His name is spread out in giant letters on the facade of L’Olympia. “I had never seen that, I am very happy about it and it moves me,” Mahmood confides to 20 minutes which he receives in his dressing room two hours before going on stage. His concert this Monday in Paris is sold out.
The Italian star, a fashion week regular, loves the French capital. Unsurprisingly, he says he appreciates “the beauty” of it. That we breathe “a different air” there. This is not the first time that the 31-year-old author, composer and performer has performed in France. In particular, he had already filled the Bataclan two years ago: “Here, the energy of the public is always enormous. »
He collects gold and platinum records
In the room on Boulevard des Capucines, this Monday, there was a large contingent of expatriate Italians but also French Italophiles or who knew him through his two participations in Eurovision. He ranked second in 2019 with Soldi – gold record in France – and sixth, in 2022 in duo with Blanco on Brividi. This massive showcase, his good looks and his sense of fashion have attracted the attention of the public – on Instagram, he has nearly 2 million subscribers – but it would be too simplistic to dwell on these superficial considerations to explain his success.
Since he was revealed on the stage of the Sanremo Italian Song Festival in 2019, where he became the first artist from the “young talents” category to triumph, he has released three albums, all ranked number 1 or 2 of the best sellers and has collected gold and platinum records with around ten singles.
In February, he finished “only” sixth in Sanremo, but the song he presented, Tuta Gold, is the one that has since achieved the greatest success: it has just been crowned triple platinum disc in Italy, the choreography of the chorus has gone viral and the song is playing repeatedly on the radio on the other side of the Alps. A small phenomenon.
“It seems impossible to have done so much in such a short time”
Does such success, so quickly, scare him? He says no. “I always move forward, I focus on work. When, sometimes, I take stock and think back on this journey, it seems impossible to have done so much in such a short time, continues Mahmood. But I think hard work always pays off. My last record took me two years. »
This album, Nei letti dei altri (“In the beds of others”) is, according to him, “a return to the origins”, his most personal. He wrote it in particular after the fire, in the summer of 2021, of the Milan building where he lived. A shock for him, who had to return to live with his mother for a while, as he told the media when the opus was released. “I tried to be as sincere as possible, to reveal myself as much as possible,” explains the singer, who nevertheless lets little of his private life leak out.
Mahmood is the image of this new uninhibited Italian scene, anchored in modernity, charting its course in quiet opposition to ambient conservatism. His first victory in Sanremo raised eyebrows at Matteo Salvini, the Minister of the Interior at the time. Faced with the widespread xenophobia of a part of the Italian population, the man who chose his surname as his stage name and called himself Alessandro declared at a press conference: “I was born and raised in Milan, my mother is Sardinian and my Egyptian dad. I am 100% Italian. » But today, the legitimacy trials are over. Even the most resistant must come to terms with the idea that the thirty-year-old is making Italian song shine internationally.
“Something of the order of rupture”
Musically, Mahmood establishes bridges between variety, the urban and sounds from elsewhere. He doesn’t consider himself “a classic pop artist”. “Making pop means conforming to certain codes, producing similar things every time. In my music, there is something of the order of rupture, he continues. It’s always difficult for me to explain what I do to someone. I am constantly evolving. The best way to know me is to listen to my music. »
The song Semper/Never has been running for a month, still too timidly, on French radios. He sings it in French (a first for him who learned the language at school but “forgot everything”) and in Italian with the Belgian Angèle. “She is an artist that I have respected for a long time. We wrote to each other on Instagram. We saw each other in the studio here in Paris… She has a similar background to mine, in the way her career started,” he says.
Mahmood’s European tour continues after this Paris stop. This spring, around fifteen dates await him in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. His dream would be to give concerts “in more cities, to take [sa] music elsewhere”, such as in Brazil or the United States.
He is not the type to imagine that conquering the whole world with a repertoire in Italian is mission impossible: “I would not have thought of filling a hall like the Olympia and yet, it happened. So you never know…”