From the Telegraph, London (
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/27/nfrog27.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/27/ixnewstop.html):
Top of the hate paradeBy Lesley Thomas
(Filed: 27/05/2005)
Be-ding ding ding de-ding ding ding. Irritated yet? Unless you never take public transport, walk down high streets or watch television, you will have heard the chafing sound of the Crazy Frog.
First it was an in-joke on the internet. Then it was a ring tone for mobile phones. Now, the ring-de-ding-ding sound is the refrain of what is set to be the biggest-selling record of the year.
On Sunday, Axel F by the Crazy Frog will be number one in the singles charts. It has shifted more than 150,000 in a few days, twice the number Oasis sold to get to number one with their comeback single, Lyla, last week.
Guy Holmes, of Gusto Records, which is producing the single, is unapologetic about giving a platform to the noise more annoying than an army of traffic wardens.
"If you haven't got a sense of fun, you won't like it," he said.
The result is a re-working of the theme from the film Beverly Hills Cop with interjections from the frog.
Most who hear it are appalled. Children and "big kids" (Mr Holmes's explanation of the demographic) cannot get enough of it.
BBC Radio 1 has banned the Crazy Frog from its playlist. "We've played it once on a request slot," said a spokesman, "but we've had more people asking us not to broadcast it than to put it on."
The frog, estimated to have generated more than £10 million so far, was spawned seven years ago in a Swedish teenager's bedroom.
Daniel Malmedahl, then a 17-year-old motorbike enthusiast, wanted to impersonate the sound of a two-stroke engine revving up to amuse his friends.
He e-mailed the sound to them, they sent it to their friends and his jape amused a few thousand people.
In 2001, a website picked it up, added a picture of a Formula One racing car to the sound and called it the Insanity Test, the idea being if you could watch the clip for more than a minute without laughing you were certifiable.
Later, Erik Wernquist, a Swedish graphic artist, invented a creature mouthing the sound.
The blue amphibian with a 1950s motorcycle helmet, a wide mouth, bulbous eyes and a belly button is now familiar to most of us. Wernquist called his creation, aptly, Annoying Thing.
Jamba!, the European ring tone company, picked up on the Thing's popularity, bought the rights to sell the sound to mobile phone users and renamed it Crazy Frog.
Malmedahl, 24, said: "I like motorbikes and it was just a little joke for my friends. I didn't really think about it."
He has been paid substantial sums by the ringtone company and the record company. Malmedahl's curious sense of humour has made him "quite rich, yes".
There will be no escape from the frog this summer. Non-internet users are already screaming at their television sets every time the advertisement for the frog appears. Jamba! has taken out advertising slots on prime-time terrestrial television as part of an estimated £5 million marketing campaign for the frog.
Last weekend it appeared in every commercial break on ITV1. The station has had to set up a helpline to deal with the complaints but promises that the campaign will be short.
More than 1,000 viewers have complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the frequency of the advert, but it cannot be taken off the air on such grounds.
A small number of viewers complained about the frog's freakish hint of a penis (designed to make him more irksome, according to Wernquist). The offending area was simply covered with a black rectangle.
There is talk of another single, possibly a whole album of irritating noises. Malmedahl said: "I am interested in all kinds of mechanical sounds. I can do an outboard engine quite well."
