Achille Lauro – Stripper
OK then, let’s get it out of the way before we start shall we?
I make no apology for posting that. Achille Lauro has been trying for God knows how many years to get the Eurovision ticket for Italy (via Sanremo), but seemingly gets knocked back on the quality threshold from the Italian audiences. With San Marino deciding that they were going down the song festival route, and having been rejected by the Italian public once again, it was time for him to ply his brand of batshitness in the home of batshit – Piccolo Italia.
If I described Achille Lauro as one of the Raggy Dolls – you’ll need to check the below video out in order to get what I mean.
He’s an outcast and a misfit but, in many ways, that’s why a proportion of fandom love him. He takes performance art to the next level, certainly in terms of Eurovision performance art.
I listened to the introduction to this song and immediately I went “It’s 1975 – no, no its not, it reminds me of something else”…
Now, I doubt that Mr Lauro has even heard this track, but it certainly has more than a passing resemblance, in so much as that song has taken recognisable bits of Whovian… music and put them through a blender to get to genius. Achille has taken the same approach. He seemingly ran the musical equivalent of Google Translate through some glam rock “hits” of the 70s and, as is the way with machine-based logic, it came up with something that looks like it might be right … but is severely and completely wrong!
And yet, despite the fact that the song is clearly answering a completely different question to the one everyone else is trying to answer, it is clearly one of his songs and for that, we have to thank him … don’t we?
As a Contest song, however, it really is fucking awful. I don’t even think it could be a semi decent song in the hands of someone that can sing better… or sing at all and yet that doesn’t matter a jot – if Serhat can literally be a tone off key for the first half of a performance and still qualify on the ironic votes, then Achille can mince and strip and show his tats across the stage, and get a proportion of Europe voting. Juries will be sniffy, but we are going to be “entertained”.
Phil’s Score – 10 Points because Achille Lauro at Eurovision.