Sibilla, The Hitmaker That Wasn't (But Should Have Been)

Rediscovering the underrated (small) catalogue of a singer whose career stopped between it could properly take off.

The singer known as Sibilla did not deserve to be a one-hit wonder

There are moments in Italian-music history that have become pop-cultural landmarks for the way they seared themselves into the collective imagery, and not necessarily in a positive way.

In 1983, Sibilla, stage name for Sibyl Amarilli Mostert, was to make her mainstream debut at the Sanremo Music Festival. She had been a protégée of Franco Battiato and Giusto Pio, with whom she had been working for the previous couple of years. Battiato and Pio, known for combining intellectualism, experimentalism, and radio-play-friendly sounds, wanted to turn her into a jukebox-friendly but highbrow hitmaker, à la Alice and Giuni Russo.

The track in question was “Oppio,” a folk-electronic-Italo-pop hybrid that depicts a Middle Eastern fantasy land— “Carthage was beautiful amid the pomegranate trees”—and whose refrain, “uru belev sameah,” is a direct citation of “Hava Nagila.”

It was not too dissimilar to those eclectic melodic/electronic tracks that Giuni Russo had been singing, and it contained all of Battiato’s and Pio’s signature stylistic conventions. A technical problem during her live performance at Sanremo caused her to sing off key in front of millions of viewers, putting a negative mark on her rising career. In an interview quoted on Orrore a 33 giri, Giusto Pio tried to reframe it as a matter of nerves. “She was panicking, so, instead of just giving her the instrumental base, for which she was supposed to fully sing, she was given the full track, to be sung in playback.” Unaware of that, she apparently sang anyway, and the difference between the base and the slight delay of her own voice amplified slightly off-key moments. “When I saw that on my TV, I just laughed. It was such a disaster. What a pity, she was really good, and the record sold 30,000 units anyway,” Pio continued.

See the Sanremo exhibition:

According to other sources, however, she knew she had to just sing in playback but, in order to keep the illusion of a real-life performance, singers did sing anyway with the mic turned off—and hers wasn’t.

However, while her career was over before it could even start, she actually did release other tracks, and we want to highlight them to showcase their merit and to reflect on what is lost when someone becomes a one-hit wonder by sheer bad luck and the perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, rather than for being an engineered industry plant with vocals sung by session musicians.

Svegliami (Oppio’s B-Side)

“Svegliami,” which means “wake me up”, opens with creepy organs, and has lyrics about IV drips being equated to an hourglass. Its refrain almost sounds like wholesome 60s Italian musica leggera, but the scene depicted is apocalyptic. The moon is burning, everything is up in flames.” The images conjured in the lyrics are fairly poignant: “over a parasol, a rainbow disappears,” and “now I am the way you want me to be; in the shadow and backlit, a sense of uselessness.”
“Svegliami” is a wake-up call both real and metaphorical, and it applies both to a bed-bound comatose patient and to a woman who wants a healthy dose of truth by her mentor. Friend of the letter the playwright and critic William G. Costabile Cisco notes that, musically, this song is reminiscent of “Atmosfera”, another Battiato/Pio number that Giuni Russo recorded in 1981 and which was then re-released by Milva eight years later.

Plaisir D’Amour

Plaisir d’Amour dates back to 1784, when Jean-Paul-Égide Martini set a poem by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian to music. Notable 20th-century renditions include the folksy interpretation by Joan Baez as “The Joys of Love”, the proto-Jim Steinman delivery by Demis Roussos and Vangelis of Aphrodite’s Child as “I Want to Live,” and the crystalline performance by Nana Mouskouri.

Battiato/Pio tailored it to Sibilla with a minimal, electronic base where, as soon as you expect a beat drop, she interpolates with a whole other melody, the propelling “Skin me, Wind me”, which she delivers in a way that may remind you of Cyndi Lauper (ex. “All Through the Night”), creating a new base for a chamber-music classic. Funnily enough, in 1988, with A casa di Ida Rubinstein, Giuni Russo would devote an entire album to revisiting opera and chamber-music pieces in an experimental manner. “Battiato himself would include experimentations with classical music in his 1991 record, and would actually revisit Baroque music in the track “Bist du bei mir”from 2001,” says Cisco.

Sex Appeal to Europe