Salvatore Adamo wears “young” white sneakers, but greets each party with gratitude – “because I know that the next party is more the last than the first.” Interview with a legend who takes nothing for granted, passing through Quebec for ten dates.
If he presents two options to those who have survived the ordeal, to close themselves in anxious pessimism or to welcome each new minute as a gift, then Salvatore Adamo undoubtedly belongs to the second category.
“I wear white sneakers, because every time I put them on, people tell me I look young,” he jokes as he greets us Monday afternoon at 21H Queen Elizabeth floor. forever young ? This is the title re-read forever young From Alphaville, a surprising moment In French please!his latest album of French adaptations of Anglo songs, was produced by Stefan Escher.
Thank you, Mr. Adamo, for taking the time to meet with us. “Thank you for taking the time to meet you,” the Italian-Belgian singer replied, compressing “to you,” as if the future of his career hinged on this interview. “I’m not going to pull out the glow brush, but the media is part of our success. You keep it.”
What another might pass for politeness, even adulation, no doubt has something to do with the humble origins of the 79-year-old sitting before us, who remains, even in a posh hotel, the son of Concetta and Antonino, Italian immigrants.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, PRESS
Salvatore Adamo, visiting Montreal
At the age of twenty, when Adamo Salvatore softened the hearts of the Francophone thanks without you my love, for all members of his family to allow the migration of the caste. “I suddenly passed from one world to another,” he says before paraphrasing Colucci, “but I did not become new rich, I remained formerly poor.”
disease privilege
Like his mother who, even after her son let him breathe more easily, “stored pasta and oil in the cellar as soon as there was a sale in the supermarket”, Adamo continued not to save, but invested with the awareness that fate depended, at least in part, on chance .
“And then it must be said that I was fortunate, for I was given a lot of sickness, and from my early childhood,” he adds, an astonishing sentence.
Photo Decilites, Press Archives
Salvatore Adamo September 7, 1971
privileged to be ill? At the age of seven, young Salvatore fell ill with meningitis, and then, at the age of forty, a heart attack. Earlier this year, the creator this is my life And the’hopefully He was silent for several weeks due to the problem of losing his voice caused by tear gas. A visitor, randomly walking through the streets of Santiago, Chile, accidentally came across with a demonstration.
I’ve been telling myself for 60 years that this could be the last ride, the last day, that nothing is taken for granted, that everything is always a reward. And I tell myself this day more, because I know that the next party is more one of the last than the first. So I live it intensely.
Salvatore Adamo
I forgot that roses are pinkAdamo sang in 1971, but he never forgot it. “The song is for those who may need to be reminded.”
Grandpa Salvatore
Giovanna Adamo, Salvatore’s kind sister, who has also been his assistant for more than 30 years, interrupts our interview as discreetly as possible in order to give her older brother a mouth spray to help him preserve his voice. “Giovanna is one of the four sisters I have left,” she specifies, suddenly moved, the eldest of seven children. A few minutes ago his wife, Nicole, came to greet us.
Why does Salvatore Adamo, 79, burden himself with ten shows in three weeks in Quebec when he can enjoy quiet days at home in Brussels? Because life is worse than spending three weeks traveling with his wife and sister, and because he knows too well the fragility of everything.
Bend over an answer on another topic, the singer brings up his brother, the guitarist of his group, who left at 51, in 2005, and then their father in 1966. He was 46 and had just been introduced to by him. son of a restaurant
As my father had left Italy looking down to make a living in Belgium, he dreamed of returning to Sicily with his head held high, but he was never able to taste such happiness. Every day, I kiss their photos, instead of going to the cemetery, where their absence becomes stubborn.
Salvatore Adamo
Salvatore Adamo, a friend of Montreal since his first visit during Expo ’67, doesn’t take anything for granted. In any case, life regularly brings him back to his humility. An impressive example was four years ago. Lily, her 6-year-old granddaughter, accompanied her grandmother to the ATM that day. This money, where does it come from, I asked the little girl, who still did not know anything about her grandfather’s profession. Grandma replied: “It comes from grandfather’s work.” What is he doing, grandfather? He throws parties.”
“A month later,” the grandfather continues, with that smile on his face that explains at least half of his glory, “I am sitting at home with my granddaughter, who turns to me and says: ‘Say, grandfather, will you do a concert for me?’ I get up, and go and fetch my guitar, And I go back to the living room and she says to me: “No, you still won’t sing!”
This Tuesday, April 25th at the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, then on tour throughout Quebec until May 14th
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