Franti - Unclassifiable Rock

Between 1976 and 1977, Italy saw the last flashes - partly unrecognized even by their own protagonists - of that movement of struggles and passions that went down in history as the Sessantotto (though it had actually been simmering since the early Sixties and, in this country, would end up lasting almost two decades). On a generational level, the handing down of this human, political and artistic legacy proved more complex than expected: made, certainly, of exchanges, but not without tensions, ruptures and misunderstandings.

Musically, the new wave of artists who emerged in those two years (from New York to London, from Berlin to Bologna) found common ground in the drive of punk - nothing more than a form of rock'n'roll built on the sheer force of its sonic impact - and in new wave, the non-genre par excellence, capable of channelling strands so distant from one another as to seem like opposites (dub and funk, rockabilly and cosmic couriers, etc.).

Together, they were, first and foremost, a reaction to the regressive years of an increasingly self-referential progressive rock, to the poetic pretensions of singer-songwriters (both the "politically committed" ones and the more "escapist" ones), to the ossification of blues into hard rock and heavy metal, and to a glam that had by then lingered on in the schoolrooms of teenagers who had grown too old to still be enchanted by glitter & paillettes.

The new wave was capable of both rupture ("No Elvis, Beatles Or The Rolling Stones in 1977") and continuity, reclaiming from earlier rock both the physicality of beat and garage and the cerebral quality of psychedelia and kraut, sending a jolt through the whole of rock that would reshape and determine its course, directly and indirectly, for at least the next fifteen years.

Only one boy could laugh while De Rossi spoke of the King's funeral.

And Franti laughed.

(Edmondo De Amicis, "Cuore")

It's in this climate that, at the desks of a high school in Turin, the story of Franti begins. A group of kids from the Mirafiori Nord and Santa Rita neighborhoods decided, in parallel with many of their European and American peers, to start a band. The group initially played mostly instrumental tracks influenced by free jazz and Canterbury-style rock (these were the years of Rock in Opposition) and used various names (Guerrilla's Band and Franti Band).

After an initial period of settling in (1976-79), the lineup stabilized in 1980 around Stefano Giaccone on sax (occasionally also singer and guitarist), Massimo D'Ambrosio on bass, Marco Ciari on drums and Vanni Picciuolo on guitar.

Following some live shows, time spent at the neighborhood's "proletariato giovanile" circle (as the emerging occupied, self-managed social centers were then called) and a growing musical maturity that would bring them into contact with the second wave of punk (which had a much greater impact in Italy than the first), the group, helped by Deafear singer Lux, decided to record a cassette with two tracks.

The first, "No future", destined to become one of their most representative songs (especially in this early phase of their career), is sung in Italian, while the second, "Last Blues", is in English: overall they remain anchored to a somewhat textbook new wave ("Patti Smith, Wire, Gun Club and a ton of Californian punk," Giaccone would say, the most frequent listening of the period), but the art-rock digressions hint that the group still had a lot to say. And the first thing they realized was precisely the lack of a voice suited to a sound in constant evolution. It's at this point (we're in 1982) that Lalli enters the scene; already the singer of Luna Nera, met through that band's guitarist, Sandro Picciuolo (brother of the aforementioned Vanni), she becomes the decisive factor that tips Giaccone & co. toward refounding the band, which can now count on the fundamental contribution of her voice.

Influenced by reading a piece from Umberto Eco's "Diario minimo," in which De Amicis's Franti is cast in the role of the anarchist who killed the King of Italy, Gaetano Bresci, the band decided once and for all to adopt this name.

We are not afraid of ruins: a new world is being born right now, as I speak to you"

(Buenaventura Durruti)

The idea was to make Franti an open group, where anyone could join in and have their say, transcending predetermined roles and rejecting both the attitude of the artist who believes in transcendental inspiration within the confines of their own room, and that of the rockstar who is simultaneously rebellious and "on the payroll" of the music industry. A logical consequence of this was the revival of the Situationist practice of abolishing copyright, and the absence of the Siae stamp on their records. Live, their music was essentially played by the group's founders (often joined by Paolo "Plinio" Regis on keyboards), but as many as fifteen people took part in writing and arranging the songs.

