It seems that Adriano Celentano's 1972 single Prisencolinensinainciusol is the advert music of choice at the moment, as I've seen (or more accurately heard) it used in two places lately, firstly this easyJet advert and secondly this advert for Poretti beer.
I first encountered Prisencolinensinainciusol while watching this episode of QI, which was first broadcast in December 2014 - I couldn't say whether I watched it "live" or not; probably not. Anyway, Adriano Celentano seems to occupy a similar niche in Italian popular culture as Serge Gainsbourg occupied in France - massively popular and influential in his own country, little-known outside it. Celentano is still alive (at 87), however, Gainsbourg very much is not.
Just to recycle a couple of observations from this tweet (plus a couple of new ones):
- it's an absolute banger and somewhat ahead of its time for 1972
- its influence on Yello's The Race in particular seems clear to me: insistent beat, semi-spoken lyrics, parpy horn stabs and all
- Mike Reid's cover version Freezin' Cold in 89 Twoso was released not, as you might have assumed, in 1989, but in 1974 and is not significantly more comprehensible than the original despite presumably containing some actual English words. He definitely says THAT'S TRIFFIC at one point, though
- Celentano is name-checked (at about 2:05 here) in Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3 by Ian Dury and the Blockheads
The other thing I noticed this week was during a viewing of Beethoven's 2nd, the vastly-inferior sequel to the barely-tolerable Beethoven, featuring a dead-eyed Charles Grodin, phoning in a performance while presumably looking forward to paying off his mortgage, and also some "endearing" kids and a large St. Bernard dog, which we Brits, as custodians of English as she should be spoke, would pronounce St. BER-nard in the proper God-fearing way. The Americans, however, pronounce it as St. Ber-NARD with the emphasis on the second syllable in a slightly weird and jarring way. This is by no means my biggest gripe with the movie, just to be clear.
One of my many other gripes is the seemingly arbitrary use of Jimmy Olsen's Blues by the Spin Doctors as musical overlay to some sort of comedy montage. I have fond memories of the Spin Doctors being A Thing for about five minutes back in the early 1990s and I did at one point have a copy of their album Pocket Full Of Kryptonite, which has a few rockin' tunes on it, along with some more questionable stuff. The good stuff includes the hit singles Two Princes and Little Miss Can't Be Wrong, as well as the opening track Jimmy Olsen's Blues. Now I had no idea who Jimmy Olsen was, but it's pretty clear from the subject matter of the song that he's part of the Superman universe, that being what the song is about, and one of the lines in the song provides the album's title. A song with that clear and specific a set of subject matter is a bit of an odd choice for a film sequence completely unrelated to it; to put it another way, it's a bouncy tune and I guess it works fine as long as you don't listen to the lyrics, something I concede the film's target audience of under-10s probably don't do.
I should add I also remember seeing the Spin Doctors at Glastonbury in what this clip tells me was 1994 - my principal memory is of some crunchy renditions of the hits and a bit too much free-form guitar noodling from the undoubtedly very talented Eric Schenkman, which I evidently had not taken enough drugs to fully appreciate.
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