Matia Bazar - The electroshock of Italian song

This is the story of a band that had the courage to change face, to toss easy success aside in order to venture into uncharted territory. A challenge won by five musicians from Liguria: Matia Bazar.

The story begins in Genoa, after a chance meeting at a concert by Pfm. The three members of a band called Jet (Piero Cassano, Aldo Stellita and Carlo Marrale), plus Giancarlo Golzi (Museo Rosenbach), discover the talent of a young girl named Antonella Ruggiero, by trade an advertising designer, but blessed with a voice that makes you cry miracle. A voice used like an instrument, with a staggering range, able to soar to unthinkable registers. Antonella calls herself "Matia", from the Genoese "matan", meaning "crazy". An ironic self-definition for a talent that was always quirky and flamboyant. A prima donna, some would say. She's the star around whom the band revolves, taking the name Matia Bazar in her honour.

The original line-up consisted of Aldo Stellita (Campobello di Mazara, 1946 – Milan, 1998), bassist and lyricist; Carlo Marrale (Genoa, 1952), guitars and vocals; Piero Cassano (Genoa, 1950), keyboards and vocals; Giancarlo Golzi (Sanremo, 1952), drums and percussion; Antonella Ruggiero (Genoa, 1952), vocals.

After cutting their teeth in nightclubs and dance halls along the Ligurian coast with a repertoire made up mostly of covers, Matia Bazar landed a solid record deal with the Ariston label, which allowed them to release their first single, "Stasera che sera" (1975), a tender soft-pop ballad that showcases above all Ruggiero's vocal acrobatics. Success comes almost immediately, and the Ligurian band's name starts to spread. After all, in those years in Italy, ultra-melodic sound was all the rage, on TV and in the charts, and the band from Liguria, at the very least, proved they could do it with a certain class.

Strike while the iron is hot: a year later, the second single is released.

The A-side is the delicate "Per un'ora d'amore" (1976), which essentially repeats the formula of "Stasera che sera": Mediterranean flavours and conventional melodies, as simple as they are catchy.

But the real feat is on the B-side: "Cavallo bianco" is, in fact, not just another astonishing showcase for the chanteuse's vocal qualities, but also a composite piece, almost "prog" in the way it shifts through different sonic phases: the drum intro, the whispered prologue from Marrale, then the choir introducing Ruggiero's entrance, her trills soaring into the highest registers and settling over dense layers of synth. This will probably remain the peak of the first phase of their career.

These first three tracks would go on to make up the tracklist of their debut album, the self-titled Matia Bazar (1976).

What strikes you first is the quintet's melodic gift, able to craft a pop vignette of such quality and sweetness as "Solo tu" (1977), which would become a massive hit across Europe and even in South America, selling over six million copies. A gift that, at times, nevertheless pays tribute to rather glib "Italian Style" clichés: "Per un minuto e poi", the single taken from their second album, Gran Bazar (1977), sinks its usual melodic flair into a fairly "standard" easy-listening mould. "E dirsi ciao" (1978) pairs a good chorus and another classy vocal performance with an improbable "Bolero"-style arrangement and lyrics that are, to put it mildly, naive: and yet it triumphs at the Sanremo Festival. "Mister Mandarino" fares much worse, giving in to a terrible kitsch refrain reminiscent of Ricchi e Poveri. But Matia Bazar inexorably climb to the top of the charts, and foreign markets too begin taking a steady interest in their work. Their first compilation, L'oro dei Matia Bazar – Solo tu, seals the fate of a now guaranteed success.

This idyllic situation could, in theory, go on forever: "Tu semplicità" (1978), the lead single from Semplicità (1978), "C'è tutto un mondo intorno" (from Tournée, 1979), "Il tempo del sole" (from the self-titled 1980 album) are easy, catchy songs that seem written on purpose to get played on the jukeboxes that were still going strong at the time; their concerts are always packed, and summer festivals compete for Matia Bazar, keeping them in an unbroken run of appearances on stages across Europe.