It was in the rehearsal room of the meeting center "Il Cortiletto" that their first album, Luna Nera, was conceived in 1983, released on cassette and featuring nine tracks (the vinyl reissue two years later added a new version of "No Future" and the zen ballad "Chiara realizzazione di Ryonen"). The band describes itself as a "hardcore folk band," in which the urgency and rupture of hardcore (in the broadest sense: from punk to bebop) combine with a rediscovery of roots (from Area to Pavese, via Dylan). It's no coincidence, then, that the album's first track is a blistering reinterpretation of Robert Johnson's "Preaching Blues." Side A is rounded out by "Io nella notte," certainly the most new-wave track of the bunch, and "Only A New Film," suspended between classic-rock riffs yet able to evoke noir and Blade Runner-esque atmospheres, followed by the touching "Le loro voci" (about the tragedy of the war in Lebanon) and the piano ballad with a whiff of Canterbury, "Joey" (based on a text by psycho-pedagogist Bruno Bettelheim).

Side B opens with "Lasciateci sentire ora," an invocation of the power of the word that knows no linguistic barriers; the central part consists instead of the instrumentals "Vento rosso" and "Solidi," worthy of the finest pages of Rock in Opposition, while the chant-like "The Week Song" closes the record.

Luna Nera was pressed in a small number of copies, but thanks to word of mouth, good reviews and a series of shows outside Turin, it began to be sought after in various quarters, and the first pressings of the cassette, to the band's great surprise, started selling out, forcing the group to issue a series of reprints within just a few months. Then, thanks to a series of events such as "Rock contro il nucleare," Franti came into contact with the city's emerging scene, in particular with punk-hardcore bands like Negazione and Blue Vomit; the encounter with Contrazione proved decisive, however, along with the idea of recording an album with them.

Released in 1984 and simply titled F/C, the LP (strictly self-produced) shows a mature group that, with only one side to work with, loses a bit of cohesion but manages to gain in eclecticism and impact. Their listening habits had become even more varied, and the band manages to make the most disparate influences coexist, from Jefferson Airplane to Dead Kennedys, from Penguin Cafè Orchestra to Gang of Four, by way of their beloved Robert Wyatt and Crass.

This album too takes its cue from a cover, a revised and corrected "Gates Of Eden" by the band's beloved-hated Dylan ("today he would never sing it like this," they write in the liner notes): preceded by a tape-and-voice announcement titled "1984," halfway between Orwell and Area ("fermiamo vodka and cola!"), the most incendiary version imaginable of a Dylan song explodes, one that perhaps only the Patti Smith of "Horses" could have pulled off.

Two tracks follow that seem to simultaneously evoke Durruti's "new world" and the most ancient ancestral symbols: the pulsing, myth-making "Questa è l'ora" (the myth of fire, the other face of the black moon) and the Wyatt-esque "Quesiti da sciogliere." The ruthless "Voghera," dedicated to the sadly notorious special prison (years later Giaccone would say in an interview: "In 1980/81 Italy was the country with the most political prisoners in the world, excluding the Soviet Union, it wasn't a laughing matter. We came from that defeat"), and the relentless "Prete, croce, sedia, morte" (once again about state-sanctioned death) close the record and the first chapter of Franti's career.

Self-production and self-management as tools for communication and for antagonistic experiences.

Blu Bus Records slogan

The growth of independent structures such as Italian Records and Attack Punk Records in Bologna, Ira in Florence and Toast Records in Turin, along with the positive experience gained on the ground, convinced Franti, together with the Aosta-based Kina, to launch the Blu Bus label. The need - at once artistic, economic and political, and shared by the whole Italian punk scene - was to step outside the official market, creating an alternative circuit (built mainly around squats and social centres) and producing and distributing their own material without having their hands tied by major-label managers.

