Of the 644 songs he wrote, the most famous was called Lights at San Siro – or “lights at San Siro” in French, named after the hill on which the emblematic stadium of Milan was built. Singer-songwriter and producer Andrea Lo Vecchio died Wednesday, February 17, four days before the “derby” was held between the two main football clubs in his city, AC Milan and Inter.
Just as symbolically, his disappearance coincides with the preparations for the high mass of transalpine song, the Sanremo festival, of which the 71e edition will be held from March 2 to 6. Lo Vecchio was undoubtedly one of the most prolific authors of tele-hook – he even managed, for a time, a water ski school in the Ligurian seaside resort.
Worn by stars such as Mina, Raffaella Carra or Dori Ghezzi, her songs were, between the 1960s and 1970s, the mirror of a sensual, plural and free femininity. Died at the age of 78 as a result of the Covid-19, this man in love with encounters did not have harsh enough words against the consequences of the pandemic: “This Covid is really awful: it takes you away from everything and everyone, and leaves you in total solitude”, he wrote in a final message posted on Facebook on February 17.
Lyrical and elegiac fashion
Andrea Lo Vecchio was born on October 7, 1942, in Milan, to a banker father and a music teacher mother. Its vocation of songwriter, as songwriters are known in Italy, became more acute in Milanese cabarets – he was to direct two of them, Le Clochard and le Student’s Club, in the mid-1960s. It is under this cap of figure of the night that he chaperones a certain Bobby Solo. A sort of transalpine epigone of Elvis Presley, Solo triumphed in 1964 in Sanremo, and in the rest of the world, with the ballad A tear on the face : “I wrote it with the help of Andrea, who never claimed copyright from me”, will recognize the singer, fair play.
In 1967, Lo Vecchio found a first alter ego in the person of Roberto Vecchioni, a Milanese like him. The pair sign pearls in spades, in a lyrical and elegiac fashion: Will be (Gigliola Cinquetti, 1968), You didn’t deserve a song (Fausto Leali, 1969), False (Isabella Iannetti, 1970), A moment (Iva Zanicchi, 1970), The Legend of Olaf (Ornella Vanoni, 1971)… Et Lights at San Siro (1971), therefore, a memory of a youthful love running through the mist, behind the wheel of a Fiat 600: this is where Vecchioni’s acting career began.
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