Yet something in this hard-won balance begins to crack: there's a need, felt above all by leader Aldo Stellita, to break free from a musical genre that has become too confining. Having grown up and matured, Matia Bazar are no longer the university students with a hobby for music they once were as newcomers; music has become their profession, and there's a desire to expand their artistic world, perhaps by drawing on musical experiences from across the ocean.

The only member of the group not taking part in the vernissage is Piero Cassano, who in fact leaves the group to move behind the scenes as an organizer and producer (working, among others, with Eros Ramazzotti). "He wanted to keep pushing the easy path, we didn't. So he left," Antonella Ruggiero would later explain.

Having lost one of the group's founders, as well as the author of many of their songs, Matia Bazar replace him with keyboardist and composer Mauro Sabbione, a devotee of new wave and new technologies, and completely reorganize their artistic vision from scratch. It's worth noting that all of them already had considerable experience behind them: Golzi had been in Museo Rosembach, the glorious progressive rock outfit of the early Seventies, while Carlo Marrale had worked as a guitarist in Brazil.

The "new" lineup pays tribute to Mitteleuropa with an album as challenging as it is fascinating: Berlino, Parigi, Londra (1982).

The sinuous electronics of "Fantasia", the album's programmatic incipit, stamped with a stunning central keyboard solo, evoke Second World War atmospheres: there's talk of conspiracies, soldiers waiting for who knows what, while in the background we hear sirens sweeping away the carefree superficiality of the past. Guitarist Carlo Marrale recalls: "We were angry, resolute, almost punk in our approach: our record label was frightened by the boldness of our new material, and in fact we were forced to self-produce it…"

The extraordinary cover of "Lilì Marleen" (championed by Stellita, who had a German mother) thus joins the existentialist lament of "Stella polare" and the furious urban rock of "Fuori orario": a strong, robust new artistic life, utterly unprecedented, by no means gratuitously sweet, and clearly indebted in its programmatic intent to acts like Tangerine Dream, Ultravox or Tuxedomoon.

Berlino, Parigi, Londra is the album that frees Matia Bazar from the "light-pop swamp" they had inhabited until then with mixed results, pushing them toward new, unpredictable horizons.

The video for "Fantasia" is equally emblematic of this new course: Antonella, with long curly hair, no longer flirts sensually with Mediterranean sweetness, but marches with a martial step and a menacing air through a futuristic setting, while the other band members sport looks decidedly in step with the prevailing wave fashion of the era. "Everyone thought we were crazy," recalls Sabbione. "The nicest compliment was being called punks: Aldo wrote in German, Antonella was taking opera singing lessons, Carlo with his dark glasses and trench coat looked like someone from the Gestapo, Giancarlo by then only played drum machines with his fingers doing complex patterns, while I started playing a computer keyboard, which back then was like playing a toaster today!"

From Mitteleuropa to retro, to a revival of Thirties atmospheres: the next album project, Tango (1983), is not just a tribute to the most sensual dance on the face of the Earth, but a finely chiseled work bringing together multiple, varied influences: the Land of Little Bells in the age of the computer.

A prelude to the album is the equally astonishing performance at Sanremo: Antonella Ruggiero appears on the Ariston stage as a new retro-synthetic muse: a Thirties hairstyle, a stylized white tailleur adorned with a démodé brooch, matching veiled gloves and hieratic poses. Beside her the band, also dressed in white, its members lined up next to one another Kraftwerk-style: the Alpha Syntauri computer screen tethered by a cable to Sabbione's prêt-à-porter little keyboard, the metronomic pulse of Stellita's electric double bass, Golzi's sparse drum pads, Marrale's austere synthesizer. Of guitars, not even a trace.

In the astonishing balance between Italian melodic tradition and new pop, "Vacanze Romane", with its detached nostalgia (“Roma, antica città/ ora vecchia realtà/ non ti accorgi di me e non sai che pena mi fai”), is a timeless song, bold and nonconformist, carried by the never-overbearing vocalizing of Antonella Ruggiero, who had in the meantime taken opera singing lessons. It would reach number one on the charts in Germany and the Netherlands as well.

