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Salvatore Adamo (born 1 November 1943 in Comiso, Sicily, Italy) is one of the most commercially successful singers in Europe, Japan and Latin America. Adamo has sold over 90 million copies of his albums worldwide. He is currently living in Belgium though he has lived in France with his family. His hits include "Tombe la Neige", "Vous permettez, Monsieur?" and "Inch Allah", all from the sixties.
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Bio
Little Salvatore moved with his parents from Sicily to Belgium at the age of three, in 1947. As so many of the immigrants who came to Belgium in that period, his destiny normally would have been to go work in the coalmines (just like Rocco Granata, with whom he competes the title of "most famous Italian immigrant with international career from Belgium"). Being a very bright student, however, he got the chance to go on to college or beyond. His passion for music crossed that path and would make him one of the biggest stars in the French-speaking world.
Right from his first hit, "sans toi ma mie" which he sung at the age of 20, in 1963, to this day, Salvatore Adamo has always remained faithful to the same style : this makes him known as the "chanteur romantique par excellence", with a characteristic, slightly broken voice (not the only feature that binds Adamo to Charles Aznavour). As he said himself, the biggest influences on his music-writing have been Victor Hugo, Jacques Prévert, Georges Brassens, the Italian canzonetta and the tango. Jacques Brel once described him as the "jardinier d'amour" (the gardener of love). But with "Inch'Allah" (about the conflicts in the Middle East) and his more recent writings, he has proven he can also write beautifully about other subjects than love.
During his long career, Adamo has sold over 90 million records worldwide. His period of bloom was of course the sixties (in 1964 he was the second biggest selling artist worldwide, behind some band called the Beatles), but he has continued to make and live of his music ever since. After the eighties there haven't been any new hits, but he never lost "his" audience in the run. Besides a string of hits in the french-speaking countries, a lot of the chansons from Adamo were also translated into Italian and Spanish ... and even into Japanese (for example: one of the most widely known karaoke classics in Japan is the song "Youki Wa Furu", which is the Japanese version of "Tombe La Neige"- the local "dreaming of a white christmas").
Part of the secret of Adamo is that he has always managed to appeal to new audiences : in 1993 he got an extreme boost in popularity here in Belgium thanks to a splendid adaptation Arno did of his song "Les filles du bord de mer". Arno about this in a Humo-interview : "During the recording of my new CD in Nashville, I had brought a Adamo-tape with me, just to make sure I didn't have to listen to country-music all the time. I'm open for everything that's good, and Adamo certainly is. He is a very good lyricist, and he is a very good singer. I've adored him since the very beginning, and I've remained faithful to him all the time, even during his lesser periods. He has written dozens of beautiful, sensitive songs that were both accessible for a big audience, yet very integer & personal at the same time". Still, Arno took a very different approach to the song (listen to his version and compare it with the original) : "That's because I think it's a very sad tale. I think that Adamo himself would have recorded it in a more melancholic way, if he had his way back then. But he had to take the tastes of his producers (Saintal, Gogaguer ..) into account, and they were people from the music hall (variété)."
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