Golf - Night Driving Ad

You may have seen the recent advert for the Volkswagen Golf - the Night Driving advert. A voice narrates over the advert’s soundtrack whilst a Volkswagen Golf is driven through a city, late at night, deserted except for the odd person.

The advert has a strange feeling to it, usually busy places are eerily empty, creating a sense of solitude: a deserted classroom, pool room with TV playing in the background, a bedroom with a couple fast asleep, lit up momentarily from outside by the car headlights that pass by outside, an empty tunnel, empty shop fronts.

The theme music is called We Don’t Have to Think Like That Anymore by Cliff Martinez and is from the Solaris soundtrack. The words are from a poem called Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas which in the advert is narrated by Richard Burton.

The whole poem is not featured in the site, the words from the poem that are featured are as follows:

And all the people of the lulled and dumfounded town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, the drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewoman and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with wings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organ playing wood.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.

The advert makes you want to jump in your car in the middle of the night and go for a night drive. Through an empty city. The freedom of the open road, and the silence of the dead of night, with nothing but your thoughts and the sound of the engine for company.

The [Night Driving] website features the entire advert, with added features including full credits and an area to complete your own advert.