The martial edge of "Il Video Sono Io" gives us Antonella duetting with a vocoder, in what would become one of the most replayed TV clips of that season; the lyrics tell of a technological future, though irony peeks through, alluding to the possibility of a "bridge" between past and future, where book and screen might happily coexist. The humorous surrealism of the synthesizer-driven African reggae of "Palestina" ("L'antico oracolo non sa rispondere/ a quel turista in cerca di un hotel") is counterbalanced by the thrilling charge of "Elettrochoc", whose keyboard refrain would delight Billy Currie.

As ever supremely refined is Aldo Stellita's literary work, lyrics now evocative, now playful, innovative yet only seemingly difficult, in part comparable to the intellectualism of Franco Battiato and the verbal divertissements of the Pasquale Panella remembered from his Carella-era work. "Intellighenzia", then, is a captivating linguistic game over which Antonella's voice "blows", pleasantly distorted by the synth; "I bambini di poi" tackles an apocalyptic theme, the threat of atomic destruction looming over new generations, boldly linking dazzling linguistic nonsense and unleashing an epic, Ultravox-style refrain.

If "Tango Nel Fango" is the most predictable and illustrative passage, perhaps the track most representative of the album, the one that best exemplifies Bazar's new direction and reveals a distinctly European imprint, is "Scacco un po' matto", with the vocoder doubling the female vocal and a long central instrumental passage that seems to come straight from the Berlino, Parigi, Londra sessions. An avant-pop mini-symphony that would be fascinating to revisit today, like much of the output examined so far.

Mediterranean exoticisms caught arm in arm with impeccable Mitteleuropean moods, vocal melodies supported by a voice with few equals on the Italian scene, merging with echoes of synth-pop from across the Channel, cutting-edge instrumentation firmly steered by a production that set a benchmark: these are the ingredients that make Tango an album worth remembering. The answer lies mainly in two names: Mauro Sabbione and Roberto Colombo. "We listened to Ultravox, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Peter Gabriel but also The B-52's and Italian opera, while putting together the new songs that would become the backbone of the postmodern period." Mauro Sabbione is the new man on keyboards, the one most attuned to new technological impulses. Roberto Colombo is the artistic producer, an outstanding collaborator of PFM (he took part, among other things, in the progressive band's live project with Fabrizio De André), already a studio hand with Ivan Cattaneo. The rest (which is considerable) comes down to the songwriting, in which the seasoned Golzi and (above all) Marrale also try their hand.

At this point, it would have been logical to expect Matia Bazar to comfortably fall in line with the retro revival that was beginning to attract a wider audience too.

Instead, with one of their trademark chameleonic transformations - a defining character trait of the group - Matia Bazar venture into a recording project even more challenging than the previous one: Aristocratica (1984).

Before the recordings, however, another split takes place: that with Mauro Sabbione, the architect of the band's "synthetic" turn. "The idea was to move in an even more avant-garde direction, while still retaining some popular traits," the keyboardist himself recalls. "Under the title 'Hotel Mister Kappa' we were putting together a conceptually Kafkaesque record that was also meant to involve collaborations with other musicians; it was supposed to contain some of the material that later ended up on 'Aristocratica', as well as other songs I had written myself. Except this time the record company stepped in, insisting that the new work pick up the same themes as its predecessor, which is indeed what happened. So I decided to leave the group, without any grudge or resentment."

Even while staying in continuity with its predecessor, Aristocratica is nonetheless a bold, avant-garde work: with the retro atmospheres wiped away (aside from the gypsy-style orchestra that heralds "Milady"), Matia work on a project that is artistic as much as musical, visual and theatrical as much as sonic.

Having by then settled permanently in Milan, Matia Bazar had come into contact with the city's younger artistic scenes, such as "OcchioMagico" and "Fragola e Panna", graphic design studios known for their dynamic, modern ideas.

