John Holmes (una vita per il cinema) by Elio e le Storie Tese (1989)

Elio e le Storie Tese wrote John Holmes in the early 1980's, at the height of Holmes's fame, and played it live from 1987 before putting it on their 1989 debut album, Elio samaga hukapan kariyana turu. The song is a mock-hagiography: episodes from a life that never happened, sung with the solemnity of a concert programme. The joke is that the only true thing about the subject is the thing nobody mentions, and the song mentions nothing else.

The band have said it was written as a criticism of the hard-core industry of the period, which turned performers of dubious talent into idols, and it is the clearest early example of what made them Italy's great comedy band: musicianship far better than the joke requires, and a joke better than it needs to be. It has been in the live set for nearly forty years, longer than most of the careers it satirises.

Its afterlife is as the Italian size entry. Where Mickey Avalon compares and Lil Dicky despairs, Elio canonises: Holmes is treated as a saint of a church that has only one relic. It is the band's phallic standard and the one song on this list where the subject is a specific, named, famous example of the organ, with a filmography.