Walking in the Air

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"Walking in the Air" is a song written by Howard Blake for the 1982 animated film of Raymond Briggs' 1976 graphic novel The Snowman. In the film the song was performed by St. Paul's Cathedral choirboy Peter Auty. For the subsequent single release, which reached number five in the UK pop charts, the vocals were sung by Welsh chorister Aled Jones, who became a popular celebrity on the strength of his performance. "Walking in the Air" has subsequently been covered by several different artists, in a variety of styles.

The song forms the centrepiece of The Snowman, which has become a seasonal perennial on British television. The story relates the fleeting adventures of a young boy, and a snowman who has come to life. In the second part of the story, the boy and the snowman fly to North Pole. "Walking in the Air" is the theme for the journey. They attend a party of snowmen, at which the boy is the only human. They meet Father Christmas and his reindeer, and the boy is given a scarf with a snowman pattern.

The song has remained so popular that a parody version of it was used in a British television commercial in 2006, for an Irn-Bru advert in which the slightly edited song tells the story of a boy and a snowman flying through Edinburgh, over Loch Ness, and over Glasgow. In the commercial, the snowman drops the boy into the snow near George Square after the boy refuses to give the snowman a taste of the drink[1].

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