Italy’s Maneskin, Spotify favourites and America’s most loved new rock band, on their US debut, performing ’70s covers and what’s ahead in 2022
- Maneskin, who won the Eurovision Song Contest last year, perform largely in Italian and were the biggest new rock band of 2021
- Now in the US, they are keen not to be defined by their biggest song, a cover of the Four Seasons’ hit Beggin’ that has had 800 million plays on Spotify
The four members of the Italian rock band Maneskin grew up gigging around Rome. But when they flew into Los Angeles for their first sold-out gig at the Roxy in early November, there was one local site of Saturnalian bad behaviour they just had to visit.
“The Rainbow Bar!” bassist Victoria De Angelis shouted when asked about which local rock ’n’ roll haunts the band had to see on its first trip to the US west coast. “I grew up on metal and glam rock, so we were all sitting on the couch in there, like, ‘This is where Lemmy and Motley Crue used to hang out’.”
Maneskin are a band of almost unnervingly lithe twenty-somethings who can squeeze into ’70s David Bowie bodysuits (or, as is often the case at photo shoots, squeeze out of them). They emerged victorious at 2021’s Eurovision Song Contest – a competition that, decades earlier, gave the world Abba and Celine Dion; last week, Maneskin helped ring in 2022 on ABC television’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest.
Maneskin are an anomaly in a rap- and pop-driven era: a guitar/bass/drums combo indebted to Queen and T Rex that perform largely in Italian and whose breakout US single was a cover of the Four Seasons’ hit Beggin’.”