MIKE SAMMES MUSIC FOR BISCUITS (Trunk) WHEN I was little, the kitchen in our tenement flat was where my cot was, and also where the TV was. My mum was pretty smart - she knew how to keep an eye on the bambino, the pasta and Peyton Place simultaneously.

Anyway, she always loves to tell the story of how I used to haul myself up on the bars of my cot whenever the adverts came on the telly. Apparently, my wee head would appear over the rail like a baby Chad, only to sink back down again when the adverts finished.

One could speculate endlessly - if one could be even remotely bothered - as to why this was. Maybe the adverts were twice as loud as the programmes even back in the early 1960s, maybe their brief duration appealed to a baby's flighty attention span - but I like to think that it was those snappy and arresting jingles that ensnared me.

The chief architect of many of these little monuments to Mammon was none other than Mike Sammes - leader of The Mike Sammes Singers and something of a godhead in the rarefied realm of hip easy listening.

Sammes is one of the great invisible men of the 1960s and 70s, omnipresent but largely unrecognised. Whenever a smooth male/female vocal ensemble was required, The Mike Sammes Singers tended to get the call, and they consequently worked with absolutely everyone - from The Beatles and Burt Bacharach downwards.

Sammes would, however, be unfairly destined to remain a footnote at best were it not for the tireless efforts of true believers such as Jonny Trunk, founder of the magnificent Trunk Records and the prime mover behind Music For Biscuits, a compilation of Sammes' advertising work coupled with the soundtrack for a forgotten film entitled Youth (with seven sublime hidden tracks into the bargain).

There's a tremendously sad story behind Music For Biscuits - read it in the album's sleeve notes or at www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/biscuits.shtml - but its very existence is a triumph against the odds, and the music itself, if you're predisposed to light 1960s ephemera, is a joy.

Each track radiates the innocent consumerist bliss of the day, when washing machines were still seen as a passport to a wonderland free from drudgery - a time before we all grew up and recognised corporate greed for what it was and shall ever remain.

If you were about in those days, you will swoon with recognition at these airily dynamic paeans to Vienna wafer triangles ("full of continental crispness"), Heinz Toast Toppers ("when toast is on the bottom, you're the tops") and, perhaps best of all, Fairy Snow washing powder.

All together now: "Fairy Snow is great, it's got - PERBORATE! - it gets right to the heart of the wash." No one ever talks about perborate any more, but long after Fairy Snow washed down the drain for good, sodium perborate still quietly exists, just waiting for you to Google it. (While we're on the subject, a gold star and a fervent handshake to anyone who can confirm or deny for me that it was Craig Douglas in those Fairy Snow adverts.) I hope Mike Sammes is smiling down upon us from a heaven that looks like a gleaming 1960s kitchen, wearing an immaculate white shirt impregnated with perborate. The best thing about these adverts is that they sound so sincere - you really get the impression that they lived like this, in a benign world of constant wonder and four kinds of freshness, where the average High Street was a portal to nirvana.