Sandy Marton

Sandy Marton is a pop singer and songwriter who became one of the faces of Italo disco in the 1980s. He was born Aleksandar Marton in Zagreb on 4 October 1959, and that is why he is on Muzika-Balkan: English Wikipedia calls him an Italy-based Croatian singer, and Italian Wikipedia a Croatian singer and entrepreneur. According to Italian Wikipedia he lives mostly on the island of Ibiza, the place that gave him his greatest hit.

He was raised largely by his grandmother on his mother's side and was sent to study in the United Kingdom, where he learned the piano and music theory; at sixteen he went on to study music in the United States. He later settled in Milan, where in the early 1980s he studied fashion design at the Istituto Marangoni.

In 1982 the talent scout and producer Claudio Cecchetto noticed him and signed him. Marton made his debut the next year under the name M. Basic with the single "Ok Run", which was used in commercials for the Philips Videopac console. In 1984, now as Sandy Marton, he released "People from Ibiza", an English-language dance song he wrote himself. With his long blond hair, a keytar over his shoulder and oversized jackets he became a teen idol, and in October 1984 the song reached number one in Italy, his only chart-topper.

In 1985 "Camel by Camel" and "Exotic & Erotic" kept him in the charts and the discos, and "Exotic & Erotic" became a surprise top-ten hit in Australia in 1986. He was a regular guest of the television show Festivalbar. His first album, Modern Lover, gave him another Italian top-ten single in "Modern Lovers", and Cecchetto set up the production company Marton Corporation and the label Ibiza Records around him. "Love Synchronicity" followed in 1987, and "La Paloma Blanca" in 1989 was his last top-ten single.

Tired of the rules of show business, Sandy Marton left music at the end of the decade. He moved to Spain, opened a large discotheque in Madrid and later withdrew to Ibiza, returning only occasionally: in 1996 with his second and last album, Erase una vez, and in 2006 with "Caminando por la calle", a duet with Al Bano. He went on appearing on Italian television, among others in La notte vola in 2001 and on Rai 1 in 2021, 2022 and 2024, each time singing "People from Ibiza".