Joke ringtone is inexplicable phenomenon
By Adrian Turpin

Britain is set to have its first number one hit inspired by a ringtone. Adrian Turpin traces the growth of a phenomenon from Scandinavian internet joke to international irritant.

London: It wasn't quite an apology. But almost. "I don't know what to say," said Erik Wernquist. "Really I don't. Some people obviously think this thing is worth paying for."

History has a precedent for Swedish innovators who have had cause to regret their creations. Alfred Nobel endowed his peace prize as an act of contrition for developing dynamite. Wernquist's crime against humanity is of a different order, although Britain's commuters, teachers, parents and television viewers might disagree.

He is the man who put flesh on the Crazy Frog ringtone and began its transformation from a Scandinavian internet joke to a multi-million-pound international annoyance.

If you hadn't seen or heard Crazy Frog (which seems hard to believe), you would not immediately take him for a frog.

Unlike most amphibians, he is blue not green, walks on two legs and has a belly button. The latter seems a bit superfluous for a creature hatched from spawn, but then so does the 1950s-style motorcycle cap.

Between the creature's legs there used to hang a small blue set of genitals (more like an epiglottis than a penis), but after a deluge of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) this has been discreetly covered with a black blob, at least on television.

Crazy Frog's rivet - now playing on a train or bus near you - is the constipated phut of a badly serviced East European car driven by a boy racer who has just passed his test: "a ding ding ding dinga ding ding..."

The fact that this makes anyone over the age of 18 want to stick their fist through the television screen and grab him and his little blue nadgers has clearly not harmed his prospects. To date, the company Jamster has made more than £10m from people downloading Crazy Frog ringtones.

As if that weren't enough, this week a CD version of the song produced by the German dance act Bass Bumpers has been outselling Coldplay's new single by more than four to one.

More than 400 000 copies of the single - which splices the frog theme with Harold Faltermayer's Beverly Hills Cop theme tune, Axel F - have been ordered, according to the label Gut Records.

On Sunday, Britain will have its first-ever ringtone-inspired number one.

"Kids obviously find it cute and cool," said Gennaro Castaldo, a spokesman for the HMV record shops, attempting to explain the phenomenon, "but students and even office workers seem to be drawn by its kitsch, ironic appeal. The only real issue is whether the record label can press enough copies to keep up with the huge demand."

No one has been more surprised at Crazy Frog's success than Daniel Malmedahl, a 24-year-old computer salesman from Gothenburg in Sweden. Malmedahl was 17 when he decided to record an impression of his friends' motorbikes on his computer. Why? Just because.

"We had mad laughs because it's so characteristic, this two-stroke engine sound. My friends found it funny when I started imitating it," Malmedahl said.

Before long, a friend had posted it on the internet where it was seen by a Swedish television researcher who invited Malmedahl to "perform" the sound live, and that is where ordinarily his 15 minutes of fame might have stopped.

But the sound was already beginning to strike out on its own. On one internet site, the Insanity Test, the sound was set against a picture of a red Formula One racing car. The joke - if that's what it was - was that anyone who looked at the two together for a minute and started to laugh, was insane.

It took a long time for the sound to attach itself to a body - which is where Erik Wernquist, a 27-year-old designer of 3-D graphics, who had taken the Insanity Test, enters. He decided to draw an animated frog to mouth the sound.

"I wanted to make something that made an annoying noise and looked annoying," he says.

Accurately, Wernquist called his new creation The Annoying Thing. Posting his work on the internet, he appealed for the person who created the sounds to come forward. When Malmedahl rang him, he was initially suspicious. Only when he performed the familiar phut-phut tune on the phone did he believe him. Nobody could fake that.

One of the strangest things about the whole Crazy Frog story is that the two men who created it haven't even met.

So is Crazy Frog anything more than just another novelty record? After all, Gut Records were the label responsible for Right Said Fred's I'm Too Sexy For My Shirt.

Graham Brown is the chief executive of the consultancy group Wireless World Forum (WWF). Does he like Crazy Frog?

"I'd rather not talk about that. They're one of our clients."

"What Crazy Frog tells you," he says, "is that young people have a lot of liquid cash and they're spending it less and less on traditional forms of music."

The figures are astonishing. The amount spent globally by young people under 25 on mobile phones is $100 billion a year.

Brown says children spend eight times as much on mobile phones as they do on music. Recent research by the WWF shows that this year young people in the UK will spend £150m on ringtones, ring-back tunes and downloading songs directly on to mobile phones.

The average British teenager now spends £26 a year on ringtones. The record industry has been slow to catch up," says Brown.

In Britain, it is not just the frog's nudity that has led to complaints to the ASA but the volume of adverts. The watchdog has shrugged its shoulders and said it does not have the power to legislate.

Crazy Frog haters should prepare to be bombarded by similar campaigns for a hateful menagerie of unlovable anthropomorphic characters, like the sickly Sweetie Chick.

At least Wernquist has shown a little contrition.

"I don't want this to be what I'm remembered for," he says. As for Malmedahl: "I have a lot of sounds," he says. - The Independent