Terry Lovelock, who died recently, was probably best known as the man who, together with art director Vernon Howe, created the ‘Heineken refreshes the parts that other beers cannot reach’ campaign. But Heineken was just the tip of Terry’s creative iceberg. He was responsible for award-winning work for TV Licence Evasion, Dunn & Co, Fischer-Price toys, Bird’s Eye, Wall’s sausages and Cinzano, to name but a few, decorating the pages of numerous D&AD annuals along the way. And remarkably, advertising wasn’t his first career; it was his second.
Before he became a copywriter, Terry was a successful jazz drummer. He held a residency at London’s Flamingo Club for a year; he accompanied Ronnie Scott, toured the UK with Dave Brubeck, and in 1961 was voted best young drummer of that year. Alan Brooking, the ex-advertising photographer, first met Terry in the mid-fifties not in an ad agency, but in a church hall in Romford where Terry was playing drums. ‘He was sensational’, Alan says.
All of which may explain two things about him. First, the hours he kept. He generally came to work at what he described as ‘the crack of lunch’, in many cases having spent the previous evening at Ronnie Scott’s. But, second, and perhaps more importantly, Terry’s former career appeared to influence the way he worked, improvising as he went along, never content with the mundane, always seeking the unusual; in other words, using the same melody as others, but adding his own distinctive interpretation of the tune. As a result, he produced work that was always unexpected and often vastly different from that of his peers. As John Salmon, creative director of Collett, Dickenson and Pearce once put it, ‘going to somewhere that’s so far off the tracks, the trains don’t even stop there’.
As a person, Terry was entertaining, amusing and given to bouts of mischief, like the time he used his expense account to buy lunch for the entire staff of CDP. Only Terry would contemplate something like that. Only Terry would do something like that. He was a one-off. A true original. And I am sure that he’s refreshing parts of Heaven with his wit, charm and originality that lesser souls have been unable to reach.