Dio È Morto L'immensità Lontano Dagli Occhi Il Cielo
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DIO È MORTO L’IMMENSITÀ LONTANO DAGLI OCCHI IL CIELO IN UNA STANZA DEDICATO LA CANZONE DI MARINELLA C’È CHI DICE NO IO CHE NON VIVO SENZA TE IO CHE AMO SOLO TE MAMMA INSIEME A TE NON CI STO PIÙ CARUSO IL MONDO PUGNI CHIUSI ’O SOLE MIO UN’AVVENTURA VOLARE [NEL BLU DIPINTO DI BLU] (This text is translated from the original Italian press kit.) HITALIA: AN ITALIAN ALBUM FOR TODAY This is an Italian album for today, and today everything in Italian music is shaken into one big cocktail: Sanremo, Cantagiro, Disco per L’Estate, Festivalbar, authentic 1960s pop; singer-songwriters from Gino Paoli to Vasco Rossi, which became mass Italian music from the 1970s onwards; song-song-squared penned by well-educated musicians and well-read lyricists; generational words and perfect texts, those right from the heart and those right from the textbook. No more black-or-white distinctions, in our memories it’s now all rolled into one. Just plain twentieth-century Italian songs, that were simply able to score a point, make a mark. Nannini hasn’t chosen the most popular Italian hits ever recorded; she’s picked out the loveliest of the most popular. Not a revival-drunk jukebox but a choice from the head and the heart made with a head and heart of a musician, a singer, a songwriter. Gianna writes: ‘What’s it like to sing other people’s songs? I don’t do it much but it’s liberating to lend my voice to someone else’s inspiration. So I decided to record them, because I like them, and because their quality has a rational appeal, but above all because they talk to my heart.’ TECHNIQUE AND HISTORY OF ITALIAN HIT SINGLES (OVERVIEW) Hitalia is first and foremost a perfect example of the short sweet song, one that’s in a hurry and doesn’t hang around, ‘sparing’ just three minutes for insights that would need an entire musical to express. It was the blessing and the spoiling of the 45 rpm, which had to hit you like a slap then take root permanently in your memory. We Italians were good at those too, wham! bam! thank you ma’am! Catchy songs as soon as you heard them on the radio or on TV, appealing enough to keep more and more and more of them coming. But that was another Italy, another market (22,000,000 records sold just in 1962, and that was only the beginning), another media horizon, overshadowed by the RAI monopoly (with its own censorship committee), another kind of discography and music publishing, perhaps more spontaneous, privateering, naive. Everything was unique, new, special. From the late-1950s revolution, with the Italian economic boom, but also rock&roll, Modugno and the so-called ‘screamers’, a new kind of music and with it the new business of garnering new trends among youth. In Italy, like in France, Germany and the UK, just about to kick-start the entire continent. Many of the tracks on Hitalia burst with that energy, the throbbing that Nannini captures with animal instinct and her own private memories. She was just a child, but a child who was already listening, ready to devour a song, savour it, digest it, now spit it out with every ounce of pure Italian (well Siena, so naturally more ‘stroppy’) energy, but for decades tuned into the sound going around, from London to Berlin. THE SONGWRITERS The elite of modern Italian songwriters are to be found on Hitalia: Paoli, Guccini, De André, Fossati, Dalla, Vasco (indeed Rossi-Solieri) and the legendary brain trust Don Backy-Mogol, Mogol-Battisti, Donaggio-Pallavicini, Conte-Pallavicini, Migliacci-Modugno, Meccia-Boncompagni-Pes-Fontana, Endrigo-Enriquez- Bardotti, Beretta-Gianco-Dall’Aglio, Bixio-Cherubini, Capurro-Di Capua. Craft and inspiration, oldies and newbies, tacky refrains and razor-sharp slogans. Pop artists who are the successors of melodrama, pioneers of the most intense, personal songs, hit-makers who stormed charts in and out of Italy, proud trendsetters, intentional purists. There’s always been life in Italian songs, long before the never-to-be-repeated Sixties-Seventies season of singer-songwriters. Nannini – one of regrettably few female voices – always had the guts to play all her cards: all on her own, music and words, or partnered by colleagues for one or the other. A singer-songwriter from the get-go, her eighteen discs of new tracks have seen her in the role of musician or songwriter or both, depending on necessity, inspiration, expediency. Setting aside this tactic, she approached the seventeen classics on Hitalia with a very different mind-set. She has nothing to defend, nothing to pluck out: she’s singing, penetrating, devouring the soul of these songs. As a songwriter herself she ponders the words and the chords, touching up and