The Best Of Paolo Conte

For a few years I was haunted by a song I could not identify. On the infrequent occasions I listened to the radio during my time in Rome, whichever station it was I'd settled upon as the least objectionable might play a jazzy-sounding number in which a deep male voice sang in Italian, but with some words of English in the chorus: "It's wonderful... good luck my baby...I dream of you... chips, chips". It was the kind of song where it seemed likelier that these were the chips one might be given in a casino, and not any potato-based foodstuff. I grew to love the song, but each of the half dozen or so times I heard it I never caught the artist or track-title being announced. I resigned myself to its remaining a mystery.

But then I heard a snippet of it again a few years later in Amsterdam, issuing from a hotel-room TV as the soundtrack to an ad. On returning from that trip back to the UK, I resolved to see if the internet might be able to solve the puzzle for me. This was still in the dial-up era, before I'd discovered Google, so it was with the aid of AltaVista, Excite or suchlike that I learned the song on Italian radio in '96 and on Dutch TV in late '98 or early '99 had been 'Via Con Me' by Paolo Conte.

Amazon UK had begun selling CDs by then, and had a copy of The Best of Paolo Conte in stock: not only had the internet solved the mystery for me, but a few days later it had provided me with a copy of the song I'd thought I might never find. I didn't love everything else on the disc - 'Via Con Me' remained my favourite - but I also very much enjoyed some of the other numbers, such as 'Sotto Le Stelle Del Jazz' and 'Gong-Oh'. It's an album I play rather infrequently, but I haven't yet been tempted to let it go.

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