MOVIE MUSIC UK

Singer, songwriter and film composer Nico Fidenco died in Rome on November 19, 2022, at the age of 89.

One of the most versatile figures in Italian popular music, Fidenco enjoyed enormous success as a singer during the early 1960s before developing a second career as a prolific composer for cinema. He wrote music for more than 80 films, particularly spaghetti westerns, thrillers, erotic dramas and horror pictures, and became especially associated with the Black Emanuelle series.

Fidenco was born Domenico Colarossi in Rome on January 24, 1933. His family moved to Asmara in Eritrea when he was a child, returning to Italy in 1949. Initially interested in filmmaking, he studied at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and worked as an assistant director while attending university. Music remained a private passion until RCA executive Vincenzo Micocci heard his demos and invited him to sing “What a Sky,” the theme from Francesco Maselli’s I Delfini (1960). The record became an immediate success.

His greatest popular triumph followed in 1961 with “Legata a un granello di sabbia.” Rejected by the Sanremo Festival, the song nevertheless became one of Italy’s first great summer hits, spending 14 weeks at number one and becoming the first Italian single to sell more than a million copies. Other successful songs included “Con te sulla spiaggia,” “A casa d’Irene,” “Se mi perderai” and “La voglia di ballare,” while Fidenco also recorded Italian versions of prominent film themes including “Moon River,” Exodus and The World of Suzie Wong.

By the mid-1960s cinema was becoming increasingly important to him as a composer rather than a singer. His early scores were frequently westerns, including All’ombra di una colt (1965), The Texican (1966), Dynamite Jim (1966), Tonino Valerii’s Taste of Killing (1966), John the Bastard (1967) and I Want Him Dead (1968). Fidenco’s western music often combined expansive melody, electric guitar, chorus and pop instrumentation, sometimes incorporating his own vocals. He eventually scored eleven spaghetti westerns.

His work became still more eclectic during the 1970s. Fidenco scored Paolo Heusch’s political biographical drama El “Che” Guevara and numerous comedies and erotic films before beginning his most enduring screen association with Black Emanuelle (1975). Starring Laura Gemser, the film inspired a lush mixture of orchestral romance, funk, pop, percussion and wordless vocals that Fidenco himself later described as his favorite of his own scores.

He subsequently worked extensively with director Joe D’Amato on sequels including Emanuelle in Bangkok, Emanuelle in America, Emanuelle Around the World and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. Despite the films’ exploitation origins, Fidenco treated them seriously, producing some of his richest and most atmospheric music, combining sensual themes with psychedelic guitars, funk rhythms, exotic percussion and the voices of ensembles associated with Alessandro Alessandroni and Giacomo Dell’Orso.

Fidenco’s genre career also included the cult horror film Zombie Holocaust (1980), after which he found a new generation of listeners through television. During the early 1980s he wrote and performed Italian themes for children’s programs and imported animation, including Don Chuck Castoro, Sam il ragazzo del West, Bem and Cyborg, i nove supermagnifici. In 1984 he joined fellow singers Jimmy Fontana, Gianni Meccia and Riccardo Del Turco in the nostalgia group Super 4, which remained active for a decade.

Fidenco’s death was announced by his wife Annamaria and daughter Guendalina.