The session singer’s session singer.

I was going to say “King of the Jingles” but Jimmy Helms was far more than that. A fantastic American singer who settled in the UK, Jimmy was every bit as good as his more famous Motown and Atlantic contemporaries. If you’ve worked in advertising in the last 40 years and were making a commercial requiring an authentic US soul singer, you’d call for Jimmy. He had a Top Ten hit in the early 70s with Gonna Make You An Offer You Can’t Refuse – which started as a jingle – then re-surfaced in the 90s as the frontman of Londonbeat. He’d have been knocking 50 by then but you’d never know it. What a tune, what a voice. Makes me want to write a jingle.