Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

VIRAL

Foo Fighters pledge Italy visit after viral video

Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters has promised to bring the American band to a central Italian town after a video put together by Italian musicians performing the group’s “Learn to Fly” went viral.

Published: 3 August 2015 10:11 CEST

Foo Fighters pledge Italy visit after viral video

Over 1,000 musicians performing there performing the group’s “Learn to Fly” in a park in Cesena. Screengrab/YouTube

The video below clocked up over five million views in just 48 hours when it was posted on YouTube late last week.

The project kicked off in spring 2014, when Fabio Zaffagnini and several friends were looking for “a mad idea” to convince the rock band to come to Cesena, in the Emilia-Romagna region, to play for them.

“We’re coming, I swear,” Grohl said. “We’ll see each other soon.”

After a year's planning, 1,000 fans met up in a park in the city on July 26th to thrash out the song on drums, guitars and microphones, belting out the hit tune together as the sun set.

“One thousand people, one thousand rockers, come at their own cost from all over the country, for a single song, your song,” Zafagnini says at the end of the video.

“So we ask you, the Foo Fighters, to come and play for us here in Cesena,” he said.

Posted on Thursday on YouTube, the video had over been viewed over five million times by late Friday and over 16 million by Monday morning.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.

Become a Member to leave a comment.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

Url copied to clipboard!