Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire Italian entrepreneur and former prime minister who died Monday (June 12) in Milan at age 86, can be remembered as certainly one of Italy’s most controversial leaders. However earlier than his profession in politics, document labels he fashioned within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties helped launch the careers of well-liked Italian artists like Cristina D’Avena, Sabrina Salerno, Ambra Angiolini and Francesco Salvi.
Within the Nineteen Fifties, Berlusconi carried out as a younger crooner on cruise ships, the place he met his buddy and lifelong skilled companion Fedele Confalonieri, who would later develop into chairman of Mediaset, Berlusconi’s media big.
Music performed an enormous position within the origins of his media empire. Within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, Berlusconi was an influential government within the Italian music business. In 1981, after founding Fininvest, the holding firm that owned Mediaset, he launched his first document firm, 5 File (renamed RTI Music in 1991).
Impressed by American songwriters, French chansonniers and the melancholic, existentialistic type of singers and songwriters from Genoa, the label initially commercialized the theme songs of the TV collection and packages broadcasted by Mediaset, from cartoons to selection reveals, from quiz reveals to telenovelas. Then it expanded and launched albums by Italian artists corresponding to Gino Paoli, Orietta Berti, Patty Pravo and Bruno Lauzi.
Inside such a large creative spectrum, Berlusconi’s enterprises launched the careers of artists who shortly grew to become immensely well-liked (and transgenerational) in Italy: D’Avena, Angiolini, Salvi, Sabrina Salerno (her track “Boys” grew to become successful in Europe), Lorella Cuccarini, Giorgio Faletti and singer/comic Fiorello.
5 File had a robust reference to dance music. Take Change, an Italo-disco challenge produced by Italian musician and arranger Mauro Malavasi, noticed their album The Glow of Love (1980) attain No. 29 on the Billboard 200 — a primary for an Italian dance manufacturing.
The label additionally launched Joe Easy’s “Promised Land” in Italy and works from Double Dee (home music from Ancona, Italy) and Novecento.
After leaving workplace in 2011, Belusconi briefly revived his music profession, releasing a brand new album, True Love, with longtime musical collaborator Mariano Apicella. The three-time Italian premier didn’t sing on the album however co-wrote all 11 songs, which had been a group of affection songs and jazz preparations.
Berlusconi’s greatest success within the music business was D’Avena, the queen of theme songs for cartoons in Italy. In a profession spanning 40 years, D’Avena has stayed related and bought greater than 7 million copies of singles and albums, together with compilations corresponding to Fivelandia and Cristina D’Avena con i suoi amici in TV. The one “Kiss Me Licia” alone bought over 200,000 copies, reached No. 7 on the Italian chart and was licensed Gold.
D’Avena’s greatest hit was “Canzone dei Puffi,” the theme track of the Italian model of The Smurfs cartoon. Launched in 1982, it bought 500,000 copies and have become her first Gold document.
“I all the time hoped this second wouldn’t come,” D’Avena tells Billboard Italy about Berlusconi’s passing. “To me, he was immortal. However watching his final interviews you might inform that he was sick. … I’m feeling an enormous loss. … An vital piece of our nation is gone.”
