Zidane Butts The Lipszycs To No.1

There’s an even a stronger chance French midfielder Zinédine Zidane’s head-butt on Italian defender Marco Materazzi will be the abiding memory of the 2006 World Cup soccer finals now that the moment has been celebrated in a mega-selling rap record.

Three weeks after France lost the final on a penalty shoot-out, “Head Butt” was blazing out of the country’s radios, televisions and mobile phones.

The overnight success of “Coup de Boule” (which is apparently what the French call a “head butt”) has taken it to No.1 in the singles chart, and it’s all thanks to it being put on the Internet by some hitherto unknown musicians.

“We are in the process of making a miracle,” Warner Music (France) president Thierry Chassagne told the country’s media.

He bought the song from Franck Lascombes and Sébastien and Emmanuel Lipszyc. The Lipszyc brothers, who run a jingle and sound-effects company called La Plage, were said to be “in mourning” the day after the Berlin defeat.

“We were depressed and couldn’t work,” said 31-year-old Sébastien Lipszyc.

“Franck came up with the idea of joining in all this reaction. Our jokes became lyrics and it was finished in half an hour.”

The trio sent their track to 50 friends over the Internet and, three hours later, it was on Skyrock, one of the biggest French radio networks.

They were besieged by mobile telephone companies and, within a couple of days, Warner had outbid two recording companies to market the record.

The video was shot in the Charlety stadium in Paris and features a referee giving an unseen player a red card.

More than 150,000 copies were sold within a week of release and it’s been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

There’s been a rash of Zidane parodies and songs on the Internet, including a video montage of him butting President Chirac.

– John Gammon