Drink - Forget the smooth ads, says Victoria Moore, who is left cold by Southern Comfort
Alcohol ads in the cinema, from Smirnoff to Amaretto, are usually luminously sleek and sexy. There's a great one around at the moment featuring a luscious honey of a female kissing the life out of all the men in the bar, one by one, until she finds the taste of her stolen drink on someone's lips. Call me a sucker, but by the end I do want to know what she's drinking. Incredibly, it's Southern Comfort. Which begs another question. Who the hell drinks that these days? I know Janis Joplin used to, but I never, ever see anyone ask for it; yet someone must, because it is behind the bar of every alcohol-serving venue I've ever been to.
Only one acquaintance will 'fess up to having touched it since their teenage Bacardi and Coke, Malibu and mixer, Southern Comfort and lemonade days. I won't drag her name into disrepute but - please don't cancel your subscriptions - she does work for this very magazine, and even she only imbibes in the privacy of her own home because, she whispers in alarm, Southern Comfort is not something she "wishes to be associated with".
Southern Comfort says it is targeting the 18 to 24-year-old male (who will, I am sure, like the ads if not the drink). But where are all these Southern Comfort stags? Despite my attempts to stalk them, I've never caught sight of one yet. There are traces of Southern Comfort drinkers everywhere, but nary a one to be found.
My own past is littered with incidents of not drinking SC, most notably at an Oasis party I attended in a scummy (sorry, rock'n'roll) bar near King's Cross. We turned up with just £5.47 between three of us, only to discover that there was only one beverage you didn't have to pay for. We were at that age where you drink anything so long as it does not cost much - I acquired my taste for dry martinis around that time because it was cheaper to drink gin neat than to put tonic in it. But we sloped off on the bus rather than partake of SC in the presence of the brothers Gallagher.
Swayed by the smooth ads, I decide to try some. The woman in the off-licence sniggers a bit when asked if she sells much, and I feel I have fallen in her estimation. Back at home, I pour a couple of hearty measures. It glows, alluringly wistful, like molten amber, seeming to sing a hymn to the fetid rhythm and buzz of the American South. But SC tastes like boiled sweets and penicillin with a soupcon of Fuzzy Peach perfume, and underneath it all a couple of drops of bourbon struggling to get out - "Like something your mother would give you on a spoon," winces my latest love. Oh my, it's sticky. And all this from a liqueur that purports to have its rebellious roots in 1870s New Orleans where a barman, M W Heron, added spices and fruit to a whiskey base.
The invisible SC fiends are all over London. Posing the question "Who buys this drink?" to a few smart bars revealed that most are actually women. "We sell a surprising amount," admits one bartender. "Mostly to pub people. If he's drinking lager, she'll have a Southern Comfort and lemonade." I am cruel and snotty enough to ask whether this means that it is for "birds" rather than high-fliers or grunge girls. Yes, apparently. And then I remember. I did know an SC drinker once. He used to stay up all night watching strange films on Channel 4, sleep during the day and glide from his room at dusk, white-faced and silent, to reheat Findus Crispy Pancakes or some reconstituted chicken-cheese-bacon munchies thing. That's who drinks it.
There's one solitary consolation: Southern Comfort says that the liqueur is still made to a "I could tell you but I'd have to kill you" clandestine formula. Praise the Lord. Let's hope the guardian of that secret accidentally tells it to himself.
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