The song on the new set of EasyJet adverts is probably driving you mad now – but did you know it has a truly remarkable origin story?
Beginning late last year, EasyJet’s new ad campaign for 2025 has encouraged British holidaymakers to ‘get out there’ and book holidays with the low-cost airline.
However, pop music obsessives immediately noticed that a strange song – that’s more than 50 years old and never charted in the UK – was playing loudly in the background.
The song in question – the one you’ve been hearing so much of thanks to EasyJet – is from 1972, and has the full title of Prisencolinensinainciusol.
Written by Italian artist Adriano Celentano, Prisencolinensinainciusol was a huge hit in Italy and in some other European countries, but never made it to the UK.
But it appears 2025 is set to be Prisencolinensinainciusol’s year, with EasyJet and an Italian lager Poretti both using the song on recent commercial campaigns.
In the Poretti advert, a man is seen sitting on a speedboat and drinking the beer while a group of animated foxes drive the boat – one of them even plays harmonica.
The history of ‘the EasyJet advert song’ goes back more than 50 years, when a 35-year-old Celentano was one of the most prolific and popular music stars in Italy.
Cultural historians have claimed that ‘Americanisation’ began to dominate Italian music in the 1950s and 1960s, with some pop artists changing their accents to sound more American.
In 1956, Renato Carosone’s song Tu Vuo fa L’Americano (You Want to Be American) brought attention to the growing cultural and societal trend.
And it was into this version of Italy that Prisencolinensinainciusol was born, with Celentano wanting to ‘capture stereotypical American sounds’ with his music.
So, in 1972, Celentano got to work on making up a gibberish language that would sound just like American English to a European person who didn’t understand it and used that language for Prisencolinensinainciusol.
Speaking to NPR in 2012, Celentano said: ‘Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did.
‘I like American slang – it’s much easier to sing than Italian – [so] I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate.
‘And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything,’ he said of the song that was performed alongside his wife, Claudia Mori.
Some claim that Celentano actually wrote the song as a trick, to fool Italian music listeners into thinking that the song was actually being sung in English.
His alleged hunch turned out to be correct: Italians bought the song in droves, and Prisencolinensinainciusol wound up being a top-five hit in Italy.
It also reached the top five of the charts in Belgium and the Netherlands, and Celentano himself was even referenced by Ian Dury and the Blockheads in their song Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3.
Prisencolinensinainciusol was eventually given a UK release under a new title, The Language of Love (Prisencol), but never charted in the 20th century.
Things have changed in recent weeks, however, with the song climbing to a new peak of number 93 thanks to its use in the EasyJet and Poretti adverts.
As the song got older, it began to be used in some American TV shows – including Fargo, Trust, and Ted Lasso – and Celentano gradually became the second-biggest-selling Italian artist of all time.
He also re-recorded Prisencolinensinainciusol on several occasions and has apparently claimed to have ‘invented rap’ with his fast delivery on the original 53-year-old song.
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