Celebrating summer though music is best done by letting the outside world mix your playlist. Instead of being bunkered up inside, we best give ourselves over to the choices of others, through song snippets wafting out of open windows and automobiles, that ubiquitous song of the summer blasting at regular intervals from shoe stores and gaudy discotheques, the presets or record collections of your Airbnb hosts, or foreign radio stations in your rental car. If the songs are in another language, the effect is that much more transformative, creating a wonderfully schizophrenic sense of anonymity in incomprehensibility and of endless possibility in the unknown.
Yet it also has to be admitted that there is as much crap music abroad as there is at home. And it will definitely seem to be a much higher percentage at first, because how would you even know where to start, which station to start streaming? It helps when your favorite artists sidestep into a foreign language. Erlend Oye, for instance, a Norwegian singer who makes up half of the much-beloved twee popsters Kings of Convenience (and more recently fronted the now defunct Whitest Boy Alive) last year surprised the world with a rare solo single in Italian. Though the album it was supposed to be a part of hasn’t yet materialized, this first taste is an infectiously strummy tribute to the grand Italian pop tradition of the 1960s and 70s.
More recently, Róisín Murphy (erstwhile frontwoman for Moloko, a band whose very essence was sophistication and sex; a noughties equivalent of Roxy Music) released an EP of covers of Italian hit songs, casting them not as the slinky 1970s stompers they originally were, but as icy disco anthems reminiscent of the Italo dance music the country exported a decade later, in the 1980s. Lucio Battisti’s “Ancora Tu”, the song Murphy covers above, may have sounded a little warmer in 1976, but I prefer the updated version’s sense of controlled cool, which works like a welcome blast of aural air-conditioning. It shares the electronic sheen of Italo, yet its pace is decidedly slower, unlike the often slightly desperate beat of actual Italo hits like “Hie Hie Hie” (a deliberate misspelling of “High High High”). Our Editor-at-large for Italy, Antony Shugaar, kindly reminded me of “Vamos A La Playa”, the Spanish-language Italo hit from 1983, which contrary to what you might imagine or remember is actually rife with 1980s eco-paranoia: The lines “Let’s go to the beach, everybody in sombreros” followed by “the radioactive wind, burns off all your hair”.
Both the Italo artists and Murphy know there’s something about hearing someone sing in a second language, something certainly sexy in its combination of vulnerability and boldness, and most of Murphy’s choices result in winning tributes to the Italian craft of songwriting on the one hand and of production on the other. Two of the tracks were originally recorded by Mina, a powerhouse singer whose work I was first introduced to when she was sampled by Elvis Costello (though you could’ve also heard her on the Goodfellas soundtrack). Debuting at age 18 in 1958, Mina quickly developed from beat girl to pop diva, with 77 charting albums and 77 charting singles spanning every decade since the 1960s.
Her fame spread to other countries as well, with Mina recording hit singles in German, Japanese, and Spanish. Her uncompromising style and life (having a baby with a man who was estranged but still married was enough to get her banned from state TV and radio in 1963) also inspired director Pedro Almodovar, who used her music in Matador and back in 2011 planned a biopic of Mina’s life. In 1964, when her continuing popularity made it impossible for TV and radio to continue to blacklist her, she scored the biggest hit of that year with a cover of “Walk Like A Man” by Jody Miller, an American country singer most famous for her semi-feminist answer song to Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”, called “Queen of the House”.
The Italian charts in those years, like those everywhere around Europe, were awash with big beat records from the US and UK. More raucous than that Miller song, these versions paid tribute to the rough and ready sound of early Beatlemania. The translations were sometimes literal, sometimes largely homophonic (as in the cover of “Love Potion #9” in the mix above), and sometimes the songs were lyrically completely conceived anew (as in the two different versions of Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Coming” above). Aside from those treasures, the above mix has plenty of actual Beatles and Bacharach songs to soundtrack your barbecue or pizza party. Just add some spumante, chianti, or spritzes and you’ll feel like you’re on the back of a vespa being sped through Cinecittá on your way to a fabulous paparazzi-strewn party.
Yet it wasn’t just English songs being imported, Italy has provided at least one deathless classic in the form of Pino Donaggio’s “Lo Che Non Vivo (Senza Te)” (recorded at the same time by Jody Miller), which you’ll know better as Dusty Springfield’s ultimate break-up anthem, “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me”. And if the summer heat is just too oppressive for any language to make sense, Mina’s colleague Adriano Celentano also has a song for you, “Prisencolinensinainciusol”!