I was a wild lad. A birthday chat with Jovanotti

January will mark thirty years since my first interview with Lorenzo Cherubini, and I have learned at least one thing: there is no point in bringing your own questions. Not because Jovanotti is the sort of celebrity who says ‘I won’t answer that’, but because the man who turns sixty today and still charmingly goes by that nickname makes Leopold Bloom seem at a loss for words, and any question you ask will already strike you, even as you’re formulating it, as utterly tedious and a waste of your time: he will have to answer some triviality, when he could simply let one of his streams of consciousness flow instead.

“Everything sounds like everything else, and it’s a right mess. Copyright came about in the early 20th century; SIAE was invented by Ricordi – it’s not as if it’s three thousand years old. Before that, Mozart used to borrow bits from Haydn: just think of Bach, who was plundered by everyone. I do not believe in plagiarism: if I rework a song, it becomes something else entirely. Rock ’n’ roll always relies on the same riff; it is built on the blues riff that underlies tens of thousands of songs. When I see individuals on Instagram exposing alleged plagiarism at Sanremo, I consider it a pastime, but it is ultimately a load of rubbish. Giorgia’s song contains a passage that is identical to La Sera dei Miracoli: Dalla would have laughed. It does not take anything away: if someone breaks into my house and steals my sheets, I no longer have any sheets; if someone steals my harmonic progression, I still have it. If there were no imitation, the things we do would not exist: you use a language you did not invent yourself. It is a debate for mediocrities, but artists do something else: artists steal. Then some things work, some don’t: you can tell when it’s a cheap copy; there’s no set method. Why do people fall in love? Sometimes you see unlikely couples: why are they together? I don’t know, it’s their business. As De Gregori says: ‘it’s Bob Dylan’s business’.”

I am sorely tempted to walk away from this conversation on his sixtieth birthday, to transcribe only his ramblings, to leave out everything else: what I didn’t ask, what we didn’t talk about, what I realised I couldn’t do. For example, a piece on what happens when your name is Jovanotti and you’re the same age as when your grandfather used to put his dentures in a glass. Twenty years ago, I interviewed him just as he was about to turn forty and I was about to turn thirty-four: reading it back now, that article all about how decrepit we’ve become, I laugh and I cry, and instead of merging with the sky and the mud, I wonder how I could have failed to realise that we were just two children. I do not wish to repeat that mistake, not least because, as I write this, the cover of GQ features 64-year-old Tom Cruise, who is fitter than a twenty-year-old, and well, perhaps when I am eighty I will read this again and say, ‘No, we are old now, not back then.’ At one point, however, Lorenzo mentions the documentary about him due out in November; I have not seen it yet, but in the trailer there is a moment when he says that at the end of a concert ‘something happens whereby the past becomes so much and the future becomes less’, and so I interrupt his outward monologue to quote a passage from Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow: “As your fiftieth birthday approaches, you begin to feel that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it is reduced to nothing. Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens again. Because now there is an enormous and unsuspected presence within you, like an unexplored continent. I’m talking about the past.” She nods: “That’s exactly it. I never gave a damn about my past: now all I care about is my past. I realise it’s there all the time. If I do a Gurdjieff-style exercise of observing myself, I realise that when I’m having dinner with people I’ve become anecdotal; I always have the same stories, my ‘hit’ tales from life.”

I had resolved, as I sat down to speak with Lorenzo—who greeted me wearing a pink shirt open to his navel, a more handsome version of Ranucci—not to transcribe any of his remarks containing famous names: It seems to me that interviews have become a catalogue of ‘tell me about Some Other Famous Bloke’, a bit like the duets on Spotify designed to broaden the audience. I quickly abandon that resolution, however, as our conversation turns to artificial intelligence: I argue that it is dangerous, while he maintains that the more appropriate adjective is ‘intrusive’, adding that, if it does perform tasks, it often does so better than humans, and that ‘so far we haven’t exactly shone: maybe it’ll create a wise government for the planet’. At that point he goes on to explain what Jack Dorsey thinks – the man who owned Twitter before Musk, and who now, partly because he has a house in Tuscany and partly because he’s a friend of a producer Lorenzo has worked with, is one of the people Lorenzo turns to for explanations (Lorenzo is curious about everything; he’d ask anyone to explain things to him).

