Enzo Carella - An Irresistible Outsider

It must have been an unusual evening in Rome that marked a key encounter for Italian pop. An evening somewhat resembling the two protagonists of this story: elusive, suspended, dazed.

They are Enzo Carella, guitarist and singer, and Lino Panella, poet, writer, performer, "calembour".

Between them it was immediately friendship, empathy. Together they leapt over the perimeter wall of our pop music, setting off on a journey that continues to this day.

Lei si rivede ragazza

Come se la porta di casa

L’avesse aperta

Ecco che esce da sé

Everything takes shape and life on a 1976 single: "Fosse vero/ Si rivede ragazza", which inaugurates a subtle, mutant, streaked pop nouvelle vague, combining musical forms and spoken images in a filigree that bewitches, a dialectical game of dazzling reflections.

What strikes you immediately is the instrumental cunning and an exemplary, magnetic melodic fluidity. Then the device of the lyrics goes off, in a continuous, lucid mnemonic flashback between lived experience, oddities and enigmas, dreamlike plunges and flights of fancy. A cascade of visions and guises in which everything in the narrative dances, twirls and shifts shape without ever settling or resolving.

When the first notes of the album Vocation (1977, It Jeans/Rca) rise up, that evening lights up as if it were day; conjuring, who knows how, sudden and picturesque pop apparitions that still manage to sound like nothing else today.

Carella's sinuous, velvety touch glides nimbly over every subject, snapshot, invention, which Panella crosses in rhyme, an unstoppable anthology with which they sidestep and outwit convention, mocking and overturning homegrown pop iconography. An excellent host of session musicians from Jeans-Rca and guests, such as Goblin bassist Fabio Pignatelli, does the rest, lifting the miracle still further.

Carella's debut boasts an exemplary tracklist, from the playful mystical delirium and phonetic assonances of "Vocation" to the candid, sensual initiation of "Guarda l'uccellino" with its wonderfully convulsive finale; through to the appetizing Mediterranean pop-funk of "Fosse vero" and "Malamore", which in relay close side A and open side B without ever suspending our disbelief. And when, seduced, we arrive at lively sarabandes like "La serietà", or surreal lovers' spats like "L'anima pagliaccona", we become convinced we're looking at something... completely new.

It is with records like Vocation, with its unusual paths, that Italian pop finds itself changing, as if after a mnemonic void, discovering itself different, altered.

On the back cover there's a dedication, “to Cristina” …everyone has a Cristina to think back on.

Toward the end of the Seventies, the collaboration between Carella and Panella meant mutual, unbreakable artistic belonging: each held the keys to the other, each the other's interpreter. And how many already hung, unknowingly, on those lips, on those gestures.

“There are quite a few singers. Enzo Carella is the least 'quite a few' of them all.” That's how Panella remembers his partner, years later. Listening to “Malamore,” Lucio Battisti said Carella was the only Italian singer who intrigued him. And, not by chance, it was Carella who gave him the decisive input toward that traumatic, necessary artistic renewal we all know.

Senza di te

Navigherò

In barche a veleno

1979 brings an encore. The song that launches the Carella phenomenon into orbit is a whirlwind called “Barbara,” so authentic you feel you could touch it. It holds all the beauty of romantic infatuation, a blend of tactile perceptions, flavors, scents, confidences and whims between lovers. A sweltering madness wrapped in a shimmering light.

On Barbara e altri Carella (1979, It Jeans/Rca), then, both fever and ambition rise. The two authors go all in, pursuing a concept that, veering toward the high model of lyric tragedy, uncovers assonances, continuities and grafts with the “passions of everyday life.”

Between sacred and profane, myth and reality, the same driving force is revealed.

Anyone who bought the LP Barbara e altri Carella, drawn in by the buzz around “Barbara”'s success at Sanremo, could open the booklet and find, to their disbelief, Panella-esque turns of phrase mixed, half playfully and half in earnest, with quotations from Otello, Carmen, La Traviata, and so on.

