Alice

Carla Bissi (born 26 September 1954), known professionally as Alice or Alice Visconti, is an Italian singer-songwriter and pianist who began her career in the early 1970s.

Her career in music started at age 17 when she participated in the 1971 Castrocaro Music Festival under her birth name.

She went on to win the contest with an interpretation of the song "Tanta voglia di lei", originally composed and recorded by classic Italian rock band Pooh.

The following year saw her winning another music award, La gondola d'argento in Venice, with the song "La festa mia" as well as making her debut in the important Sanremo Music Festival performing "Il mio cuore se ne va" in the Newcomers category, also released as her debut single, the song however failed to qualify for the finals.

Two further singles on the Carosello label credited under her birth name Carla Bissi followed in 1972 and 1973, both going relatively unnoticed by Italian audiences.

In 1975 she quit her day job at a design studio and took the stage name Alice Visconti as she was signed by the Italian subsidiary of CBS Records and released her debut album La mia poca grande età.

The album consisted of material written by some of Italy's most successful composers and lyricists of the era and among the musicians contributing were in fact members of Pooh.

The singles "Piccola anima" and "Io voglio vivere", both in the fairly traditional Italian easy listening genre, became minor chart successes in late 1975 and early 1976, the latter also a modest hit in France.

A second album on CBS followed in late 1977, Cosa resta... Un fiore, recorded with the same team of producers, composers and musicians as the debut, including the singles "...E respiro" and "Un'isola" which also met with moderate commercial success.

In late 1979, shortly after her contract with CBS had expired, Alice met a man with whom she would go on to collaborate with for the next three decades with great success, the experimental, unconventional and highly productive composer and singer Franco Battiato who was just on the verge of having his Italian breakthrough in the pop genre with the album L'era del cinghiale bianco, released in 1979.

Battiato secured Alice a contract with his label EMI and the two began working together with his producer Angelo Carrara on what was to become her first proper hit single, the dark and despairing "Il vento caldo dell'estate" ("The Warm Summer Wind") and the following album Capo Nord ("North Cape").

Co-written and arranged by Battiato, the album saw Alice making a dramatic change in musical direction as it combined influences from contemporary rock and new wave and a musical landscape with prominent use of synthesizers and distorted electric guitars.

At this time she also dropped the Visconti part of her stage name and the Capo Nord album was the first to be credited simply as Alice.

The album also marked her debut as a composer, with her writing the majority of the songs and over the course of the following albums she would become increasingly involved in the production of her music, both as composer, lyricist, musical arranger and sound engineer.

The duet made her one of the best-selling Italian artists on the German-speaking markets of the mid-1980s and it has been said that she at this stage of her career even sold more records in these countries, the Benelux and Scandinavia than in her native Italy.

After releasing three albums by the end of the decade, her breakthrough came in 1981 when she won the Sanremo Music Festival with the song "Per Elisa".

This was followed by European hit singles like "Una notte speciale", "Messaggio", "Chan-son Egocentrique", "Prospettiva Nevski" and "Nomadi" and albums like Gioielli rubati, Park Hotel, Elisir, and Il sole nella pioggia which charted in Continental Europe, Scandinavia, and Japan.

In, she represented Italy in the Eurovision Song Contest with "I treni di Tozeur," a duet with longtime collaborator Franco Battiato.

In her more recent career Alice has explored a diverse range of musical genres including classical, jazz, electronica and ambient, and has collaborated with a large number of renowned English and American musicians.

In early 1981 Alice returned to the Sanremo Music Festival with the song "Per Elisa", composed by herself, Franco Battiato and his longtime co-writer, classical violinist Giusto Pio.

The song was both lyrically and musically a modern paraphrase of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Für Elise" but it was by no means an archetypal sentimental Sanremo ballad.

The rough rock track had lyrics which dealt with jealousy, betrayal, anger and revenge.

For the live performance at the contest, she made full use of her vocal strength and range; one of the singer's trademarks is the exceptionally low register of her contralto voice.

"Per Elisa" is also partly sung in falsetto and thus covers close to four octaves.

The unorthodox entry and Alice's delivery of the song while dressed in tight jeans and a leather jacket made a strong impression on both the juries and the TV audiences; "Per Elisa" won the contest, becoming one of the first up-tempo rock tracks to do so and it became her commercial breakthrough, not only in Italy but also in the rest of Continental Europe, becoming a Top 10 hit also in Switzerland and Austria and most other parts of Western Europe, including Scandinavia.

An album titled Alice followed a few months later (released as Per Elisa outside Italy) including follow-up single "Una notte speciale" ("A Special Night") and the same year Bissi set out on her first European tour.

The following years saw the release of the albums Azimut (Azimuth) and Falsi allarmi, again mainly composed by Bissi herself, but also including further songwriting collaborations with Battiato and Giusto Pio, and both albums produced by Angelo Carrara.

The albums spun off further popular single releases like "Messaggio" ("Message"), the nonsensical French/Italian/German/English language "Chan-son Egocentrique" ("Selfcentred Song", a duet with Battiato), "A cosa pensano" ("What Are They Thinking"), "Notte a Roma" ("Night in Rome"), "Solo un'idea" ("Just A Thought") and "Il profumo del silenzio" ("The Scent of Silence").

These became especially successful in West Germany, which led to her recording the German/Italian language duet "Zu Nah Am Feuer" with singer Stefan Waggershausen in late 1983, an English/Italian version was later also released in certain territories under the title "Close to the Fire".

The single which sold nearly a million copies in West Germany alone was also a number one in Switzerland and Austria.

In May 1984 Alice and Franco Battiato represented Italy in the Eurovision Song Contest with the for its genre highly unconventional song "I treni di Tozeur" ("The trains of Tozeur"), again composed by Battiato, Giusto Pio and lyricist Rosario Cosentino.

The mid-tempo synth-driven ballad was based around a very brief excerpt from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Magic Flute and was performed on stage in Luxembourg with three classically trained mezzo-sopranos.

In 1985 Alice followed up the success of the "I treni di Tozeur" single with a full-length tribute album entitled Gioielli rubati – Alice canta Battiato (Stolen Jewels – Alice Sings Battiato), including nine of the composer's best-known songs.

Angelo Carrara's production of the album, recorded in Milan and mixed at The Power Station Studios in New York City, accentuated Battiato's influences from classical masters such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart and Johannes Brahms by juxtaposing modern sequencer-programmed synthesizers and drum machines against a classically arranged string section, just like in the case of "I treni di Tozeur" courtesy of the opera house La Scala in Milan.

Both Alice and Battiato have since recorded several solo interpretations of "I treni di Tozeur", both with contemporary and classical arrangements, and the song also appears on the CD set of Eurovision Winners and Classics produced to coincide with the Congratulations 50th Anniversary special of late 2005 as well as on the accompanying DVD.

Her latest album Samsara was released in 2012.

Born in Forlì, Alice started taking piano lessons in the local Conservatory and singing privately at the age of eight.

Despite being tipped to win and arguably the best reception from the audiences on the night as well as receiving the coveted "twelve points", the full mark, from countries as diverse as Spain and Finland, Alice and Battiato lost out to the Swedish song "Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley", and finished 5th out of 19 entries.

"I treni di Tozeur" however became that year's bestselling entry in Continental Europe, and paradoxically enough also a Top 20 hit in Sweden.

The song is also in fact one of the very few Italian Eurovision entries ever to become a commercial success in Italy itself – even topping the Italian singles chart, and some twenty-five years later it still remains the best-selling single in Bissi's career to date.