“Suppose tomorrow you check your bank statement and there’s nothing left; artificial intelligence has made a forced withdrawal: he says that’s the risk. He says you’re all discussing free speech, but free speech is worth nothing; the problem is free will – in other words, that you don’t control what you do, because it’s done for you. He says: ‘The solution is cryptocurrencies.’ But why should artificial intelligence be able to take hold of euros and not bitcoins? ‘I don’t know. Every time I say to him, “Jack, I can’t make head nor tail of what you’re saying: am I stupid, or are you just very clever?” By the time you’ve finished every sentence you say to me, I’ve forgotten the beginning.’

Let us address the “body” chapter immediately. Ever since you broke your femur, it has been impossible to discuss you without referring to your physical condition. “The accident is part of this pattern: I did it because I was putting myself in danger. We were going on holiday for a fortnight and I was taking my bike – a decent husband wouldn’t do that.” He also attributes some responsibility to his wife for taking him to a place that feels like hell for him. “I can’t stay in a gated community where they play golf; it’s against my religion. There’s a story by Junot Díaz that says that’s what hell is like, and he’s Dominican. But anyway, we were going there, we could have been safe...” (Unasked question: but what’s the difference between that and cycling from one concert to another, as you’ve just done? Are the roads in southern Italy any less dangerous than those in the Dominican Republic?)

The story Lorenzo refers to dates from 1998; Junot Díaz’s first-person narrator takes his girlfriend to the very same luxury resort from which Lorenzo would later crash his bicycle whilst trying to escape – Casa de Campo. Díaz describes it as “a resort forgotten by shame”, where the only Dominicans you meet are those who have to change your sheets, and where people go to relax after oppressing the masses. Lorenzo says it felt like being in a Houellebecq novel, and that ‘I don’t have the caustic gaze of the ironic author; I’ve never adopted that approach except in private, so that place is of no use to me at all’. If you cannot turn it into a short story for The New Yorker, what use is a holiday in a place full of golf courses? Toni Morrison used to say that artists, without an art form, become dangerous. To themselves, first and foremost.

After breaking his femur and collarbone, Lorenzo got back on his bike and returned to the stage: “Your body adapts. In this show, I stood still for almost the entire concert; I moved very little. A while ago I saw Bowie on the telly, some of Madonna’s songs, and he was rooted to the stage, making only the tiniest movements. But when he makes that one move, all hell breaks loose. I’ve been a madman for sixty years; now I move even more than any Italian singer ever has, but, compared to how I used to be, less.” I tell him about the time De André asked Guccini how he managed to do those gigs where he’d always be at the front of the stage messing about with the audience; he said he had back pain and had to sit down. He notes that De André was more of an intimate bard, while Guccini was more of a pub-style performer, and then employs his favourite trick: he asks and answers his own questions. “Why do we like artists? Because each one brings a whole world with them. Which ones don’t we like? The ones who seem like someone else.”

He then does another of his favourite things, which is to bring religion into it. “A great song is something you celebrate on an altar; you’re merely an instrument. Now don’t take the mickey out of me, but in the old days you used to offer your son to God: a song is an offering to God. It’s something of which you’re merely an instrument; it comes like grace, which is undeserved and is the most beautiful thing about Christianity. Those others have karma, but karma doesn’t convince me; karma is a rule: a religion cannot be a list of rules. How do you explain greatness? You recognise greatness, but you can’t explain it. How do you explain the Beatles? How do you explain Michael Jackson, Thriller? Yes, then there are the good songs, the hit songs. But greatness?” The most sensible objection to Taylor Swift I’ve ever read is ‘where’s her “Billie Jean”?’ Perhaps greatness is like Don Abbondio’s courage. ‘I agree, but Teresa really likes her.’ And you’re from the generation of parents whose tastes are dictated by their children. “I really do respect her; I respect what she thinks. It frustrates me because she thinks too much – she should think less; thinking is overrated, and she’s very headstrong, too headstrong. But she has excellent taste, and she loves Taylor Swift a lot. But it’s because of the lyrics, and for me, focusing on Taylor Swift’s lyrics is a bit too much.”

When we meet, Lorenzo—who at one point in this conversation casually remarks, “The South is still the one Camus wrote about” – has just used a break in the tour to visit Padre Pio’s shrine; he is even wearing the T-shirt and is enthusiastic about the merchandise. He explains to me that sales are down a bit compared to the start of the century, the heyday of the two series on Rai 1 and Canale 5. He explains that he has become a devotee only recently, having previously taken little interest in Padre Pio due to a lack of written works: “He never wrote anything; Saint Benedict wrote The Rule, Saint Francis wrote The Canticle of the Creatures, Saint Catherine wrote far too much – in fact, I haven’t read her, because she’s just like you, writing endless Substacks, those bloody letters to emperors: she was a pain in the arse. He didn’t write; he only replied orally, or by teleportation” (note for critics who take offence at the tone: yes, Lorenzo knows it’s called bilocation and that Padre Pio wasn’t Captain Kirk).

