Interview with Il Volo

The Britons, who are notoriously proud to be British at any given moment in their lives - even when their Royals run away from Wembley Stadium?after having lost EURO 2020 to Italy so they won’t have to crown somebody else - invented the term British Invasion to define bands like The Beatles , The Animals , The Tremeloes , The Merseybeats , Gerry and the Pacemakers , The Zombies and many others that entered the US charts in the 1960s and became famous and acclaimed in America thereafter.

And they are right in having conceived a special word for that, because breaking in the States really is a special achievement that deserves headlines, respect and praise: placing a record in the US charts is extremely difficult even for well-established bands and affluent solo artists. Take someone like?Robbie Williams, for example:?acclaimed everywhere, unknown in America. Despite being the British solo artist with the most number one albums on the UK's Official Albums Chart of all time - he got more number one albums than the likes of Elton John and David Bowie -, he still didn’t make it in the USA after over 30 years in music.

Ever since The Beatles cracked it, things in the music? industry have always worked this way: singers start off with local gigs, they work their way up, they rise through the ranks and they get famous in their own country first. It’s only after they’ve achieved considerable fame and success at home that they will try and do something abroad. This is how it works. It wouldn't make sense the other way around. Still, the other way around has become the norm in Italy.

Look at what happened to Andrea Bocelli at the beginning of his career; in 1996, Germany got him to duet with British Soprano Sarah Brightman in Time to Say Goodbye, a version of Con Te Partirò partially chanted in English which got certified 11x Gold after breaking the all-time sales record in Germany for selling over 2,750,000 copies.

Only after he achieved this, and only after the single sold another 750,000 further copies across Austria, Switzerland and the UK and reached number one on single charts everywhere in Europe, somebody in Italy eventually thought that maybe Andrea Bocelli deserved a chance in his home country too. At the time of publication, the Italian tenor has sold 90 million records worldwide, scored a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records for holding simultaneously all the three top positions on the US Classical Albums, and his 1999 record Sacred Arias has become the biggest selling classical album ever sold by any solo artist in history.