Via Verdi – Diamond
Dear Dinosaurs, today I want to tell you a story that dates back to the last week and the last day of 1985! A personal memory: to celebrate New Year’s Eve, my class was meeting at a classmate’s house, about mid-afternoon. Someone started cooking, I started taking care of the soundtrack of course, and someone spent the afternoon playing poker. Luck was focusing mainly on Andrea, who at the end of the poker afternoon had scrapped the sci-fi sum of 4500 former Italian Liras, about 2.20 Euro, and decided to gift the class by investing them in a record that we could hear during the evening, a 45 rpm of course. Well, Andrea chose the record of the moment, which later became one of the symbols of our 80s.
Yes, because during that week we witnessed the beginning of the story of a group and of a fantastic song, a pillar of italo-disco, even if it remained linked more to a television and radio context rather than to the world of discos. Behind this story there is, as often happened in Italy in those years, the great deejay and producer Claudio Cecchetto, who with the production group that gave birth to DeeJay Television was often discovering a series of talents that would remain in the history of the 80s, in and out of Italy. At this point in time we had already known one of such talents, and it is a sensational example: Sandy Marton. The immortal interpreter of People From Ibiza had followed exactly the same journey in the shadow of Claudio Cecchetto. After all, this was one of the skills that made Cecchetto great: he was not only the greatest Italian deejay, he was the talent scout who knew in advance what we teenagers would like, and managed to bet on talents that would later become the artists we are still talking about after so many decades.
In the last weeks of 1985, his show, DeeJay Television, had changed its opening tune. It must be said that the opening tune of DeeJay Television might have seemed like a simple jingle, because it was generally short, but often it was a real song, which naturally achieved success in Italy, and then went often beyond national borders. Perhaps the first great theme was Audio\Video by Fitz, an artist that I also had the chance and the honor to interview. Well, the new song presented itself with an irresistible intro of electronic music, then with lyrics in English, and finally with a simple refrain that no longer comes out of your head.
The name of the group that sang it was absolutely unknown, but at the same time it was weird and absolutely captivating: Via Verdi, which is basically an address in Italy, the name of a street existing in every Italian village and town. This name was the only trace of Italian in this song, since the title, Diamond, was also in English. Nothing was known about the group Via Verdi. And we continued to know nothing about them for a long time, and they became a kind of myth because they did not appear in TV programs, nor in the newspapers. Their song, however, entered the charts exactly in the last days of 1985, and would have reached the first position in February 1986, remaining however in the top ten of the best-selling records until June: an incredible success.
And this was precisely the record that our friend Andrea, with his 4500 lire won by shamefully cheating at poker, gave to the class for the party that would begin a few hours later. That night we put on that record so many times that in the morning of January 1st it already had a number of additional grooves, and I think it didn’t make it to the next day.
Via Verdi were four young people from Ancona, a seaside city in central Italy; the singer, Remo Zito alternated his collaboration with Via Verdi with experiences as a newspaper seller and taxi driver. Via Verdi had a few years of moderate visibility (without ever repeating the resounding success of Diamond), which were followed by moments of separation and others of reunification, in which Remo himself was one of the members who moved away and rejoined several times. Today they are still in business, although only the two founders Marco Grati and Glauco Medori remain from the original formation.
The video is simple, weird, but very enjoyable. There was a legend at the time that two of the characters that quickly appear in Diamond‘s video are Claudio Cecchetto and Sandy Marton, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any reliable confirmation.
Diamond was truly a very bright star in the music sky at the end of 1985; I would say that at the end of each year it is the right song to wish a new year than could be sparkling like a diamond!
Via Verdi on Wikipedia
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