Đorđi Peruzović

Đorđi Peruzović is a Croatian singer of zabavna music and one of the first big names of the Split Festival. He was born Juraj Điđi Peruzović in Šibenik on 4 March 1940, almost by chance: his father was a seaman and his mother was visiting her sister there. The unusual Điđi came from his Italian grandmother, Bepina Zanetti from Genoa, but everyone knows him as Đorđi. He grew up in Vrboska on the island of Hvar, and Split became the city of his youth.

He studied solo singing at music school and began singing in public in 1958, while still at school. His festival career began in 1963 at the Split Festival with Zdenko Runjić's "Balada o tovaru", which won the third audience prize, and he became a regular there. In 1966 PGP RTB released his EPs with Croatian versions of songs such as "Everybody Loves Somebody", "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" and "Hello, Dolly!".

According to Billboard, he won first prize at the tenth international pop music festival in Yugoslavia in 1970, and at Split '72 he won with Nenad Vilović's "Di si bija kad je grmilo", which reached number two in Yugoslavia and also won the Lira in Bratislava. It became his signature song, and people still call the title after him in the street. Other favourites include "Cvrčak cvrči Ane", "Časna riječ", "Gdje je taj svijet", "Luna luda", "Ponoćno sunce", "Vražja Mare", "Smiraj", which he wrote himself during a tour of Siberia, and the 1977 disco song "Banana Cafe". His album Mojoj jedinoj ljubavi came out on Jugoton in 1973.

He sang at the Sopot Festival in Poland in 1973 and toured widely: he says he gave some 800 concerts in the Soviet Union alone, recording live albums there and in Czechoslovakia, and he also sang across the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. In 1984 he won the jury's first prize in Split with "Samo ti", sung with Snježana Naumovska. After a spell away from music in the late 1990s, he returned to the stage in 2005.

In 2023, at 83 and sixty years after his debut there, he won the 63rd Split Festival with "Letim u svemir", taking both the jury and the audience prize. His recordings are gathered here in one playlist.