When Jovanotti and Carboni rewrote Extreme in Italian

“It’s almost Christmas. We wrote a small reflection on music that is not ours, but belongs to a group called Extreme. We want you to hear it,” Luca Carboni shyly tells the audience. “It’s called… It’s not called in any way – adds Jovanotti at his side – he doesn’t have a title yet. Let’s call it Christmas 1992.” Attacca Carboni: “It’s almost Christmas / and it’s so cold in Bologna”. Then Lorenzo Cherubini intervenes: “I’m leaving from Milan / to spend it with mum and dad”. The scene comes from one of the concerts of the tour “Carboni-Jovanotti in concert 1992”, the tour that in the autumn of 1992 saw the Bolognese singer-songwriter and the Lucky Boy share the stages of the main Italian sports halls to celebrate their respective successes together.

Carboni was on the crest of a wave in 1992 after a year to remember, marked by hits like “Ci takes a beastly body” and “Mare mare”contained in an album, “Carboni”, which reached its fifth platinum status with over one million copies sold. Jovanotti, on the other hand, had sent his fifth album, “Lorenzo 1992”, that of “Non m’annoio” and the same “Ragazzo Fortunato” to the shops that same year.thus consecrating himself as a true teen idol. It’s the evening of November 30, 1992 when the two, who are performing in front of the over 10 thousand spectators at the Assago Forum in Milandecide to surprise the audience by singing live for the first time an unreleased song they worked on together. “Or it’s Christmas every day”, as they will later title it, is a rewriting in Italian of “More than words”the catchphrase of the Extreme which in those very weeks is becoming popular worldwide.

Extreme’s song had been released the previous year and had made the American metal band known to the whole world, paradoxically finishing at the top of the charts with a very melodic, acoustic song. The original version was not really a song about Christmas, but a song in which the group’s singer, Gary Cherone, asked his girlfriend to do something more than simply say “I love you” to show him her love. The record executives at A&M Records weren’t exactly convinced about releasing that song as a singleso much so that at a certain point guitarist Nuno Bettencourt – who recorded the vocal harmonies of the piece – had threatened to leave the band: “The label didn’t want to release ‘More than words’ as a single because there was nothing like it in radio at that time.

They told us: ‘Who will pass it on?’. At the time everyone was making great power ballads and this one was more like an Everly Brothers or Beatles track. We fought,” Extreme would recall years later. The single already had. alone sold 1.5 million copies worldwidewhen Jovanotti and Carboni decided to make an Italian version, with an adapted text.

“More than words” had become “O it’s Christmas every day”. The two songwriters had recorded it in a hurry during the rehearsals for the joint tour, in the Bolognese studio of Mauro Malavasialready alongside Lucio Dalla and Carboni himself. The Italian text, credited only to the Bolognese singer-songwriter, was full of pacifism and invectives against consumerism: “The world / perhaps not, it has never changed / and peace on earth / no, there is not and there will not be / because we are not men / of good will”.

And again: “And in the meantime we / give ourselves gifts / on the day that Christ was born / we enrich the industrialists / and in the meantime we / eat panettone / on the day that Christ was born / we become fatter”. “The story of this song dates back to 1992, Luca and I were rehearsing for our legendary tour together, we were in Bologna. We drove around at night and we always heard that Extreme song on the radio that was going strong. .Luca told me ‘let’s do a cover on the fly, so we have a Christmas song for the sports halls that we will shoot in December’. The next day at his house after a coffee we wrote the lyrics at supersonic speed and sent it to Extreme’s publishers for approval which arrived within a couple of days. We recorded the piece in Mauro Malavasi’s studio, and I think that was the first time in my life that I tried my hand at a very melodic and essential song, made with just a guitar and two voices. I think this is evident in the original recording, but you know how things go in pop music, it’s the truth that gets to the heart, not the technique. And so the piece worked”, Jovanotti would say years later.

“O è Natale tutti giorno” was included in 1993 among the songs in the collection “Carboni diary”, together with two other unreleased songs resulting from the collaboration with Lorenzo Cherubini: “Vedo risorgere il sole” and “Mix 1992” (a mash up between “Le storie d’amore” by Carboni himself and “Puttane e spose” by Jovanotti). Today, more than thirty years after that first performance on the stage of the Assago Forum, the song is considered a small cult.