O2 Arena, London
With a vast audience belting out word-perfect lyrics in Italian, the one-time Eurovision winners’ heavy live set makes sense of their unlikely mainstream success
Måneskin’s frontman Damiano David stares out into the vastness of the O2 Arena, raising his eyes to the seats at the rear, so high up that tickets come with a warning about vertigo. “Fuckin’ ’ell,” he says, almost to himself. “This is a big-ass venue.”
David is not a performer much hampered by reserve – it takes him two songs to strip to his waist, and a couple more to start grinding his crotch against the microphone stand while singing “I want to fuck” – but, for a moment, he seems genuinely taken aback. Few rock bands have taken such an unlikely route to arena-packing success, involving busking on the streets of Rome, Italy’s version of The X Factor and Eurovision, a pathway that doubtless says a lot about the by-any-means-necessary approach an Italian rock band has to take to get noticed internationally and may also tell you something about the ongoing collapse of old-fashioned ideas about credibility and authenticity in music.