In its tormented, intimate romantic swings, this album is an overwhelming pop ecstasy. Besides “Barbara” and the revisited “Malamore,” which condemns one to live abandoned by love, there's a piece of magic: “Amara,” dizzying and obsessive in its hints of aphrodisiac feasts, magical fluids, invisible instruments of seduction: dedicated to Brillat-Savarin, the gastronome intellectual.

Carella's unmistakable melodic instinct soars through a continuous stream of instrumental invention (Pignatelli again on bass, M. Guarini on piano and keyboards, alongside Pennini on guitars), whose intricate simplicity has since become proverbial.

Further on, another mythical figure appears, Carmen: as told by our duo she becomes “Carmè,” from the Gulf of Sorrento. From a garland of strings and keys opening the track burst sensuality and passion. “Carmè,” a place of perdition and restless longing, is an irrevocable farewell between lovers set to bickering, games and loving affectations, theatrical vocal flourishes. It stops just short of anguish, an anguish sublimated in “Parigi” (“sotto i grigi cieli”), a snapshot as vast as no other, and as no other allegory of the abandoned lover's soul.

A sweet shipwreck that thickens until it dissolves in the flow of its own torments and regrets.

A couple of years later comes the turning point of Sfinge (1981, Rca), Carella's third album in four years.

The Egyptian woman/lioness stands tall, majestic and cryptic, against a backdrop of unchanging pale blue, while a light breeze rises from the sea and reaches the shore, seeping into the music.

A sophisticated, elegant pop record, once again supremely inspired, Sfinge was written and performed by grido, arranged and produced by Elio D'Anna, former saxophonist of Osanna, a musician of keen sensitivity who provides the decisive impetus. For many, this is in fact the finest moment of Enzo Carella's career, his genuine stroke of brilliance. He is by now the shrewd herald of a light, sensuous language, chiaroscuro, limpid yet murky, forever developed and enriched only in relation to itself.

This time there's no Sanremo frontrunner to decorate or weigh down the collection. The album itself dispels any such doubt: Sfinge stands strong on its own, a phenomenal display of creative and collective force: a blistering "koine" of Italian pop with few equals.

First of all there's the title - brilliant, ambiguous, crucial, symbolic, poised between illusion and introspection - and then there's this feline, feminine semblance, sensitive and enigmatic, the final, decisive "form" taken by Carella's desire. It induces and encourages a different attitude, contemplative, passive. By making herself desired, the lover sets the beloved's desire ablaze.

The tracklist offers intriguing stylistic pastiches that flow seamlessly into one another, an infectious blend of funk, jazz, Creole sounds, even touching on the kind of saudade typical of the early albums of another irrepressibly creative artist, Alberto Camerini. Like a wave, dedications and escapes roll past, "burning nostalgias", fleeting encounters, flashes and vapours. Sentimental pangs that strike everyone involved, from the "physical" protagonist Carella, to the "mind" behind it all, Panella, to the instrumentalist "choreographers", right down to the listener. Everything is spontaneous, spicy, enticing and intriguing to the point of paroxysm.

On "Si, si può", the Roman Lungotevere, made for strolling, shifts in hue, taking on "west coast pop" colors of an eternal Californian summer. The sea's waves, pushed to the point of exhaustion, even to delirium, to the point of breaking down, resurface as nostalgic torment on "Mare sopra e sotto" and "Che notte (qui con te)", where surrender finally happens, the definitive capitulation.

From the striking intimacy of "Stai molto attenta", with its acoustic pulse, all the way to a keyboard-driven refrain of jubilation, Carella learns from the marks left on his own skin and reacts. More elusive, shrewd, shadowy, perhaps even cynical, his words now turn the relationship on its head: the victim becomes the executioner, the woman/muse/Sfinge can do nothing more, and surrenders herself.

"Sex show", "Lei no", "riflessione finale" are oblique cinematic flashes, pop ecstasy for short summer-intrigue films with an unwritten ending, stories animated and scored by relentless percussion, swirling electric solos à-la Larry Carlton, and the sheer density of an untamed sax.

That's everything up to this point. Everything would have led one to expect a stellar follow-up, but reality took a different course, and the collaboration between Panella and Carella came to a halt, was put on hold.

