The singer spoke about himself on Fabio Volo’s “Kong” program: «In Italy the beginning was difficult, I didn’t know how to play football: I sang and made myself understood».
«I needed to express myself with my voice but, since we didn’t live in flourishing economic conditions at home, my father asked me to help and, for five years, I worked as a secretary in a hotel». To tell it is Riccardo Cocciantelast night (Monday 27 April), guest of «Kong – With your head in the clouds», program hosted by Fabio Volo on Rai 3, from the top of the Torre Branca in Milan100 meters above sea level.
The singer looked back his childhood in Vietnamcountry where he was born from
French mother and Italian father and lived until the age of eleven. «I was very well placed – recalls Cocciante -, that period was very beautiful. I also lived with the Vietnamese, when it rained we went to do something that the whites couldn’t do: bathe in puddles. I liked the heat, we dressed accordingly, we didn’t have shoes, which I later discovered in Italy was slavery. The light, the colors, the smells were beautiful, very strong, while in Europe everything is homologated, faded, the contrasts are lost.”
Once I arrived in Abruzzo, it was not easy to integrate. «At the beginning it wasn’t pleasant – continues the singer, a native French speaker -, they made fun of me, then they got used to me: I was bad at football, I didn’t know how to touch a ball and I saw snow there for the first time». Volo asked him if these difficulties were a tool for expressing himself through music. «I sang and they understood me – says Cocciante -. The music came to me and I tried to give it a shape.” The journey was uphill. «“Beautiful without a soul” – he says – it is a cry of desperation, no one wanted it, they rejected it on Rai. Instead, the public liked my way of singing, a little black, a little white, a little French, a little Italian, a little American.”
In his family, he reports, that he was «supported, my mother and my pianist aunt helped me follow my pathmy father left me free to choose, they didn’t stop me and I did it.” To young people, Cocciante advises: «Study, go and learn the rules, but then forget them, dig in and discover something new in yourself».