The first releases were the expanded vinyl reissue of Luna nera, Kina's debut "Irreale realtà" (in later years Giaccone himself would join the band as an additional guitarist) and Contrazione's album "Cineocchio".

This experience only opened up new avenues and sparked further crossovers, ranging from scoring a short film by Mimmo Calopresti (with the track "Acqua di luna", also released as a single on Marco Pandin's P.E.A.C.E. label) to sharing stages and musicians (Regis on piano and Mandrile on trombone) with Joel Orchestra (the track "La mia casa").

Recorded between February and May 1986, that same year saw the release of the album many consider their masterpiece, The Garden of the Fifteen Stones. The title draws on a medieval Japanese legend about a garden built by the greatest architect of the age at the emperor's command, in which, from whatever angle you look, only fourteen stones at a time can be seen. As they wrote in the liner notes: "Of course: had one wanted (and been able) to climb up high, all the stones would have been visible, but to truly enjoy a garden you have to walk through it". A metaphor both for an unyielding refusal of power and for the impossibility - at once Shakespearean and Zen - for the artist to follow his own path even at the risk of losing himself, the album would also prove (though the band themselves weren't yet fully aware of it) to be the group's swan song.

This time the initial spark came from a text by Jamaican poet-singer Linton Kwesi Johnson, which became "Il battito del cuore", built on a reggae-dub backbone over which Lalli's spoken-word delivery and Giaccone's sax climb and weave. Next come the apocalyptic, martial "Acqua di luna", the urban alienation of "L'uomo sul balcone di Beckett" and the Soweto-made blues of "Every time", which closes side one.

The album continues with the playful dedication "Ai Negazione" (nothing more than a sped-up fragment of "No Future"), the hardcore charge against yankee imperialism of "Hollywood Army", followed by "Big Black Mothers", which opens with an intro where Area and King Crimson magically coexist and closes with a two-voice vocal section that pulls the track back into hardcore territory. After that comes a breather with "Micrò micrò" (dedicated to Demetrio Stratos), a track Robert Wyatt would surely have loved, followed by the aching, Coltrane-like poetry of "Elena 5 e 9" (also instrumental). A text by poet Mario Boi accompanies the closing prayer of "Nel giorno secolo", while the album ends with the electric jazz of Joel Orchestra on "À suivre".

The end of one spiral breeds another, if the eagle has enough sky to fly in

(from the liner notes of the "Unclassified" box set)

Something, however, was beginning to shift within the alternative scene; much as the major labels across the Atlantic were starting to notice the huge potential the indie scene had built up over these years (Husker Du, Rem and Sonic Youth being the leading names signing to majors), in Italy too people were sniffing out the business opportunity of the so-called "new Italian rock", and some of the most prestigious bands (Cccp chief among them) decided to head down that road.

Within the band too, the first cracks were starting to show. The centrifugal pulls, the constant refusal to be boxed into a ghetto (whether that of the social centres or that of punk), and shows in which it became increasingly hard to separate the social discourse from the musical one, led the collective to break ranks in early '87.

At the end of the year, the quadruple box set Unclassified was published for the first time; alongside all the albums Franti had released up to that point, it contained a few rarities, a couple of live tracks and a previously unreleased mini-album titled Del salto dell'ascia sul legno. The record is made up of nine short lyrics (all written by Vanni Picciuolo) sung and recited by Lalli and Eliana Cravero, accompanied by sparse "musical commentary" of electronic drums, Roland guitars and sax. The box set would later go through several reissues, the latest being a triple-CD edition that also includes tracks recorded by some band members for a project called Il lungo addio. In this form it is now available, distributed exclusively by Marco Pandin and his Stella Nera label through "A/ Rivista anarchica".

Between 1988 and 1996, the band's members launched a series of projects (Environs, Orsi Lucille, la Banda di Tirofisso, Howth Castle and Ishi) that, in one way or another, carried forward the legacy of the parent group, at times leaning more folk, at times more punk, at times more blues, but nonetheless helping to write one of the most original and most genuine chapters in Italian songwriting.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google