Damians David IS REVIVING THE ROCKSTAR

He became one of the world’s biggest musicians after winning Eurovision with his band, Måneskin—and now the Italian singer has his sights on a global solo career. Over espresso and cigarettes in Rome, Damiano David argues that pop music desperately needs a high-fashion frontman.

- BY MINA TAVAKOLI

DAMIANO DAVID, THE frontman of Måneskin, fiddles with the ashtray. Out in the Piazza del Popolo, un minuto a piedi from the hotel courtyard where we sit, a cast of whimsical men has apparently been let loose on the women of Rome. A lollipop salesman is busily seducing a crush of tourists. The maître d’ of a fancy restaurant is entertaining his waitresses by shooing a pigeon with his hat. Not one, but two jesters—first juggling, then dropping, navel oranges—are blowing kisses at the flock of pearly signoras who stopped to lob their fruit back. “Yes,” says David, almost listlessly, “everybody is like a comedian.”

In his own way, David is a performance artist of this particularly Roman strain of rakish male swag. He is the lead singer of a glamorous and extraordinarily horny interpretation of a rock band, whose rise to international megastardom reads like an absurd epic. It began with David, a street musician on the tourist-congested thoroughway of the Via del Corso, and reached one of multiple climaxes when David—shirtless in leather pants, eyeliner and Louboutin heels—became the winner of the carnivalesque European talent show Eurovision. David’s cock-rocking Måneskin performance made him a muse of former Gucci designer Alessandro Michele and a beloved target of paparazzi, and, in one instance, it earned him a rebuke by the sitting French president (more shortly).

“Romans have this sense of humour,” he says, lighting a cigarette. But the sword, he warns, is double-edged. “It's definitely a city of judgers,” he says.