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Fact #116871

When:

Short story:

Bill Backer, creative director for ad agency McCann-Erickson flies to London, UK, to join up with two songwriters, Billy Davis and Roger Cook, to write and arrange radio commercials for The Coca-Cola Company, to be recorded by The New Seekers. The end-result of the visit will be the song I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing.

Full article:

Roger Greenaway (co-writer) : I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing actually started as a melody with no words whatsoever when Roger Cook and I were on holiday in Portugal round about 1969. We used to go with our families and stay pretty close to each other and, on every other day, we'd sit on the beach and put ideas for songs down on tape, including about eight bars of what eventually became this song.

At the same time we had been doing Coca Cola Commercials for McCann-Ericsson on a contract basis since 1965, and we'd done many commercials, maybe a dozen with different people for the product.

Two guys used to come over from New York, one being Billy Davis, who co-wrote some of Jackie Wilson's hits with Berry Gordy, and a guy called Bill Backer who was the account executive.

We'd play them all the bits and pieces es we had and, this occasion, we played Billy this little tune which he liked, and so we finished it off for him.

At that time it was called True Love And Apple Pie and was eventually recorded under that title by a girl named Susan Shirley.

Bill Backer came back to us a few days later and said, 'I love the melody but I hate the lyric.' So we sat down that same day and re-wrote it as, "I'd like To Teach The World To Sing.

It was then recorded by The New Seekers as a two-minute commercial and went onto radio in America. However, we got very little reaction from it and, after two or three months, it was taken off and other commercials went on the air.

About a year later, a guy called Harvey Gabor was in the McCann-Ericsson offices in New York, and said to Bill Backer, 'I've got this idea for doing a 30-second tv commercial with kids of different nationalities, different colours and different creeds, all standing on a hill, with a Coca Cola bottle and singing an anthem. Is there anything suitable in the Coca Cola song catalogue that we could use?'

So Backer said, 'Look, I'm busy ... there's the library, everything that you need is in there.'

Gabor started listening and came out after about three days, saying ,"I've got it. It's called I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing.'

Gabor then came to London to record the commercial with all the kids but the weather was so awful that he transferred the shoot to one of the hills in Rome. They then trawled all the local embassies for the children of the diplomats, so all those kids you see are dressed up in their national costumes.

However, because of an accident causing damage to a helicopter while filming, the shoot went over budget by a quarter of a million dollars and Gabor was sacked on his return to New York.

Anyway, about two months later the commercial went on air in the States and, apparently, within two weeks Coca Cola had received over 10,000 letters from people asking where they could buy the music from the ad.

By chance, the New Seekers happened to be working at a hotel in New York, so we rushed them into the studio, recorded the song and got it released in a few days.

Of course, it zoomed up the charts there, and it came out about a month later in the UK, just before Christmas, and it did over a million singles in ten days here.

That's how it happened. It wasn't planned. It all came about more by default. And to this day virtually no-one has heard the original version of the song, when it was called True Love And Apple Pie and had a middle eight, which was never used on the later version.
(Source : Inspirations by Michael Randolfi, Mike Read and David Stark, Sanctuary, 2002)