Thus, the adventure of Aristocratica starts with the cover art - geometric, brightly coloured and crowded with symbols of every kind - and continues with a sonic current (the term "liquid" is the most fitting way to describe the record) that, after the title track's own brand of "neo-romantic" poetry, winds its way through the percussive exoticism of "Carmen", the mocking decadence of "Milady", and above all through the frenzied carousel of "Sulla scia", a rhythmic construction that still feels thoroughly current today - indeed, one that anticipated the work of bands such as Subsonica or Scisma.

On the record (though at this point it would be more accurate to call it a multimedia project), the sonic materials are broken up, fragmented, in a musical and verbal game that brings together Islamic chants, a sampled voice of Che Guevara, and seemingly irreconcilable sounds fused into a geometric construction that proved to be a successful, trailblazing experiment for future Italian bands.

Naturally, such avant-garde boldness could only bewilder Matia Bazar's regular audience: sales stayed low, television appearances were scarce, while a measure of recognition and support came from independent radio stations, which had always championed the Ligurian band (and the group would return the favour by celebrating the twentieth anniversary of private radio stations, titling their 1995 album RadioMatia).

Guitarist Carlo Marrale would later state: "We knew exactly what we were getting ourselves into, venturing into such a pioneering project..."

The conclusion of the trilogy that began with Berlino, Parigi, Londra also marks the end of Matia Bazar's most avant-garde artistic period: three years in which the band worked essentially for themselves, for their own personal satisfaction, ignoring the pressures of the music business, and building a sonic repertoire that many later drew on (just think of Mara Redeghieri's Ustmamò).

In 1985, competing at Sanremo with "Souvenir", Matia Bazar leave the experimentalism of the past behind to turn towards a songwriting style in which the melodic foundations that had defined the Marrale-Cassano harmonies resurface - as in the unforgettable "Cavallo bianco" - combined with a certain "decadent" flair.

"Souvenir", which wins the Critics' Award at the Festival, precedes by a few months the release of the group's new album, Melancholia (1985), the title that writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had originally wanted to give to his masterpiece "Nausea".

It is a compact, elegant and refined work, standing out as one of the few Italian releases of that second half of the Eighties - an era dominated by foreign music, from Sting to the sophisticated new cool of Sade - capable of holding its own on artistic outings abroad.

Softening their tone, and falling into a musical current reminiscent of bands like Working Week, Matia arrive at a new sound, one that remains fully "European" in character.

Carlo Marrale's guitars go back to pulsing strong and powerful, Antonella's voice ventures into vocally daring territory, Giancarlo Golzi's uncommon rhythmic talent breaks free from the electronic drums of the past to return to the fold, and the "English" organisational flair of Sergio Cossu (the new keyboardist) oversees the whole work.

The album's incipit, "Ti sento", immediately shoots to the top of the European charts, but the record's real gems lie elsewhere: in the tormented love lament of "Angelina" (which pokes sarcastic fun at Matia's past, announcing that Mister Mandarino no longer flies), in the evocative hypnotism of "Amami", and in the mini-suite linking "Cose" to "Da qui a…" into a single new-wave block of extraordinary impact.

The appeal of such a winning musical proposition convinces the band to embark on a very long European tour. Spurred on by their producer, Roberto Colombo, Matia Bazar win flattering acclaim in precisely the countries where they had previously been criticised for being overly "symphonic".

With the definitive arrival of Sergio Cossu, the band's third keyboardist after Piero Cassano and the short-lived Mauro Sabbione, the group gains greater stability.

After long months of touring that "absorb" the whole of 1986, Matia set to work on their new album: Melò (1987), another notable record, but also the one partial misstep in the Genoese band's catalogue. Here the pursuit of a warm, Mediterranean, "colourful" sound is evident.

The credits reveal Carlo Marrale's absence from the songwriting process, but this gap is offset by the intense work of the others, joined since 1981 by outside collaborator Marco Guzzetti.

