HAHAHAHA, HOLY FUCK! HOW DID THAT PERSON SUCCEED? Gigi D’Agostino
In a way, it’s a touch disappointing to learn that Gigi D’Agostino actually has a place of birth (Turin, like you cared). When it comes to an otherworldly character like D’Agostino, you sort of assume he was spat out of a spaceship in rural Italy by a bunch of aliens from the planet Eurosleaze who agreed ‘Yeah, this guy is too trashy even for us’, before walking a few hundred kilometres to Naples in his kimono, silk belt trailing behind him and a mini-electric keyboard under his arm.
Things, though, were different in the early 00s. Better? Who can say (nah, they were definitely better). Back then we were in a strange time between technologies, in a sort of constipated period of expectation still taping songs from the radio, realising that CD’s were as delicate as angel tears which made them an investment for lunatics. But we also sort of knew that something better was coming around the corner. One TV show popular in early 00s Ireland that managed to partly plug that purgatorial gap was Top 30 Hits. The format of the show was uniquely complex, but I’ll do my best to explain: it would countdown the top 30 hits in the Irish charts. That actually wasn’t too difficult.
Top Thirty Hits would go out late on Saturday mornings, around 11:30. Post breakfast my uncles and I would, in a dismissive, laissez faire sort of way, NEVER FUCKING MISS IT.
What was special about TTH was that the songs were only played for approx 15 seconds, so if you didn’t like something, you had just enough fuel to mercilessly ridicule the music/the singer/the band. If you did like it, you got just enough to make you want more. There was, though, one song that, for me at least, fell somewhere between those two categories. It was love. It was hate. It was a 15 seconds of emotions so contradictory you could never quite reconcile yourself to the feeling.
It was L’Amours Toujours by Gigi D’Agostino.
First off, let’s take the music.
I’m not quite sure we can quantify the bravery of an artist who anchors an entire track, dance music or not, around an AIR HORN. This is an instrument specifically designed to make a sound so unavoidably shrill that its primary use is for emergency vehicles. For all of us norms, we hear an air horn and immediately think ‘Jesus, something AWFUL must be happening!’, or we’re at a sporting even thinking ‘Hmmm, someone using an airhorn there.’ and then fall into deep, sweet reverie where the offender is shit on from a height by a seagull that’s been into the bins at Bengal Benny’s curry house.
In Gigi D’Agostino’s case, the airhorn was what the piano was to Chopin. In fact, it’s the opening — I’m not sure how to describe this… chord(?) — of L’Amours Toujours. A grunting, meaty, emphatic airhorn parp. I’ll skip going into any true detail on the rest of the track suffice to say that it features two additional voices: one sounds like Alvin the chipmunk with two 16kg kettlebells swinging from his nuts, and the other is the sort of violently earnest, honest, all-or-nothing vocal effort where you assume the talent had no true idea where his voice was actually going to end up.
Sound Engineer: Great recording, Steve! You really gave that socks. Mr D’Agostino will be absolutely delighted.
Steve The Singer: What? Wait a second… who?!
And then, of course, there’s the video. Ah… the video.
Through the four minutes of auterish slow motion film, slathered with a transparent layer of Gigi in states of Christ-like meditation, we’re treated to an unapologetically rudimentary edit of his live stage performances. Adorned in Japanese robes, fur hats and the sort of jewellery your friends used to buy on package holidays to Crete, D’agostino spends his time between jumping sort of energetically on the spot and twiddling knobs (Ooh, Vicar!), but always looking just a little too old for all of this and dare I say it: tired. Fair is fair, however, and he does find the energy at one point to sail across the stage on a scooter (who’s playing the music during this is anyone’s guess).
In one of the video’s more inadvertently depressing scenes he’s seen to walk through airport arrivals in what was I suppose intended to hint at the glamour of international DJing, but looks more like he’s just hopped off a Ryanair flight in Bucharest where the rest of the stag group have taken taxis into town without him and now he’ll have to take the Air Bus on his own. In a darker turn, while writing this, I viewed the entire video with the sound off and it watched like a grim, low quality memorial video for dead friend who died jumping off a balcony on coke.
But fear not, Gigi D’Agostino is FAR from dead. In fact, he’s paying Lithuania in 2020. See you there.
