The surprising reach of Coward’s songs: from Levi’s jeans to post-apocalyptic wastelands

Fan art of the video game Bioshock

Bioshock is a dystopian, first-person shooter video game released in 2007. The horror game, set in a dark underwater city, features an art-deco style and futuristic technology.

Needless to say, it’s not an obvious place to look for a Coward connection. But the game contains two of his songs.

The game is set in 1960, and music from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s can be heard playing on gramophones throughout the city, including “The Party’s Over Now” from Coward’s Words and Music (1932) and “Twentieth Century Blues” (1931).

In an interview, Bioshock creator Ridgway explains "The songs themselves, there's a really interesting juxtaposition of a happy quirky musical razzle dazzle number and then they'd be singing about how the world is ending.”

“It was supposed to mirror the optimism and the decay at the same time...those two things sort of coexisting with each other."

Coward’s music denotes the image of a glamorous era that has been lost in the decaying underwater city, whilst the lyrics of the songs hold a bitter note despite their cheery tune.

“Why is it that civilized humanity/ Can make the world so wrong?”, “Twentieth century blues” begins.

“Every sorrow/ Blues value/ Is news value/ Tomorrow”, the song goes on.

You can see why the makers of Bioshock were struck by the appropriateness of the song for a dystopian world.

“The Party’s Over Now”, quite appropriately played outside a theatre, tells of the ending of things: “The party's over now/ the dawn is drawing very nigh.”

“Dancing time/ May seem sublime/ But it is ended all too soon.”

“The music of an hour ago/ Was just a sort of "Let's pretend!"/ The melodies that charmed us so/ At last are ended.”

The end of a party, then, at the end of the world.

Bioshock is not the only instance where Coward’s music has cropped up in a video game.

Official promotional art from the video game Fallout: New Vegas (Credit: Bethesda)

“Mad About the Boy” features in the post-apocalyptic game Fallout: New Vegas, broadcast on the fictional in-game radio station called Radio New Vegas. In the game you can listen to songs from the 1940s to the early 1960s on the radio.

Fallout: New Vegas is a 2010 action role-playing game, set in the Mojave Desert 204 years after nuclear war.

The version of the song in the game was recorded by Helen Forrest with Carmen Dragon and his orchestra in early 1950.

Perhaps there is something deeply nostalgic about Coward’s music that makes it so fitting for the settings of Bioshock and Fallout: two worlds turned to ruin look back nostalgically on the ‘Golden Era’.

All three songs were written in the 1930s. They come after World War I, the ”the war to end all wars” and the most destructive conflict anyone had seen up to that point.

The music of this golden era was set against the backdrop of wartime horror; a kind of apocalypse in its own right.

Its not just games where Coward’s music has cropped up in surprising places. In the world of advertising, companies have found Coward’s music to be a classic accompaniment.

In 1978, a Cadburry cream eggs advertisement featured a rewritten version of “Let’s do it” by Cole Porter, with singer Frank Muir putting on a distinctly Coward-esque tone.

Despite not featuring the man himself, the impression is quite uncanny.

“The upper class break the ranks for them, they’ll even break their piggy banks for them,” the new lyrics go.

“Can’t resist them, can’t resist cream eggs!”

A 1992 Levi jeans advert featured "Mad About the Boy", written by Coward and sung by Dinah Washington in 1961.

In the advert “Swimmer”, a topless man wearing Levi jeans runs through various private gardens and dives into pools while the Coward song plays in the background.

It is clear that even half a century after his death, Noël Coward’s music has had an impact on popular culture far and beyond the world of theatre.