The album brushes up against jazz by reviving atmospheres dear to Thelonious Monk ("Oggi è già domani… intorno a mezzanotte"), reclaims blues and funk instinct ("Grande piccolo mondo"), indulges in a rhythmic backdrop written entirely by Antonella Ruggiero ("Aria"), pairs electropop (the single "Noi") with funky echoes ("Mi manchi ancora"), and closes in style with a gorgeous example of atmospheric lyricism ("Vaghe stelle dell'orsa"), probably one of the finest moments in Matia Bazar's entire output.

Literature and cinema chase each other through Aldo Stellita's beautiful lyrics, while the album's sound is extraordinary, recorded at the Maison Blanche in Modena together with musicians and engineers from the Bologna scene. It certainly feels like a different band from the one that, back in 1984, indulged in a "sonic maze" like "Mosca Helzapoppin", a track assembled by splicing original sounds with others lifted from the rock opera "The Snowman": but everyone, admirers and detractors alike, already knew about Matia Bazar's versatility and unpredictability.

It is precisely in this period, so fertile in terms of inspiration, that the first frictions within the group begin, tied not only to artistic but also to interpersonal reasons.

When they take part in Sanremo '88 with "La prima stella della sera", which retraces the melodic paths of the past, Matia have already decided they won't renew their record contract in this line-up. And yet the music critics amid the Sanremo chaos have no hesitation in pointing to Antonella and co. as the only genuinely "unquestionable" talents among the guests on the Riviera. The band's swan song also contains an explicit tribute to the Bazar of old: a record free of experimentation and sonic aggression, but precious in its simplicity, at times melancholic, bringing back the Ruggiero-Marrale vocal pairing and a bunch of old-styled "beautiful love songs".

Red Corner, the red corner of the heart and of memory, boasts a cover photographically elaborated by Carlo Marrale and moves between nostalgic tango-like echoes ("Besame", which addresses Aids), full-blooded, formidable rock ("Caccia alle streghe", a sarcastic portrait of late-1980s Italy), irresistible odes to romantic bonds ("Stringimi"; "Sentimentale") and a closing curtain worthy of everything Matia Bazar achieved in fifteen years of career, namely "Nell'era delle automobili"; two minutes of jaw-dropping jazz.

In the album's sleeve notes, Matia Bazar thank Edoardo Bennato for his contribution to "Winnie", but above all they thank their audience, for its affectionate and constant presence through so many changes of style and sonic allegiance.

Antonella Ruggiero, who for a good many years to come would want to forget her time in Matia, gives a touching account of the band's final days: "I remember the last concert together, an evening in late September 1989; it was an outdoor show at Parco Lambro in Milan. While I was singing, it started to rain… In my mind I was saying goodbye to the audience, thinking of the suitcases already packed at home. It wasn't just the end of a long tour, because the following day we were all going on holiday, but also the end of a period of my life, because the band effectively no longer existed: but our fans didn't know that yet…"

United by an irresistible love of music in all its forms, incapable of shying away from a new musical challenge, Matia Bazar always paid the price in person for their bold choices, and it's no coincidence that many smiled with foolish condescension when, from honey-drenched melodies like "Italian sinfonia" or "Il tempo del sole" (both released in 1980), the band moved on to the Mitteleuropean new wave of Berlino, Parigi, Londra. And yet, on that very album Il tempo del sole, Antonella delivered an almost progressive track like "Non mi fermare", and in general, save for their early days, one cannot help but credit the Genoese band with always having sought to diversify their musical language.

Delving into an examination of Matia Bazar's individual members, one cannot help but note how indispensable each of them was: from the "maître à penser" Aldo Stellita, an extraordinary figure, an introverted, dreaming and generous poet, who left Matia orphaned in 1998; to Carlo Marrale, tightrope walker of the six strings, architect of that warm, exotic, "Mediterranean" character, as it was called, which was never missing even in the band's thorniest recordings; from Giancarlo Golzi, the rhythmic engine of the band and current holder of the Matia Bazar "brand", to keyboardists Mauro Sabbione and Sergio Cossu, decisive figures for the Bazar of the Eighties, for the independence of a "new", modern sound. The sweet Antonella Ruggiero, with her magnetic eyes, represented far more than just a singer for the band born in the cellars of the Porto di Genova: to this day, despite having been replaced first by Laura Valente, then by Silvia Mezzanotte and finally by Roberta Faccani, she remains the female icon with whom Matia Bazar is identified.

