I owe this review to Veronica Fusaro. I’ve been aware of her for a few years and noted how she’d been brave enough to pitch up in Manchester in the middle of winter to shoot an early video. So when she came again last December, opening for an Indian artist at the Deaf Institute, I trotted along there.
Unfortunately my car broke down in a ‘disabled’ bay, I had to leave the venue immediately after her set to try to avoid being clamped (unsuccessfully) and most of it went over my head for that reasonand it was impossible to write a review.
The Swiss-Italian Fusaro has made her mark both in her home country and in Asia but deserves a wider audience here in northern Europe. This is the first single off her debut album and was written in a basement studio in Switzerland and produced by Paul O’Duffy in London.
The song invites you to dream about a cruise down the Amalfi coast in the 1960s, longing for a taste of the sweet life but with a bittersweet taste – the night is falling but the sun has parted company with us – ergo the song is upbeat musically but with sad lyrics.
It’s definitely retro in nature, there’s something of the 1960s about it. You could imagine Cilla Black or Petula Clark singing it. She is jazz-influenced and there is a slightly jazzy flavour to it but it is principally heavily mainstream but high quality pop. Nothing wrong with that and if it wasn’t for the arcane way in which national radio playlists work in this country I’m sure this song would get on one.
Right from the first time I listened to her I recognised the quality and power of her vocal, at one time comparing her to Shirley Bassey. Yet at the same time there is a unique, mischievous intimacy about it.
I don’t know when the album will come out but we are promised “a soul pop album full of organic and raw sounds”.
Veronica is playing shows right now in Switzerland, yet another foreign lesson for our government.
Photo by Nils Sandmeier.