The past few days the media has been filled with Jalisse and everybody's talking about them, Sanremo and Eurovision again. Why? Gigi Vesigna (78), a great music expert in Italy as well as ex-editor in chief of TV Sorrisi e Canzoni, the main TV-music magazine in Italy, has published a book of the history of Sanremo titled Vox populi, voci di sessant'anni della nostra vita, on what's going on behind she scenes, how victories have been bought and how it all changed when Jalisse won and Sanremo was never the same again.
When they won in 1997 they didn't belong to any major record company but had produced themselves, independent. That made all the major labels furious and - as Antonio Ricci writes in the book - "instead of being treated like a winner they should have, they were completely cancelled from radio and TV, they were just made to disappear. Ever since winning Sanremo wasn't a big deal anymore. A couple of months later the winner was forgotten matematically. The song contest had become only a TV programme with music. Their win seems honest and clear but they came outside the system, didn't belong to it so they were punished and cancelled." On top of that they were accused of plagiarism, of Roxette's Listen to your heart.
But that's not all. They managed to go to Eurovision, once again alone and without any support from RAI (apparently RAI had forgotten to confirm their non participation as it was those days still, now it's the other way round, and only with the insistence of OGAE Italy and Jalisse's manager Carmen Di Domenico Jalisse got ok from RAI when they had to send someone) but once the word got around from Dublin to RAI's head quarters in Via Mazzini RAI that they were superfavourites and might win RAI - the book claims -made a deal with some countries to stop Italy from winning...
As we all know Jalisse came 4th with Fiumi di parole when bookmakers gave it a top-3 placing and they won the exit poll, if my memory doesn't fail me. Could it be true? We did have the exchange of votes scandal a few years ago, so... Hard to say.
But for Jalisse despite winning Sanremo and scoring a respectable 4th place in Eurovision it was over once they returned to Italy. They were to do Festivalbar 1997 but it never happened. They tried to return to Sanremo with a song by Morra-Fabrizio in 1998 but were refused (recently they told they have sent a song most every year but have never been accepted...). All these years they have been doing music, enjoying some success abroad. Against all odds.
Is it only Fiumi di parole or rivers of words, in short bla bla bla. What do you think?
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