A new Fiat commercial starring infamous bad boy Charlie Sheen features music by Welsh band Henry's Funeral Shoe.
Dog Scratched Ear features in the new Fiat Abarth advert with cult star Sheen. The advert has gone viral on the internet with almost a million YouTube views in one week.
The advert will be airing on US television during the 'Mad March' basketball season.
M caught up with Aled from Henry's Funeral Shoe, who told us how the song came to be featured in the advert.
How did the song end up as the soundtrack to the advert?
Our record company Alive Records are known for the Dog Scratched Ear kind of sound and Fiat were on the look out for that kind of thing for the advert and asked the label directly. The label put out The Black Keys debut album and that gave them a good profile.
We lucked out, with charlie Sheen in it, it went viral - I'm not that familiar with him actually, but enough to know he's a bit of a bad boy! The video
The song is on our second album. Alive told us that they had been dealing with the car manufaturer for over a month trying to make it happen and it almost didn't come off - originally the advert was supposed to go out over the Super Bowl broadcast but they couldn't decide which celebrity to use.
Alive told us about the whole thing a day before the advert went out on the web as they were wary of disappointing us. We've been very close to having our music appear in various things before and it hasn't quite come off. However, this has gone so much better than we ever dreamed it could, we couldn't pay for this kind of promotion, we could never afford it. Hopefully we can turn it into sales.
We go on tour in the US for a fortnight in June so the idea is to try and get a booking agent out of the profile from the advert. we have an agent for Europe where we do most of our gigs but we'd like to play more festivals and events here.
Some might say we've sold out but we didn't have to make the decision as the label sorted it out for us. We just want to take this opportunity of the music being out there as everyone is struggling these day with illegal downloads and so on. It's a great promotional tool.
Can you tell me how you wrote the song?
Dog Scratched Ear came about after lots of touring, we just wanted to make an exciting song. It's quite observational, the opening line is ' I've got street-fighting hands and a rock 'n' roll face' and that comes from a festival we did in France whee played alongside a really young band. We were backstage and this kid was watching me - I think he thought i was Keith Richards or something! He kept touching me and saying 'So, you're a real man like me - you've got a rock 'n' roll face', which I thought was a polite way of saying 'you look a mess', after all we had just driven 12 hours in a van to get to the gig!
Once you tour it really does change the way you record. The first album was recorded in a few days but with the second, we really gave some thought to making it exciting in a live setting. At the time we wrote it I was listening to a lot of Bo Diddley, so we wanted to make it really percussive. I just wrote it in the bedroom with a guitar and then took the riff into practice and it went from there.
www.henrysfuneralshoe.com
