Darrell Davis: Your Song . . . my commercial

Christmas has long passed, but once or twice a day I click onto YouTube to watch Elton John in my favourite holiday commercial. It starts with him plinking a few notes on his upright piano before the camera swoops backwards in time, showing the various stages of the superstar’s career to the strains of his famous “Your Song.”

The commercial is a pitch from a British department store, trying to sell pianos as Christmas gifts. It’s masterful, to the extent you can hear his voice change during the different eras. His pink mohawk is a wonderful flashback!

I obsess over the commercial’s five actors. It’s got to be the same actor in the dressing room, in the marvellous recreation of his sold-out Dodger Stadium concerts and giving that little Elton John-style shoulder shrug while playing and singing in a chartered jet.

Those young Eltons; how did they find a perfect replica in pinstriped, pint-sized pyjamas, eagerly ripping the wrapping off his first piano, the one gifted him by his mother and grandmother when he was a child? I can’t stop singing the song and now I feel guilty about throwing away that old, unsellable, upright piano from our basement.