|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Sanremo is one of the annual cultural highlights for me, a music festival so big it transcends its secondary role as the Italian selection for Eurovision. Amid the endless chit-chat and superfluous sketches there’s always plenty to enjoy. Even so, I bet nobody had John Travolta doing the birdie dance on the street outside the Ariston Theatre on their Eurovision 2024 bingo card. It’ll be one of the deepest dives of this year’s iceberg.
On stage the quality of the songs spoke for itself. This winner is a delight. Taking inspiration from the Colombian cumbia style, with a splash of reggaeton, La Noia is among the most contemporary sounding of 2024’s line-up. It’s co-written by Angelina along with Madame and Dardust, two of the stand-out artists of recent Sanremo festivals and the wider Italian music scene. Dardust already has credits for Soldi under his belt as an Italian Eurovision entry and La Noia is only one of two 2024 songs he’s linked to, with credits on the Luxembourg entry too.
There’s a bit of magic to this. As Angelina debuted it in February, I wrote in my viewing WhatsApp group “this could win Eurovision”. Here we are in April and it’s leading the cumulative score on the Eurovision Scoreboard app and at or near the top of poll after poll and the collective betting odds. There’s stiff competition, but as a song that can appeal to both juries and televoters this is my pick.
La Noia is my favourite song in Eurovision 2024, but it’s testimony to the strength of this year’s Sanremo that it wasn’t even my favourite there. That honour goes to Mahmood’s Tuta Gold, by far my song of the year so far. But this little earworm could have us all back in Italia again next year.
Photo credit: Andrea Bianchera/EBU