The life of Nino d’Angelo should be told in flash, forgetting the blond bob, forgetting A pair of jeans is a T-shirt. The flashes are the ones you didn’t expect or didn’t want to see. Miles Davis, for one thing. The genius of jazz loved him. The interview exists. It is 1986 and, on the Courier service, Davis tells Paolo Biamonte: “The other day, I heard an Italian sing that shocked me: Nino D’Angelo. Formidable, I could play his music ». He had heard it in a taxi and bought the entire discography. The flashes are certain scenes, but also certain responses from Nino. Like: «My bass player warned me in the morning. He goes: “Did you see what Miles Davis said?” I say “but who is it? A new Napoli player? ”. Honestly, I didn’t know this Davis. I only heard the Neapolitan singers. Perhaps, the Beatles I would have recognized ». The Beatles, in fact. The fifth of the Beatles, Billy Preston, the one he played in Let it be
, what he wrote You’re So Beautiful for Joe Cocker, Nino had it on his record: «He was in Italy and he came to me, because at Miles Davis’s house they put my songs. I was making a record, he liked it coffee bean, he began to play the piano. And then he played it on the record, he’s the one playing it. Almost no one wrote it ». So many things almost nobody wrote. Another flash: 1998, Quirinale, in the presence of Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, the candidates for the David di Donatello for the soundtrack parade: “I was there for the music of Tano to die for by Roberta Torre. The president comes and tells me he liked the movie. I feel myself put a hand on my shoulder and I hear Roberto Benigni calling in my ear: you have won the David. So it was. Benigni was a candidate with Nicola Piovani for Life is Beautiful
, he was my opponent and he wasn’t just anybody. I beat an Academy Award, but that too no one wrote it ». Nino D’Angelo, is in the kitchen of the house. Today, she has short white hair, she says “I like it. I am 64 years old. I’m a grandfather now“. Lives in Rome. From Naples, he left in 1986, after the first Sanremo. “A betrayal of his city,” the detractors said, but he now explains: “I left because they shot twice at my house ».
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Who? Because?
“The Camorra, they wanted the money.”
Lace?
“They saw success. They phoned, threatened. The second time, they fired into the house, the bullet entered the room where my son Vincenzo slept in the cot. We escaped in one day. A shame, because I owe everything to the city, the Neapolitans adore me: they like that one of them made it without help ».
In Naples, this year, the inhabitants of San Pietro a Patierno, where he was born, made a collection to commission the famous Jorit a murals with his face.
«It seemed to me too big a thing. I asked myself: why did they do it for me? ».
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And what has been answered?
«Because I represent the real periphery, the one where no one passes: you have to go there on purpose. Now I have found the neighborhood as I left it: the same. Looking at the desperation in people’s eyes I started to cry and thought that today I would be so old, with children living to survive. I have the desire to write again and the album that comes out on October 15th was born ».
Toni Servillo gave her a speech in «Pane e Canzone»: «Day and night have the same taste where the rain never fell on umbrellas, but on the heads of kids who were born already grown up». What water was raining on the head of Nino as a child?
«There, there was nothing at all. Nobody told us that school was important. I didn’t like studying, because nobody in the family liked it. In eighth grade, to promote myself, the professors made me sing the Marseillaise. Those are places where you are born to be nothing ».
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And how does one become something and someone in a place like this?
«Encountering the culture. When you don’t know, you can’t defend yourself. Thanks to my talent, I met people who taught me, even just by going to dinner ».
Dad shoemaker, six children. What child were you?
“I was the oldest, the one who, when dad gets sick, finishes middle school and goes to work. One day the Italian teacher sent for my mother, who immediately gave me two slaps: she was sure that the teacher wanted to complain. Instead she told her that when I wrote, it didn’t look like me: the dialectic was imperfect, but I wrote thoughts bigger than me. He said: he is a poet who cannot speak. This is how the disc that comes out is called:
The poet who cannot speak
. He wanted me to continue my studies, but I had to take the place of a sick dad, selling ice cream at the station. There I sang and people emptied my banquet. Then I started singing at weddings. “
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How did your family manage to find 500 thousand lire to make her record the first album?