streamlining, loosening up or tightening up, but always with love. ARRANGEMENTS AND SOUND The seventeen Hitalia classics were given Noughties treatment: guitars always; electronic, hypnotic dub and beat when needed; strings by Will Malone, recorded in London at Abbey Road, included almost everywhere. A London musician with an interesting background, now on his seventh Nannini album. Producer, composer and arranger for the likes of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Todd Rundgren, The Verve (Bitter Sweet Symphony), Massive Attack (Unfinished Sympathy), Depeche Mode (One Caress), and the legendary arranger of The Who’s Tommy for the London Symphony Orchestra, he was just twelve when he decided the way to go after first hearing Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings op.11, one of the most poignant pieces of twentieth-century American classical music. It’s as if Will Malone had begun all his truly personal work as Hitalia producer and arranger from two stubborn string notes that Ennio Morricone wove into his fabric for one of the album’s key tracks, Jimmy Fontana’s Il mondo, by her own admission the spark that triggered the whole operation for Gianna. In a sense Malone and Maestro Morricone, Malone and Italian music of that time (which he may only just have heard for the first time), but above all Malone and Nannini, are kith and kin. He’s loved her to bits for years for her fiery musical talent. So Malone knows his orchestra has to sing AGAINST her voice and WITH it: no filling in or embellishing, just singing. And getting an orchestra to sing when Gianna’s rock voice explodes against the blazing guitars of band leader Davide Tagliapietra, is no mean feat. Especially if he’s got a stellar rhythm section behind him formed by Simon Philips (drummer and producer for artists like Jeff Beck, The Who, Judas Priest, Tears for Fears, Mike Oldfield, Gary Moore, and whose career began aged 19 with Phil Manzanera and Brian Eno in 801 Live, then continued in tours with Toto, Jack Bruce, David Gilmour, Frank Zappa, and countless others) and Francis Hylton (from Galliano’s acid jazz to Incognito’s jazz funk). Not to mention keyboards and programming in the hands of an old diehard like Leandro Gaetano, who has been with Gianna forever, and on the Italian scene since the 1970s, when he was in Lucio Dalla’s band and a founder member of The Area. Then there’s the Hitalia sound, lean, metallic, keen sound forged by Alan Moulder, a key producer of Brit sound from the 1980s, from The Jesus and Mary Chain to Placebo, Arctic Monkeys, Nine Inch Nails, The Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters. TRACKS 01. DIO È MORTO Distorted guitars, flaming beat, but the Metro Voices mixed polyphonic choir step up to add epic nuance to the first masterpiece of Italian ‘protest songs’, penned by Francesco Guccini and launched by The Nomadi at the 1967 Cantagiro (The Equipe 84 rejected it, scared of ruining their image). RAI censored it but Vatican Radio promoted it in the years after the Second Vatican Council. ‘Ho visto’ (refers to the ‘I saw’ of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s Howl) is the key verse underpinning the entire song. While making the album Gianna wrote: ‘I opened my eyes, I saw! When I think of yesterday in the studio and how I got so into Dio è morto . I felt as if I could see in that one song everything that rock means to me, like a faith, not out of habit and not to hide from fear.’ 02. L’IMMENSITÀ The introduction tells the story of when a very young Nannini met Don Backy, against a hypnotic, cutting-edge electronic groove with ‘stubborn ethnic’ guitars, then fleshed out by the strings. One of Italy’s all-time great songs (performed for the first time by Don Backy and Johnny Dorelli, Sanremo 1967) given the Nannini treatment. 03. LONTANO DAGLI OCCHI Wicked bad distorted guitar and for a split second there’s a flash of curly- mopped heavy metal guitarists swaying in unison. Then Gianna’s feisty ‘Che cos’è?’ and sweeping strings wake us up from the dream: we’re in the soul of Sergio Endrigo, one of Italy’s finest singers. From another Sanremo, the 1969 edition, when Paul McCartney’s Apple protégée Mary Hopkin (Those Were the Days) partnered our man from Trieste (but Vangelis and Demis Roussos also covered it, with Aphrodite’s Child). Who knows if they knew that the great lyricist Sergio Bardotti stole the idea for the words from Seneca? 04. IL CIELO IN UNA STANZA [featuring Gino Paoli] Fantastic intro with electronic rhythmic house figuration, strings offering just a simple four-note counterpoint, a hint of dub rhythm, and the voices of Gianna and Gino (eighty years young and in better shape than ever), in continuous tempo rubato phrasing.