Sign up for IQ Index
The latest industry news to your inbox.
As one of Italy’s biggest stars, Laura Pausini has enjoyed yet another record year, selling out stadia in her homeland and arena shows throughout Europe and the Americas…
By IQ on 09 Dec 2016
image © Naphtalina
… To celebrate her remarkable year, Adam Woods talks to the team that has taken her spectacular Simili production around the world
In summer 2007, in the pouring rain, Italian star Laura Pausini became the first woman ever to headline Milan’s San Siro Stadium. Two years later, following the devastating earthquake in the central Italian town of L’Aquila, she returned, with 42 other female singers, to raise money for local charities.
This summer, she managed to raise the stakes again, with two nights at the 80,018-capacity San Siro as part of a full-scale tour of Italian stadiums – the first two-night San Siro stand and the first Italian stadium tour for a female artist.
Acknowledging her record-breaking stadium shows in Milan, Pausini tells IQ: “Coming back there this year was amazing – two nights in a row. I was freaking out until the moment I started singing on that enormous stage. I felt that I would be able to embrace all, just like the shape of the stage I drew for this tour.”
Pausini’s was the first two-night San Siro stand and the first Italian stadium tour for a female artist
On her first night at the ‘Meazza’, Pausini made an appropriately weighty dedication from the stage: “Questo concerto è contro la violenza sulle donne” (“This concert is against violence towards women”). After 23 years on top, Pausini remains a major star, and like all such artists, everything she does needs to make a point.
The tour that followed went on to do the same. After five Italian shows, and across two further legs, Pausini toured what you might call the Pausini-speaking world, whirling through North and South American arenas before a set of European dates. For anyone unfamiliar with the 70 million-selling Pausini and her regular world tours, the route is a remarkable one, only partly explained by the fact that she has released both Italian and Spanish versions of eight of her nine most recent albums.
Read the rest of this feature in issue 68 of IQ Magazine.
To subscribe, click here.