The first night of Sanremo is always a splendid blend of joy and anticipation, where you have to wait and see what your favourites bring to the show, and get surprised by singers that you'd never have imagined would give you such a thrill. And it was very much like that with Achille Lauro's performance tonight. While I absolutely loved his slightly ill-placed effort with Rolls Royce last year, Mrs Apocalypse hated it in equal measure.
So I was gratified to see her standing on the sofa and punching the air in delight with each new pose and preen from our lapsed mumble rapper here. For the pair of us it was absolutely the performance of the night, from the unexpected entry, to the camp-yet-still-well-hard interplay between himself and his guitarist, and the utterly massive build to the end.
Where last year was his saw thumb testing of the water, this year he's plumbed right into the very essence of Sanremo, yet still managing to punk it up some considerable levels.
We just wonder what he's likely to wear for his next two appearances!
***STOP PRESS***
We learned late last evening that the whole performance was an allegory for the story of St Francis of Assisi divesting of his worldly goods and giving himself over to God. Blimey! We also learned that he'd gained in the region of ten times the views on YouTube than all the other contestants. So he may have had a relatively lowly ranking on the first scores table, but he's certainly the artist that everyone is talking about!
He seemed to be enjoying every minute of it, loving prancing about in his costume in front of the grey-haired front section of the audience. And yes, what will await audiences when he whips back his cloak on Thursday? (Probably a well-cut Italian suit!)
ReplyDeleteWho could have prepared us for how that escalated!
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