“I was the internet before the internet even existed: I was the internet; I was a hypertext. The confusion, the crossroads: they’ve always been part of my life. I was lucky enough to grow up in an era that only took shape later on. It’s a stroke of luck to have been born on that very street: here I have the Vatican, and here I have the Rome that, back in the 1970s, was full of sheep. Today Monte del Gallo is a trendy neighbourhood; when I was a child, there were fields, there were workshops where they took stolen spare parts – it was a whole Pasolinian world; the world of Mamma Roma was right behind my house, and in front of it was the Vatican, the cardinals, the Council, the wonder, the history. In my class there was a boy whose mother was a prostitute. I was unaware of this; to me she was a remarkable woman with very fair, voluminous hair. Occasionally she would come to collect him, and then my classmates told me, ‘Marco’s mother is a prostitute’, although I did not fully grasp what that meant; I sensed something dangerous about her – she wore knee-high boots. That experience broadened my perspective, and people often fail to grasp this aspect of me. Thank goodness I had that early influence, and that I like Fellini. I’m a proper Catholic: Jesus Christ performs his first miracle at the wedding at Cana. Then he heals people, but the first thing he does when he enters the scene is to do with the celebration. For me, it’s inconceivable to tell others what to do; I’m curious, and I always stay a bit on the sidelines of situations, but I do go and have a look. I don’t want to be part of the scene. I started out doing rap and gave it up because rap had become a scene: people were talking about Italian rap; I didn’t like the idea of being pigeonholed, but what can you do? I am who I am. I’m not convinced that Degas wanted to be categorised as an Impressionist.”

Jovanotti wasn’t meant to be Jovanotti, which to me always seems a brilliant illustration of just how daft those slogans about chasing your dreams are: sometimes your talents are things you stumble upon, not something you plan for. “When I was a lad, I used to watch Gigi Proietti on the telly; he ran this drama school, and I thought, ‘Maybe when I finish secondary school, I’ll try to get in.’ I didn’t want to write songs; I wanted to be a DJ. I had no ambitions – when I started working in a nightclub, as far as I was concerned, it was all over; I’d made it. I thought maybe I’d become a great dance music producer, like Moroder, or perhaps I’d have my own radio show. I’d done an audition for Discoring. Cecchetto rang me and said, ‘My wife saw you working in the nightclub; she liked you – come to Milan.’ I said, ‘Claudio, I’ll come, but I’ve already done an audition for Discoring and they’ve taken me on.’ He replied, ‘I don’t want to influence you, but bear in mind that these opportunities only come round once.’ Deep down, I felt that Discoring was already a bit old-fashioned, because it was on Rai Uno, whereas Deejay Television was cutting-edge. I wrote the songs because Claudio told me to. It would have gone well anyway, but with Claudio I learnt a lot. ‘Self-esteem’ doesn’t mean making demands, in my view: ‘self-esteem’ means knowing where you stand. I’m doing this, it’ll be useful to me, won’t it? I’m out and about amongst people; maybe I’ll even learn something. I wanted to leave home, to be independent, but I never asked for any payment; I always said, ‘It’s up to you’.” (Unasked question: you have to move to Milan, perhaps to work at Deejay, and in the middle of the night you wake your mum up and she gives you five hundred thousand lire to last you until you get paid; that sort of starting from scratch is something that will never happen to Teresa. Is that an advantage or a disadvantage?)

At one point he says to me, ‘Back when iTunes was around and you could give ratings, I’d give it five stars without a second thought: I used a fake name and’d write “brilliant album, Jovanotti’s best album”’, so I ask him to tell me my favourite Jovanotti anecdote. It was 2002; one of his albums wasn’t doing as well as usual. He had a blog and, much to the horror of PR professionals, decided to write that there were so many unsold CDs that the record label was using them to tile the bathrooms. “It was quite a story: it’s Christmas and I’m a Jovanotti album, and there are loads of us here in the warehouses, and I see the other albums being taken out, and I wave to them saying ‘Merry Christmas, where are you off to?’, ‘We’re off to other people’s homes’, and ‘we’ll be spending Christmas here, unsold, and there are loads of us’. Universal called me asking if I’d gone mad; the newspapers ran articles about ‘the artist’s sincerity’.” And there were no social media back then. Just imagine today – they’d be feeding off it for a month.

