Måneskin's huge global success in the wake of winning the 2021 Eurovision song contest has been of the most unexpected and entertaining rock n' roll stories of recent years. But if a loosely-bound coalition of right-wing conspiracy theorists are to be believed -spoiler warning: they're not to be believed - the Rome-based quartet aren't just award-winning, arena-filling, headline-grabbing extroverts living out their wildest glam rock fantasies, but are in fact, a sort of musical Trojan horse created and funded by the Italian government to promote and normalise gender-fluid culture. Who knew?
Actually, it appears that at least a couple of members of the band are wholly unaware of their pivotal role in this new culture war too, for when the bizarre theory was mentioned by frontman Damiano David in a recent interview with The Guardian, drummer Ethan Torchio was apparently incredulous. Although, then again, he could be just a really good actor...
The revelation came to light during an interview which ran in The Guardian on Saturday, January 21, when David shared his opinion that the band have always been "very dividing".
"There are a bunch of people that love us and are very proud of what we’re doing," the singer says, "and then there’s a whole other part made of conservatives and traditional rock’n’roll fans and fascists that hate us with everything they’ve got.
"There’s this conspiracy building up... that we’re getting famous because we’re being paid. That we’re working with the Italian government to share this gender-fluid culture!
"A lot of people are really proud, bassist Victoria De Angelis adds in the feature. “But Italy is a very conservative country and they’re intimidated by the fact that someone can wear makeup or high heels or appear half-naked or not be straight. But fuck them.”
In the same interview, the band reveal that their 2022 single Kool Kids was written, post-Eurovision, as a loud and proud 'fuck you' to everyone who ever doubted and sneered at their band.
"That [was written] three days after Eurovision so our feeling was: 'Fuck off, we won and everybody has to eat our shit'," David says. "Before Eurovision we went through a very tough year; everybody was trying to stop us doing this kind of music and doing Eurovision. Nobody believed in us. So we had this feeling of being the underdogs that won."
The band's new album Rush! is out now.
