Celentano

Celentano, Adriano

b. 6 January 1938, Milan

Singer, actor and film director

Italy’s most famous and most enduring rock’n’roll singer, Celentano was born in Milan of southern parents. While working at various jobs, including as a plumber and a watchmaker, he began doing imitations of Jerry Lewis and Bill Haley at the Santa Tecla Club. In May 1957, backed by the Rock Boys—a group that included, amongst others, Giorgio Gaber and Enzo Jannacci—he sang at the first National Festival of Rock’n’Roll at the Palazzo di Ghiaccio (Ice Palace) in Milan. He proved to be an overwhelming success and was immediately offered a recording contract. His singing career on the rise—and by now becoming notorious as ‘il molleggiato’ (the sprung one) because of the way he moved his body—he performed at the second Italian National Rock’n’Roll

Festival in 1958 and was soon also appearing in films, including being featured in a segment of Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). In 1961 he was inducted into military service but was nevertheless able to continue his singing career, competing in the Sanremo festival that year to perform his now legendary ‘24,000 baci’ (24,000 Kisses). He scandalized the judges by turning his back on the audience and so failed to win, but his song immediately leapt to the top of the hit parade and sold over a million copies, making him the most popular rock’n’roll artist in Italy.

In the following years, having founded his own recording company, the Clan Celentano, he continued to produce a long string of hits in Italy, and performed in rock festivals abroad, thereby acquiring an international reputation. By the mid-1970s, having already appeared in films by Lattuada and Dario Argento, he also began writing, directing and acting in several of his own films. During the next decade, as well as touring intensely both in Italy and abroad, he also appeared in over fifteen films as well as directing himself in Joan Lui (1985), a film in which he played Jesus Christ returning to the earth for the second time.

In 1987 he was invited to host a season of the RAI’s long-running and extremely popular Saturday evening variety programme Fantastico (see Canzonissima) where he caused a furore (as well as increasing the ratings) with his assorted, improvised and often contradictory opinions on everything from consumerism and television advertising to hunting and environmental issues.

Regarded as something of a dinosaur by the younger generation in the 1990s, he nevertheless manages to maintain considerable popularity amongst a more mature audience by regularly releasing new albums, the most recent being a CD recorded in collaboration with another classic rock star, Mina, and an album of new songs written with the lyricist Mogol (see Lucio Battisti) in 1999.