The new songs? Better the old ones. Tours become “Only Hits”
It is simple: to the public that has purchased a ticket for your concert, it is not interested in listening to the songs of the album you have just released and that probably nobody has listened to, and if he listened to it, he didn’t even like it so much, because what you have done in the past remains a priori – and to be separated from everything – unparalleled and unrepeatable.
Yes, of course, the desire to tell the audience that you still have something to say, that you know how to speak to the present, is strong: it is a ambition that you do not intend to give up. But the risk you run is that when you start singing a song from the album you have just released, you find yourself on stage, suddenly, the only one to sing it: nobody comes behind you, in the stands. Better to give up, perhaps. And enjoy the classic status. A luxury that few can allow themselves. That of the “Only Hits” ladders, “Only Hits” is a type of show that is increasingly footing among the protagonists who have made the history of Italian pop-rock of the last thirty years, becoming in all respects a format. And that in some cases it is proving to be ultra -leader.
Ask Max Pezzali, who thanks to this simple but brilliant found managed to carve out a whole new place in the scene. The former 883 released his latest album, “Something new”, in 2020. It was not really a best seller: far from it. On his career they seemed to have already began to scroll the titles of the tail, before together with his entourage, the singer -songwriter of Pavia invented a celebratory tour of his history and, more generally, of the 90s, of which together with Mauro Repetto he was icon and singer. He said it without too many words, on the eve of the concert at the Circus Maximus of Rome in 2023, who represented a highlight of the tour together with the shows in San Siro, that the record activity, for him, now “does not represent a priority. I wonder: is there space today for a new album by Max Pezzali? Is it true that I sold 470 thousand tickets with this tour, but people are interested in listening to something new to me? I think not ». He was the first not to be ashamed to explicitly declare that he wants to listen to the public only the hits.
A move that immediately followed Ligabue. When in 2023 Correggio’s rocker went on tour in the buildings after the exit of the album “dedicated to us”, of the album he played only three songs in the evening, possibly the singles, stuffing the ladders of classics such as “Some nights”, “screaming against the sky”, “Happy Hour” and not properly very recent as “on my way”, “the best has to come”. He also repeated the move on the occasion of the tour of last autumn in theaters, brushing up rather pieces like “Light”, “Dreams of R&R”, “I feel you”, “All the streets lead to you”, loved by the followers.
Jovanotti, who started from Pesaro last night with his “Palajova Tour”, over forty shows who will hold the former lucky boy on the stages of the Italian arenas until the end of May and who arrive after the release, last January, of the new album “The human body vol.
1 “, already on the eve he had promised that the last album would only make four pieces: to the new songs he preferred intergenerational hits like the same” lucky boy “,” to you “,” Summer on “,” the greatest show after the Big Bang “. «I will not do much stuff of the album, only 4 pieces, I tried: it comes out too close to the tour. I want to make a feston, I want to entertain people even by doing things I didn’t do in Jova Beach Party, which was a rave. I will do the great successes: big, precisely because they sold a lot and people sing them. And I too, “Lorenzo Cherubini said. The last to give up the ambition to sing at the present was NEK, who has just launched his “Nek Hits – Live 2025”, scheduled for this summer: “There will be all the hits, because the people I will come want to hear me sing my songs and sing them with me. This tour was designed and made on purpose to sing ». It’s so simple.
