«I lived a life destroyed by comments, one is born with an unpopular DNA and one keeps it. I’m 40 now and I have the ability to filter this information and give a damn. But that wasn’t the case before. Music saved my life ». In a nutshell there is the synthesis – his synthesis – of the life of Tiziano Ferro, an artist – a very rare case – who has decided to show why no one has done before the private, intimate, at times dark, tormented and restless side, of his existence as an irregular pop star. Because if the public image of any artist almost never adheres to private life, in the case of Tiziano Ferro these opposites seem never to have been so far away.
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Tiziano Ferro literally explodes at 21: the first single, Xdono, is an immediate success not only in Italy but in Europe. An indisputable and immediate popular consensus that anticipates the first studio album, Relative red. Those who do not expect it say that it is one of the many bluffs of record labels to “catch the girls”. And twenty years later we understand how totally wrong that prediction was. But at the time Tzn – few have the luck of a tax code name that becomes a brand – has all the right passwords of the teen idol: thin, handsome, smacking smile, scary voice. Success grows outside, but inside it also grows the desire to get out of a cage in which over time it is not clear whether he has locked himself in or if others have imprisoned him. At the age of 30, in 2010, he tells of being homosexual. “I did it for myself, because I was living a life in complete denial in a society that didn’t accept who I was, and I didn’t accept myself. Nobody had ever done it in Italy ».
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And now, at 40, roughly in the middle of his life’s journey, he decided to sculpt his entire story in the documentary film Ferro, an original Amazon production available on Prime Video from November 6 (the same day also comes out I accept miracles: the experience of others, Titian’s first cover album). A portrait emerges – very conscious – in which he dismantles, piece by piece, the external image, glossy, always a little photoshopped, to use as a cover that public figures are often forced to act. In Ferro there is no acclaimed pop star, the one that everyone puts on a pedestal, the aspirational model, the tensive goal, the emblem of the success that today’s society requires (fame, money, consents, all obtained without help because in music meritocracy again: one is valid if it is a number one). If thanks to the filter, the cage, the safety cord, the aura of invincibility that the discography business builds around you, it could appear, at a superficial glance, that in Tiziano Ferro there was a discordant note, an underlying harshness, the Titian of Ferro it shows itself in all its fragility, in curious antithesis to that surname which refers to the hardest, strongest, unscratchable metal.
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Tiziano Ferro’s birthday: «And it’s been 40 years !!! Thanks for the good wishes and love “
The 5-word summary of why he wasn’t happy is like a Fontana cut, a clear blow that leaves you amazed in its simplicity. “Alcoholic, bulimic, gay, depressed, famous. This too, famously, seemed to me a defect, perhaps the worst ». Ferro is the painting of a simple man (the normal house, the kitchen nothing special, the wedding album like everyone else, boiled eggs with her husband Victor Allen), witty once again in his humanity (“in Los Angeles the the only tour I like to do is the one through the aisles of the supermarket with my trolley “). A man who is very moved (how many tears and red eyes in the documentary), but we knew this (just see the latest Sanremo). A troubled existence, as a nomad, also represented by his wandering: he lived in Puebla de Zaragoza in Mexico, in Manchester, again in Milan. While now he moves into a very enlarged triangle that has one side in Los Angeles and the other two in Milan and Latina, the city where he was born and raised.
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This is really a cube coming out, the breaking of a communication code that seemed destined to never change, a probable sign of the times we live in which certain patriarchal archetypes, therefore also of confidentiality, are obsolete, overcome by a habit of telling oneself that television first and social media later have cleared customs. The substantial difference is that here there doesn’t seem to be any ulterior motive to move a story to the skin. “I was never the top of the class, I was anonymous, not handsome, not at all athletic, rather fat, shy, the boys called me fat, sissy, loser. I was waiting for someone to step in to defend me, but it never happened. I lived perpetually frustrated, and pissed off and even humiliated. Then I sang for the first time and the world changed. Music has become the channel to express myself in a world in which I did not recognize myself ».
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Tiziano Ferro: «In America because I want a child, even alone». The career and life of the singer
Barely 18, Tiziano Ferro draws attention of the producers Mara Maionchi and Alberto Salerno, but three years of silence follow, oblivion, doors in the face: no record company wants to bet on him. “The unspoken was my burden.” It weighed 111 pounds (111 will be the title of his second album) and he loses 40: «I used to dress thin, pain and hunger did not allow me to constantly enjoy 40 kilos less. Inside I was as before. I moved and thought like a fat person ». How much damage the “unspoken” do. In fact, the second inner torment arrives: «After the relationship with food and with the body, there is another big problem: they spoke of me as gay and it was not going well. I freeze because the problem was no longer mine, only mine. But I decide not to lie, I don’t invent girlfriends ». But he has to make some compromises: the French record company every time he flies to Paris for a promotion makes him find a stylist who brings him clothes “with more masculine codes” to change into in the airport restrooms.
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Bulimic, gay, depressed, famous. The last step is missing: «One night the band convinced me to drink. And from there I never stopped ». Now he sat in the psychologist’s chair, once again, in front of everyone. “The truth has made me free; honesty and sincerity have brought me even closer to people ». Finally happy, no more secrets, no unspoken. Yet, 15 million records later, Tiziano still doubts himself and his talent, perhaps because those who know himself the more doubts: «It still happens to me now when I enter a stadium, I think it’s the first and last time. I look at the stadium and I say to myself: enjoy it because it might not happen again ».
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November 6, 2020 (change November 6, 2020 | 07:38 am)
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