Until 1992, when one of them, remembering just how special those songs had been, thought about starting over again. Picking up exactly where they had left off.

From his own hideaway, Carella re-emerges from the half-light (of the cover art) to revive a handful of tracks, barely enough to fill half a vinyl side, alongside reissues of pieces from his own back catalogue; but it's still something. Something of good quality ("Aspetta e s.p.a.", "Pensa se una"), and appetite grows with eating, as they say. The collection is called Carella De Carellis (1992), and perhaps it's a prelude to something more substantial… which would indeed come to pass not long after, in '95.

Fu quell'abbraccio forte

Che ci inchiodò

Se non cantassi sarei nessuno, subtitled "L'Odissea di Panella e Carella" (1995), is a cult record first and foremost by necessity, given the scant number of copies pressed and in circulation, and the modest means behind its making. But it's a "virtuous" cult, by virtue of how it glimpses, and even anticipates, new pop stylistic trends almost while standing still, without ever compromising its soul.

This "Odissea" deals with material that - this time, truly - cannot be separated from the ongoing liaison between Pasquale Panella and Lucio Battisti: a compromise takes place, a mimetic triangle whereby what is different now becomes the same. The same, indeed, is Panella's pen, and not even dissimilar are the forms shared by Battisti and Carella, with the latter showing a greater "pretension to song". Our man's muted delivery murmurs in a terse, essential bittersweet tone, over impalpable electric-keyboard effluvia that, shifting through supple grooves, come to resemble vegetation itself. The appetite is constantly stirred by music that relates to a kind of "creative piano bar".

In the mid-'90s, Enzo Carella is a modern-day Ulysses, a survivor making his bizarre, unexpected return to Ithaca. He resurfaced, taciturn and sparing, after fourteen years as if nothing had happened, dressed in a sober, tailor-cut suit. But countless Telemachuses recognize him and remember him.

Just as Steely Dan in the new millennium keep a certain license to surprise by producing "only" captivating variations on a theme, so Carella — anticipating them, no less — flaunts intriguing tracks like "Parti nude", "Odissea", "solitudine vera", "La miseria". That distinctive class returns in various episodes, the old magic, a shock marriage of sweeping harmonies and perpendicular lyrics; from which spring illuminating paradoxes and amused reversals of meaning, as in "che cos'è partire? …forse è un po' partire".

The rest is recent history, in fact very recent: May 2007, when a new album arrives, Ahoh Ye Nànà (2007, Sony Bmg). Preceded by the single "Oggi non è domani", as electrifying as if the moment of his debut had returned, as though a scent or some arcane flavor had brought back lost time.

A strange sense of surprise and wonder takes hold. Enzo states he came back to singing because of the demand and interest his exemplary brand of pop continues to spark, despite being saddled with a discography still stuck on vinyl. His music's irresistible appeal is held hostage, a mirage, and paradoxically still awaits a digital reissue. But a diehard group of fans spanning three decades is always there, still wondering "how" that voice, those words, can still appear as a "radiant mirage".

When the new alchemical bridge from the Carella/Panella duo kicks in, you think it's a miracle, or simply that you never moved from there, from back then, that time has turned back. Enzo is as sardonic as ever, but today more than ever he's willing to work through things with irony. Perhaps this is the main, greatest driving force, the spark behind such an unexpected artistic renewal.

And so the semitones and the apparent dormancy of his last album from the '90s awaken into shoots of colorful guitar lines — the work of Carella himself alongside keyboardist and arranger Fabio Raponi — stretching Enzo's unfailing bittersweet melodies into a bouquet of flashes, vistas and visions with irresistible counterpoints.

Journeys of nostalgia through which everything flows, euphorias and disenchantments that "leave thorns in us": "Pierina", "Tramonto", "Estrella misteriosa", "La spina", "La banalità".

On February 22, 2017, news arrives that chills everyone who had fondly followed his singular trajectory: Enzo Carella has passed away from cardiac arrest, after months in intensive care. He leaves the stage of Italian music on tiptoe, just as he did throughout his career — as brilliant as it was unjustly underrated.

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