Certain wounds do not heal easily: the "retroactive" success of a recording project like "Registrazioni moderne" (1997), in which Ruggiero relives her best days in Bazar surrounded by 2000s bands who, back in the days of "Vacanze romane", were still in school, shows how affection (for a band, for a particular moment of personal or social calm, for a system of intertwined notes that lingers in the memory) is not so easily washed away.

That September 1989, then, Matia Bazar closed up shop, and fans would have to wait until 1991 to find them again, surprisingly, now joined by a new vocalist in Laura Valente, who would steer the group toward a more "everyday", sentimental sound – certainly less original and interesting, but not without merit.

Then came the return of Piero Cassano, who would accompany the band through the 2000s, bringing them back to an unpretentious easy-listening style.

More changes over time, more departures, deeply painful episodes that added weight to the legend of a famously unstable group (as Ruggiero herself confirmed: "We're basically schizophrenics, we can't be just one story: we're many stories"). The reins of the group were taken up by Giancarlo Golzi, who summed up what Matia Bazar meant in his life with blunt simplicity: "They've always been a matter of faith for me".

The 2000s were defined above all by Silvia Mezzanotte, a precious voice ("Brivido caldo"), and later by Roberta Faccani, who stepped in in 2005. With the latter's departure from the lineup, the search began for a new female voice. But surprisingly, on 20 September 2010, Silvia Mezzanotte returned as a solo artist, and together with her the group released the single "Gli occhi caldi di Sylvie" (music by Piero Cassano and Fabio Perversi, lyrics by Adelio Cogliati and Giancarlo Golzi, arrangement by Fabio Perversi).

After three years of recording silence, the album Conseguenza logica came out in 2011, and in 2012 the group took part in the 62nd Sanremo Festival with the song "Sei tu", which however failed to make it to the final round.

On 12 August 2015, though, came the tragic news that seemed to spell the end for the very existence of the Matia Bazar name: the band's longtime drummer Giancarlo Golzi suddenly died of a heart attack. A year later, the collaboration with Silvia Mezzanotte also came to a close, while in May 2017 Piero Cassano too left the lineup, ushering in a period of uncertainty over the band's future.

After a period of silence, a new lineup of Matia Bazar debuted at the 2017 Bellaria Festival, now led by multi-instrumentalist Fabio Perversi, who – after vainly trying to reunite the surviving historic members – nonetheless received their encouragement (first and foremost from the families of the late Golzi and Stellita, and from Cassano himself) to carry the project forward. Perversi, in the band since 1998, recounts a promise made to Cassano and Golzi, who had wished for the Matia Bazar project to one day be able to survive its founders.

The relaunch came in 2018 with the single "Verso il punto più alto", which unveiled the renewed lineup made up of veteran Perversi, new singer Silvia "Luna" Dragonieri, drummer Fiamma Cardani, bassist Paola Zadra and guitarist Piero Marras. In particular, the choice of the talented Dragonieri, whom Perversi and Cassano themselves had been on the verge of producing as a solo artist before Golzi's death, seems consistent with the group's great tradition of female voices, given also certain affinities she shows with Ruggiero's inimitable style.

Once a legal dispute with the Marrale/Mezzanotte duo over the use of the name in live performances was settled, another lineup change followed, with Perversi and Dragonieri now joined by Piercarlo "Lallo" Tanzi on drums, Silvio Melloni on bass and guitarist Gino Zandonà. This new incarnation of Matia Bazar debuted in May 2022 with the single "Non finisce così", born from lyrics found among Giancarlo Golzi's notes and later set to music with the involvement of Piero Cassano, almost as if to bring together the band's past and present.

But that is, quite decidedly, a whole other story...

* © Fucine Mute 17

Contributions by Marco Bercella ("Tango")

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