«Annamaria’s father, my wife, was a songwriter. He found me at an amateur festival, saw the talent and practically took me to his house: it made me feel normal, never last, it made me realize there was a way. Annamaria was 11 years old, then she grew up and we fell in love. In-laws and parents made a debt to let me do a single. The dramas were in vogue, I wrote
My story – o ‘mugging
. To sell it, I pretended to be the brother of a prisoner, I said: buy it, it must support the family. I sold 50 thousand copies ».
Success comes by singing about love. “‘Nu Jeans e’ na T-shirt” sells a million copies.
“One million the original: with the counterfeit cassettes, it must have been five million.”
The film grossed almost as much as “Flashdance” and, in the South, more than “Flashdance”.
“I had guessed a new trend. Before Mario Merola used to say that I was his heir in the drama, but I didn’t want to be number two and the drama sang underworld, guappi and I didn’t like this. I made up my mind to talk about love to boys. Except that the music critics didn’t know where to put me: when the neomelodics were born, they made me a neomelodic, but I had already made 15 years of success ».
Afterwards it was Goffredo Fofi who cleared it through customs, when «Tiempo» came out in ’93. He wrote that few realized he was “a true musical inventor.”
“I still feel like a cleared man waiting to go through customs.”
What do you need to feel cleared of customs?
«At the Tenco award they don’t even know my songs. Going on TV is not easy. For years, it was easier for me to have the Olympia in Paris, the Royal Albert Hall in London or the Madison Square Garden in New York than a theater in Naples. To have the San Carlo and celebrate Sergio Bruno it was necessary to arrive Roberto De Simone who signed the structural chamber composition. Perhaps, for some people, the helmet I have had for years still has it on my head ».
What is Nino D’Angelo singing now?
“Since I cut the helmet, the last ones. The social. In the new record,
Chillo is comme to you
it’s about a black guy who speaks Neapolitan. Before I had done
Beautiful Italy
, that if another had written it everyone would have talked about it: “Italy c’a nun va ‘, Italia cu too many rich ca nun vonno pava’ …”.
Bella
, instead, he talks about Naples without naming it: “Bella ca non tene l’ucocie, ma canta vote e chiagnuto …”. I would like to be known for
Bella
and for
Ciucculatina d’a ferrovia
».
When and why do you cut the helmet?
“When my mother died, I got depression. I was successful, finally mom lacked nothing and she suddenly left. I recovered when I saw my son Toni with my dress on, he was beautiful and I thought: I can’t stay like this, I have two children. Another Nino was born, a father Nino, no more songs. I left from Sanremo, from
Without and jacket and tie
».
His son Toni, director, he said: “For me my father was like Michael Jackson, but he was only interested in reading Raffaele Viviani and Viviani taught me everything: how to write, how to make a scene, how to give voice to those who don’t have it”.
«Viviani is the only one I have studied so much. And do you think that when Servillo invited me to see him at the theater the headline in the newspapers was that I was going to see Viviani, like the ignoramus who doesn’t know Viviani. Instead it was between him and Peter Gabriel that I learned to put together music and contaminations ».
He later named the Trianon theater in Forcella after Viviani, which he directed twice. Why did they throw out the first one even though the subscribers had grown from 67 to four thousand?
«Because Antonio Bassolino made me do it, then he changed the policy and they fired me. Maybe my theater brought culture to people who don’t count and this seemed dangerous ».
Can you give us a souvenir of your friend Maradona?
“He was talking and dribbling from shoulder to shoulder. Right left. Left right. He danced and made speeches of exaggerated humility ».
She married at 21, his wife was 15.
«We made the fuitina. Parents said we were small to get married. I would do it again, we have two intelligent, good children, Toni graduated, almost Vincenzo. They are 42 years of marriage and four grandchildren ».
He has written hundreds of love songs. Always loving only one woman, doesn’t inspiration end?
«No, if love doesn’t end. Now it will come out
Sultanto was lost to you
. At a certain age, the people you love are afraid of physically losing them.
’A pair of jeans is a T-shirt
I wrote it while watching Annamaria cleaning the house. I told her right away: this is the song of life. In fact it has solved all our problems ».
How much does he still say “I love you” to his wife?
«We tell each other every moment. We are telling ourselves this even when we do not tell ourselves ».
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September 21, 2021 (change September 21, 2021 | 23:13)
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