Where Love Lives
Why This Years John Lewis Christmas Advert Got Us Right in the Feels.
I was (a little bit) too young to be a proper raver in the 90s. But I grew up on the echoes of it, the joy, the freedom, the way house music made people feel alive.
And house music has been the backdrop to so much of my life — love, friendship, heartbreak, healing. It’s more than sound to me; it’s a pulse that runs through my story. The joyful nights with friends that felt like coming home. The songs that carried me through my grief. The tracks that lifted me when nothing else could.
So, when I watched this year’s John Lewis Christmas advert — with the opening bars of that familiar beat giving me goosebumps, and that shimmering sense of connection and nostalgia — it hit me way harder than I expected. There were a LOT of tears. Straight from the gut. It wasn’t just a Christmas ad — was about the way music holds memories, how rhythm carries emotion, how connection lives on through sound and soul.
It’s about memory. About time. About how music, and love, can connect us long after the lights fade. To each other, and most importantly, to ourselves.
The soundtrack of memory
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the ad follows a teenage boy who gives his dad a vinyl record for Christmas — one of the most iconic classic house tracks there is, Where Love Lives by Alison Limerick. As the record spins, the father is transported back to his clubbing days, lost in a wave of memories, nostalgia and emotion. He sees his younger self, and his son through the years — as a toddler and then a baby — as finally he holds him in his arms. Past and present merging in one wordless, powerful moment of love and recognition.
There’s something about house music that gets under your skin and straight into your heart (fittingly, its BPM mirrors the rhythm of a human heartbeat.) But it’s not just the beat — it’s the feeling. House was born out of connection: sweaty dancefloors, unspoken unity, joy shared between strangers. It’s music that never asks for perfection, only presence. To be fully there, in that moment — mind, body, and soul.
That’s why this advert works so beautifully. It’s barely even about Christmas; it’s showing us how memory works. One note, one lyric, one sound can take you back decades in an instant. It’s the same way a smell can transport you to a moment you’d forgotten, or a photograph can knock the wind out of you with its familiarity.
When the dad in the ad drops the needle on that record, he isn’t just hearing a song — he’s remembering who he was, and everything that’s shaped him since. You can almost feel that lump in his throat as the music swells and the years collapse into one beat.
That’s what house music has always done for me, too. It’s been a companion through joy and loss — a reminder that even in heartbreak, there’s still rhythm. There’s still movement. There’s still life pulsing through it all.
Connection across generations
But what moved me most wasn’t the music itself, but the way it connected the father and son without a single word. You can see it — the son recognising something in his dad’s eyes, even if he doesn’t fully understand it yet: a recognition that the man before him is an actual person with a history, and not just his dad. It’s a huge milestone in any parent/child relationship, and I look forward to these moments with my little boy one day. That said, we’ve already had plenty of ‘disco parties’ in his five years — and they’ve been some of my favourite bonding experiences, for every reason I’ve just described.
Music captures those threads. It holds the moments we can’t quite keep and reminds us of the people we never stop loving — even when life has moved us onto a different dancefloor.
Music as Healing
Music has always been the best kind of medicine for me.
When I’ve faced loss, it’s often been the only thing that could reach me — those moments when words fell short, but a melody could still make its way through. Sometimes, dancing was the only way to release what my heart couldn’t say.
And that’s exactly what I saw in the John Lewis ad, beyond the Christmas lights and nostalgia; that profound truth that music heals. It connects us to our memories, our younger selves, the people we’ve loved and lost. It gives the pain somewhere to go, turns it into movement, into light, into something that still lives on.
It might be wrapped in Christmas sparkle, but at its core it’s about something far more universal. Connection. The kind that doesn’t depend on words, or distance, age, background or even time.
It reminded me that the things which truly move us aren’t picture-perfect moments, they’re the messy, emotional, human ones. The times we catch someone’s eye and feel understood. Dance with our eyes closed with beads of sweat catching the light of a disco ball. The songs that remind us of who we were, and who we’ve loved. The memories that hurt and heal in equal measure.
That’s what house music has always represented for me: togetherness. That feeling that, for a few minutes, everyone on the dancefloor is part of the same heartbeat. And maybe that’s what love really is too, that pulse that never leaves us, even when life changes shape.
So, when I saw that final scene, the father and son in their quiet embrace, I thought about how love shows up in all its forms, through music, through memory, through a simple gesture that says I see you.
Because love doesn’t fade.
It just finds a new beat.