When Fool's Garden released their Dish Of The Day album in 1995, the five-man band never expected it would open new horizons outside their home market in Germany.
Lemon Tree, which was the first single taken from the album, has become a big hit in Europe and Southeast Asia.
Formed in 1991, the five members include Peter Freudenthaler, who is the lead singer and song-composer of the band, guitarist Volker Hinkel, bassist Thomas Mangold, keyboard player Roland Rohl and Ralf Wochele on drums. They recently visited Hong Kong for a short promotion and to accept The Best International Pop Song Of The Year award in a music award presentation organised by local Hit Radio.
There are apparently about 17 versions of Lemon Tree on the market, including the Mandarin version performed by Taiwanese singer Tarcy Su, and most of them are special remix dance versions of the song. Even though the band have not listened to all of them, they were quite happy with the other versions.
'When we did the promotion tour in Taiwan, we were standing beside the girl [Tarcy Su] on a TV show and the feeling was very strange, because you knew that she had sung a cover version of your song,' he said.
Among all the different versions there was only one which they thought was not good enough - 'the German version is really awful', they said.