The John Lewis Christmas advert has become as much a part of the festive season as tinsel and crackers. These adverts function as short films that don’t just sell products, they sell feelings. They work not through product placement but through sentiment, nostalgia and connection.
This year’s advert, which centres on a teenage boy buying his father a vinyl record, strikes a particularly resonant chord. The story invites us to think not only about family and festivity, but about how music and the technologies that carry it, allow us to travel in time and revisit the past, and to understand who we are.
At York St John University, our Music, Memory and Narrative Research Group has spent the past decade exploring exactly these questions. In Music, Memory and Memoir and Venue Stories, we gathered people’s stories of musical experience, not simply as nostalgic recollection, but as acts of constructing identity.