“Simone Weil said that attention is a form of prayer. It’s true: attention is already a prayer, and I’ve learnt how important it is, but I haven’t learnt how to practise it. One of the – justified – criticisms I receive at home is that I only think of myself, and it is true, but what can I do about it? The Instagram gurus tell you that your energy goes where you direct your attention. I, for example, reject all ‘entertainment crime’: I prefer to focus my attention on Heidi. She is all on Amazon Prime, and she is lovely. ‘Unfortunately, there’s no Candy Candy.’ This business of attention reminds me that, in that first radio interview twenty-nine years ago, your new song was Bella, and the first thing I asked you was why you’d pretended to be a baker to write a love song, and you said that love needs to be looked after just like bread. “Thank goodness. I didn’t remember that bit, but bread is a symbol – if you’re not careful, it burns. Morandi says that if you mention mum and milk in a song, it’ll be a hit, but I reckon that’s a line of reasoning he came up with later; it’s all Dalla’s brainchild – he was the sort of bloke who’d tell you exactly what to put in your songs.”

On Morandi, on their friendship in old age – “he’s younger than me; he rejects old age, whilst I’m embracing it. I like old lions, because in this line of work I realise that lasting a long time is incredibly difficult” – and on the songs he writes for him, at one point he’ll tell me: “It’s not a collaboration, it’s a friendship: it’s something else entirely”; and also: “He has an instinct for show business like no other; Celentano perhaps has that sort of animal instinct for the stage”. I ask him whether he, too, has found – as I have – that it was only as an adult that he realised just how precious the older generation are, and whether he’s regretted not paying more attention to some revered masters when he was a lad. “Once I was at the airport waiting for my luggage, and Bruno Lauzi was there. He came over to me, very kindly, and I treated him a bit like an elderly gentleman: ‘Ah, nice to meet you.’ Then, years later, I heard one of his songs and thought: ‘Blimey, this is an absolute cracker – just listen to how well it’s written.’ But since he used to write children’s songs when I was a teenager, that’s how I’d pigeonholed him, and that day I wasn’t as respectful as I should have been.”

Do we become like our parents as we get older? “My dad thought he had a divine right to everything; he was a real rock star, a master of spouting rubbish. He reminds me a lot of Giuliano Ferrara in his tone – when I read Ferrara, it’s like reading my father, who, if he met a communist in the square in Cortona, would say he was a fascist, and if he met a fascist, would tell him that fascists were a bunch of shit. He was a bit like Guzzanti’s Bertinotti – he liked causing a ruckus, he’d argue with everyone, and then you could win him over with next to nothing.” So the answer is yes: you really do get bored with people who agree with you. “Absolutely.”

Perhaps cycling is not about putting oneself in danger, but rather the fulfilment of Lorenzo’s true perversion: getting tired. “I like hard work; for me, hard work is a quest in itself. I like things I don’t understand, books where I lose myself in the style: I’ve never been a reader of crime novels, because in crime novels the plot is everything. Museums have become full of captions; I’d do away with them: you walk in, you bump into something you like – you don’t even know it’s Raphael. Above all, you need to be exposed to things you don’t understand; at school you need to have things that fascinate you, and the teacher must be good at creating an air of mystery. I’ve realised that lately I’ve also lost interest in new music coming out; after all, if there’s anything worthwhile in this chaos, it’ll find its way to me. I used to preach that ‘you must always fall in love with the new’, but now I’ve had a change of heart.” (Unasked question: so are we going to retract all the trust we placed in Taylor Swift?)

The final scene is set in the 1980s: Lorenzo is still at school; in the afternoons he works as a DJ at a Roman radio station; and he has evidently already realised that the country’s most important cultural institution is Publitalia. “When I was working at the radio station in Rome – it was called Radio Jolly – it was a station you could barely pick up in the three neighbourhoods around the Aventine Hill. I’d recorded the adverts for Coca-Cola and Algida ice cream cones onto cassettes from the actual radio broadcast. My sponsor there was ‘Angela’s Hairdressers’, but I wanted to make it look as though I had big advertisers. Not only that: I thought, ‘They can only hear me in the neighbourhood; they can’t hear me in Milan, so they can’t contradict me.’ So I’d say, ‘Hi friends, we’re broadcasting from Rome, but today I want to say hello to our friends in Milan who are listening to us,’ and no one ever told me, ‘Look, I’m in Milan and I can’t hear you,’ even though they couldn’t hear me.”