- Product/Brand - Halfords
- Spot - Does Anything Beat A Bike?
- Song Title - Zoraide
- Composer - Poti
- Publisher - Copyright Control
- Artist - Cairobi
- Record Co - Week Of Wonders
- Music Supevisor - Dirty Soup
- Ad Agency - Mother
- Creatives - Paddy Fraser, Hannah Tarpey, James Sellick
- Film Company - Somesuch & Co
- Film Director - Aiofe McCardle
- Air Date - 29/10/14
“Fresh… modern… timeless… nostalgic…not what you’d expect on Christmas Day” were among the buzz words in the tricky music brief prepared for Dirty Soup supervisor Raife Burchill by Halfords’ ad agency Mother when work started in August on the spare part specialist’s Christmas 2014 TV campaign Does Anything Beat A Bike.
But with little more than a month to go before the scheduled broadcast date of November 8, it was the film’s Irish director Aoife McArdle (best known for promos by Brian Ferry and James Vincent McMorrow) who finally came up with the eerily off-beat soundtrack by indie band Cairobi which puts the pedal power into this ad.
Often compared to Animal Collective and Flaming Lips, the cleverly-named multi-national five piece are recent signings to Week Of Wonders, the East London label owned by one-time Simon Fuller acolyte and former Little Boots manager Karen Tillotson.
“Aoife and I are old friends and we often talk creatively about what we are working on,” Tillotson tells adbreakanthems.
“She said she was looking for a particular sound for the Halfords advert. Off the back of her shared references I sent her some new tracks by Cairobi and she thought Zoraide fitted the footage and the feel perfectly.”
And to prove that it’s not always what you know but who you know which can spell success in the sync sector, Mother agreed.
“It was the first track we put to picture and everyone immediately thought we had found something special,” says Hannah Tarpey, one of the small team of Mother creatives responsible for the spot.
“Even after falling for this Cairobi song we continued trying more. But, with only days to go before we aired, nothing surpassed it.”
Week Of Wonders releases Zoraide as a single on December 15.
And with digital pre-sales reportedly very healthy, an EP ready to drop in February and Free Trade booking agent Paul Boswell penciling in dates for the festival season, it looks like Halfords is helping Cairobi saddle up for the summer.
