WHEN the new movie Walk the Line about the life of Johnny Cash opens in London next week, cinema-goers will be treated to a selection of his songs in London Underground stations.

Buskers are being hired for £40 a day to sing Cash’s hits as part of a marketing ploy to sell CDs. Record companies have discovered that one of the best ways to promote a new release is to pay buskers to sing its songs to some of the 3m people who use the Tube each day.

The stunt will surprise many travellers who believe buskers are enterprising musicians or beggars who have learnt a skill. Instead, they are helping the record companies to take advantage of a deal that lets licensed buskers stand on one of 34 pitches in Tube stations for two hours at a time once they have passed an audition.

Hiring them to sing other people’s hits is particularly useful when the artists are no longer alive, like Cash, or rarely perform live, like the Eurythmics, the band fronted by singer Annie Lennox.

So when the Bafta-nominated film about Cash, starring Joaquin Phoenix, plays in London’s West End next week, Tube buskers dressed in black will be singing its title theme.

Other Cash songs will be performed to promote Ring of Fire, a greatest hits collection spanning the singer’s 50-year career up to his death in 2003. The buskers will be given a copy of the CD and asked to sing two songs from it every hour. A test exercise just before Christmas is said to have helped to push the album into the charts.

One of the buskers, Andy Thornes, 36, from Streatham, south London, who was performing at Tottenham Court Road station last week, said: “It is a good pay day for us. I like to play my own stuff most of the time, but the other day I left one two-hour pitch with just £1.80 to show for it.

“Anyway, I like Johnny Cash. I’ll even throw in songs which aren’t on the album like Ghost Riders in the Sky.

“Mind you, another record company promised a £50 bonus whenever one of their executives heard a busker sing songs from a particular album and we are still waiting to be paid.”

Music industry insiders claim it was the group Travis who first conceived the idea of using buskers. The ploy was then used to promote the soundtrack for Love Actually, the Hugh Grant film, and recently for a Eurythmics greatest hits collection, when buskers sang songs such as Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) to reintroduce people to material some of them last heard in the 1980s.

The Sony BMG record company paid 34 buskers £150 each to play two hours of Eurythmics songs for three days, a total outlay of £5,100. A spokesman for the company said: “I hope it gave commuters a chuckle. Sweet Dreams is not the usual song you would hear on the Tube, and it made you look up. So you just try to put it into the promotional mix of posters and TV ads.

“It works really well for a greatest hits album by a well known act, but it won’t work yet for new bands like the Arctic Monkeys.”

David Livingstone, in charge of marketing at Working Title Films which released Love Actually, said: “We gave 25 buskers Love Actually T-shirts and asked them to sing the Beatles’ All You Need is Love. It’s better to do it with familiar material. You can’t really get buskers to learn new songs. It might be all right for Britney Spears, but not some bloke in his fifties with a beard and an acoustic guitar.”

London Underground said: “The busking scheme has been a huge success since it was launched in May 2003. The scheme resulted from customer demand for talented musicians to be licensed to perform at Underground stations. Customers’ surveys have been overwhelmingly in support of the busking scheme.

“The buskers are not paid by London Underground and rely on commuters’ generosity. We are investigating payments made to buskers to get them to play specific music.”

Some buskers are also less enthusiastic about the innovation. One banjo player at Monument station said: “I am a bit ambivalent about the idea. Busking, which used to be an alternative lifestyle, is now part of the corporate world.”

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