Making a duo with a little blonde girl, who wasn’t yet called Patty Pravo, in Mestre in the mid-60s which was a small beat capital. Going to Milan and recording a successful television theme song which enters the charts surpassing the Beatles, second only to Lucio Battisti. Changing name and recording the first success of Italian disco music. Winning a Sanremo Festival as an author for Iva Zanicchi, relaunching the career of Fausto Leali. Even winning a Zecchino d’oro, then singing for years on gondolas for a living, between “O sole mio” and “Volare”. And interrupt every now and then to lend verses and voice to commercials: like the one for Tabù sweets, “I eat a thousand a day, do you want to know why”. Italo Ianne82 years old, Calabrian raised in Venicecontinues to write songs, has two albums ready, he just has to wait for them to discharge him from the hospital in Mestre where he was hospitalized for heart problems.
The interview is done in a room of the San Marco Polyclinic. He moves quickly, leaning on a walker, his hair very white and thick, a mask over his mouth. A story that spans sixty years of Italian pop music, between “the bold descents and the ascents” as Battisti sang.
How did you arrive in Venice?
«Calabrian family but I was born in Castellamare di Stabia and when I was 40 days old I was already traveling to Fiume: father Giovanni was a Customs inspector and was transferred in the middle of the war with his wife and three children. We managed to get away from Istria in 1946, we were also there in the exodus. At the Lido of Venice I spent a beautiful childhood with my mother Assunta: under the house there was a large garden that seemed like paradise to me; nearby was the Alambra open-air cinema. Coming from the war I found the garden, the cinema and the sea and I was happy, even though we were poor. In the Campostrini school nursery there was a small zoo and I played more with caged animals than with my own kind. I remember my first love, at 11 years old, naturally platonic, but which remains in my heart. Her name was Liliana, I was in the Rose park, I looked up and saw her above the ice cream shop looking out the window, blonde like an angel. A stroke of love at first sight that left me drunk.”
When did music enter your life?
«I was in middle school and my passion for music was growing, I saw Elvis Presley’s first LP displayed in the shop on the Lido, I was intrigued by this singer with the guitar and all dressed in white. Even though I had a voice better suited to Neil Sedaka’s songs. No one will be born like Elvis Presley again; Little Tony, dying, wanted to hear Elvis’ songs, they were an invocation to his life. In 1959 I formed the first rock band in Mestre with the name of Rockers and we debuted at the Disney theatre, next to the church in via Piave. On guitar Stelio Stella who then played for eight years with Toto ei Tati, Toto Cutugno’s band. When Cutugno died he went to the funeral, he sat on the steps with an accordion and played all the songs of his great friend.”
Why leave Venice for the mainland?
«Back then Mestre was a city in musical ferment, with many groups. I tried singing with the Hurricanes, the Bats, the Blue Hair Boys. At the Toniolo theater there were competitions for bands.” Mestre was then the true Venetian capital of young music, there were clubs where people played and danced, such as the Big Club at Quattro Cantoni and the Bandiera Gialla at the end of Via Torino. In Piazza Ferretto you could meet Nicoletta Strambelli, Mara Venier and Guido Toffoletti who enchanted you with his London stories. And at a table at the Veterans or at Scarpon, Italo Ianne wrote songs with the Sagittari and sometimes Sergio Endrigo, who was the night porter at the Hotel Plaza, in front of the station, also arrived. A world told with passion by the journalist Gigi Rizziato who remembers the first national competition for solo ensembles in Mestre, at the Toniolo Theatre, in 1964.
And the meeting with the future Patty Pravo?
«In 1963, this 15-year-old girl, beautiful as the sun, Nicoletta Strambelli, emerged. With her we created the “Duo Magenta” taking the name at random from a score, and we participated in a competition in Loreo, coming second; the first was responsible for recording a record with RCA. Then she left for Rome and went to the Piper, she changed her name to Patty Pravo and had great success, a year later she was in the charts with “La Doll”. Coincidentally, the author of that song, Bruno Zambrini, was also the author together with Gianni Meccia of my first success. It was the theme song of Lieutenant Sheridan’s TV show, with Ubaldo Lay: it was entitled “Centomila cellos” and for weeks I was in the charts ahead of the Beatles, behind “Mi ordini in mente” by Lucio Battisti”.
A nice entry into the world of music.
«I entered through the front door, a record that sold more than 300 thousand copies on the first try. “From today this is your job, but you have to be careful”, Gianni Meccia told me. “Success has arrived: an acronym was enough to launch a voice”, wrote Sorrisi e Canzoni. I was lucky.”
How long did the success last?
«I have recorded about fifteen 45s of which at least three have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. At a certain point I called myself Jerry Mantron and in the mid-70s with a theme song, “Supersonic band”, I sold 400 thousand copies, the first example of Italian disco music. Two editions of the Cantagiro and again at the top of the hit parade for 16 weeks, an eight-month tour on a Fulvia coupé. As an author I won a Sanremo Festival, the one in 1974, with “Ciao cara come stai”, composed together with Cristiano Malgioglio and sung by Iva Zanicchi who two years ago for Sanremo asked me to write her the song “I want to love you” dedicated to Husband. When Gabriella Farinon announced the winning song I jumped on my seat and left the theater to enjoy the most intense moment of glory of my life. Moments like this repay you for everything that comes later. Zanicchi is special, she gave me a hand in difficult moments. I also recorded a successful advertisement, the most sung of the ’80s, that of Tabù sweets, and I composed the tune that Enrico Ruggeri sang for the Fiat 500 advertisement. With the song “La shower with coat” I also won the Zecchino d’oro Festival of 2009″.
Then many years as a singer on gondolas in Venice…
«I rode the gondola for 16 years after my marriage ended and I returned from Ventimiglia with nothing from my parents who were over 80. One day I was returning from the Ca’ Giustinian hospital where my father was hospitalized and I stopped in a bar in Tre Ponti. There was a customer they called Celentano, he asked me if I wanted to sing on the gondolas. It was 1984 and it became my job, with a few parentheses: in 1987, for example, there was the great success in Sanremo of “Io amo”, the song that Fausto Leali relaunched to great effect. I wrote it with Toto Cutugno and Franco Fasano. I also worked as a guitar bar from Porto Rotondo to Riccione, to Piazza San Marco.”
What’s it like singing on gondolas?
«For a romantic like me, seeing under the Rialto Bridge someone who kneels in front of his woman, offers her a ring and asks for a love song… The song they ask you for the most is “O sole mio” and then Flying, Santa Lucia, Return to Surriento. With these moonlights, in these streams, in this body of water that makes you dream, you seem to be in another world. I was made a knight of the Venetian song at the Malibran; in 1992 I won the Venetian Song Festival with “Venezia un amore”, awarded with a golden lion».
