales of the single. The song’s chart success helped to reinforce the ad campaign, which helped sell even more jeans.

And so, the Levi’s-ad-to-chart-success pipeline was created. BBH pulled off the same trick again and again, even scoring Number Ones with songs like ‘The Joker‘ by Steve Miller Band and ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go‘ by The Clash.

But nothing lasts forever. By the mid-90s, the formula was looking a bit tired, and rereleased singles by Johnny Cash, Dinah Washington and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins all fell short of the Top 40. It was time to try something new.

3. Fat man starts to fall

But wait, let’s rewind for a second. Before Nick Kamen, before BBH, all the way back to 1980.

Here, you’ll find an ecomonics student named Peter Lawlor. Peter is a extremely promising young man who will spend much of the 80s working for an investment firm in New York.

But Peter is also a talented songwriter, instumentalist and producer. While he’s still in college, Peter and his friend set up a DIY studio in their flat and create demos for local bands. It doesn’t make Peter popular with his flatmates, but it does help him become part of the local scene.

In May 1980, one of those bands asked Peter if they could perform a song he had written, called ‘Everytime I See You’. Peter agreed and went along to the show, which turned out to be a pivotal moment in British music history…

…because the support act that night was a group of Mancuian teenagers called The Patrol playing their first-ever gig. A few years later, The Patrol would become The Stone Roses.

But apart from that, the gig is unmemorable. Lawlor puts ‘Everytime I See You’ in a drawer and forgets about it.

Okay, let’s return to 1993. Levi’s are looking for a new advertising strategy, The Stone Roses still haven’t released their second album, and Peter Lawlor is back in the UK. He’s quit finance to focus on music production, mostly focusing on movie soundtracks and advertising jingles.

When BBH invited Lawlor to work on the next Levi’s campaign, he assumed that they wanted some background music or a remix. But he was wrong. Not only did BBH want brand new music, they were engaging with some of the coolest people in the business. Lawlor’s competition for this gig included the likes of Nellee Hooper and Massive Attack, who had already started working on some tracks.

If he wanted this contract, he’d have to most fast.

Lawlor tells the rest of the story like this:

They weren’t very sure about the music. One of the ideas was for me to write a choral piece to run through the entire commercial.

They wanted it to begin with a sort of hymn, the sort of hymn which might have been sung in a small American country church in the 19th century. Then, on the grand reveal, the music was to move into an emotional soundtrack…the sound of awakening.

…There were countless changes in brief but the upshot was that the agency wasn’t all that keen on Massive Attack’s track, nor were they all that keen on the choral piece I’d written.

BBH spent months searching for the right song, and even considered returning to the tried-and-true classic song formula, but nothing fit. Eventually, they returned to Lawlor and asked if he could try writing another piece—and they gave him one weekend to do it.

That’s when Lawlor remembered ‘Everytime I See You’, a song that he hadn’t touched since 1980. He recorded a full version in his studio, playing all of the instruments himself…and then decided it was rubbish. BBH were trying to be cool and zeitgeisty. They didn’t want classic rock. So Lawlor recorded another new track, this time something more electronic and dance-ey.

The following Monday, he met with BBH again and played his club banger:

The dance track was, however, met with polite indifference…the job was ineluctably slipping away.

So as a final move, I said: “I’ve also written this.” and played them my rock track.

There was no hesitation. BBH commissioned the song on the spot.

4. That’s because I’m broken minded

In 1994, Ray Wilson was a pub singer working the Glasgow circuit. He was also broke as hell and about to have his house repossessed. When he saw a Melody Maker ad looking for a rock singer, he jumped straight into his disintegrating Volkswagen and headed to the audition in London.

The ad Ray Wilson saw had been placed by Peter Lawlor. The Levi’s commerical was a sensation and people were obsessed with the song. Ordinary members of the public were tracking down Lawlor’s phone number just so they could beg to hear the full version.

Except the full version didn’t exist yet.

Lawlor had approached EMI and offered it to one of their bands. EMI laughed him out of the office. Maybe Levi’s can revive an old classic like ‘The Joker’, they said, but nobody is going to buy an advertising jingle.

He needed to get the song into shops before public interest died down, which meant he would have to release it himself. Lawlor already had everything he needed, including a studio and music industry contacts who could help distribute the single. Only one thing was missing: vocals.

In desperation, Lawlor stuck a Singer Wanted ad in Melody Maker. Only two people replied. One was a Spanish girl who sent a brilliant demo, but forgot to include any contact details. The other applicant was Ray Wilson.

Wilson laid down the vocal track on the song that was now called ‘Inside’ while Lawlor hired some session musicians to mime along to his instrumental. The four of them shot a very cheap, very ugly music video, and 50,000 copies of ‘Inside’ went out to the UK record shops. Within days, every copy was gone. ‘Inside’ charted at Number 5, but probably would have debuted higher if there had been enough CDs to meet demand.

After a bigger second pressing and an appearance on Top Of The Pops, ‘Inside’ went to Number One.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbPD2agPmU

5. Don’t keep it

There are overnight successes, and then there’s Stiltskin, whose first public gig was on Top Of The Pops. How do you top that? Where do you go from there?

The predictable answer is… not far. Stiltskin’s album, The Mind’s Eye, mostly consisted of ‘Inside’ sound-a-likes. It peaked at Number 17. The follow-up single, ‘Footsteps’, barely scraped the Top 40.

By the end of the year, the only person who remembered ‘Inside’ was Billy Corgan, who claimed the whole thing was screwjob aimed at him personally. Corgan version of events is that Levi’s had wanted ‘Today’ for their next ad; when he refused, they hired a grunge-lite band to imitate the Smashing Pumpkins sound. He was so aggreived that he began opening gigs by saying, “Hello, we’re Stiltskin”.

(Corgan also claims to have had sex with a shapeshifting lizard-person, so take his statements with a pinch of salt.)

Within a year of ‘Inside’, Stiltskin was over. Looking back, Ray realised that the problem was having “too much, too soon”:

The first thing we did was Number One. It was a license for disaster, which was a shame because there are some songs on the album, like “Footsteps” and “Sunshine and Butterflies,” that are great live, and people liked them.

…Peter Lawlor was the main driving force in the band. He was the guitarist, and a very talented guy, but he was difficult. He was actually rich, and we were not. That probably was a problem. He had all the money and maybe we resented it a little bit.

…I think we just realized we didn’t really like each other very much…We respected each other’s abilities, but we didn’t get along. So it just kind of petered out.

Wilson soon landed another, even more bizarre gig as the replacement for Phil Collins in Genesis. His tenure went so badly that Phil came back and booted him out. Since then, Wilson has been touring as Ray Wilson and Stiltskin, although his setlist includes fewer and fewer Stiltskin songs. Some nights, he doesn’t even play ‘Inside’.

Peter Lawlor went back to the world of business, becoming an economics adviser and a lecturer at LSE. It’s hard to say how much he earned from ‘Inside’, but we know he got paid twice: first by Levi’s, then the royalties from the single, on which he had the sole songwriting credit.

BBH and Levi Strauss were thrilled with the success of their new campaign and spent the rest of the 90s launching a series of one-hit-wonders. Eventually, this would lead us to the nightmarish horrors of Babylon Zoo. But that’s a story for another day.

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