24 Grana - Di Bella - The thousand colors of independent Naples

This is a very intense time for 24 Grana and their frontman Francesco Di Bella. They've recently embarked on a proper reunion tour that, after roughly nine years apart, is bringing them back into the embrace of their audience. Francesco, meanwhile, has just released a collaborative album (“Play With Me”) in which he revisits some of his classics together with leading figures of the Italian alternative scene. We took the opportunity for a long chat with Di Bella about all this and much more. There's plenty of food for thought here, along with the ideas sparked by his words, a few laughs, and the immeasurable pleasure of feeling the distinctly Neapolitan warmth of his voice.

Hi Francesco, how are you?

Hi, here I am! What's your name?

Michele.

Michele what?

Corrado.

Ah, Michele Corrado. But have you already written about 24 Grana?

Yes, of course, your monograph, obviously for OndaRock.

Ah, wonderful. Thank you!

So Francesco, after nine years off, two of them due to the pandemic, you and the rest of 24 Grana have finally reunited on stage. You've already gone through a short five-date tour around Italy, but many more will follow. What was it like finding each other again? But above all, what was it like finding the audience's embrace again?

Well, it's all been pretty incredible, we're still fresh with emotion! You know, we even played last Saturday. These are the first dates, it still doesn't feel real that we're all back together on a stage. For a band like 24 Grana, which had already gone through a very long journey before this hiatus, it was truly moving to pick up right where we'd left off. That's the feeling we had, both at the level of the crew, the band, the "van", I don't know if that makes sense. A whole series of emotions that always used to fire us up before going on stage have come back to life. And then finding an audience that, let's say... had been waiting for us, was a really powerful feeling. Realizing that what we produced musically still makes sense today, even 25 years on from our first album ("Loop", ed.), really gave us a sense of what we've been as a band. The audience has really given us a huge desire to keep going, we're going on stage absolutely buzzing. Having fun, but also with a different awareness than the one we had when we stopped, about ten years ago. Especially with Nando (Armando Cotugno, ed.), who had been missing from the lineup since 2009.

Yes, in fact a huge amount of time had passed.

You know, we're a band that was born and grew up together. With Nando and Renato (Minale, the drummer, ed.) we've been making music together since 1988. We're basically childhood friends who drifted apart for a while and then found each other again, with clearer ideas and fresher minds. Certainly all those years, all those concerts, all those miles together in such close contact had worn us out a bit, so we thought we'd lost a bit of that energy that had kept us together. In the end, that's what we bring: energy, a desire to explore the past, but with eyes always looking to the future of music, to how a sound as regional as ours, which certainly stems from Neapolitan song, could evolve. There would really be so much to say about the stimulus this reunion has given us. Above all, I really value being able to play with ease, being more in control of the sound and the performance. I think it's a very interesting moment for the band. I've always been very attached to sound, and that's why I chose to pursue a solo career, because I wanted to find a new freshness. And the great thing is that today I'm finding that freshness again precisely with 24 Grana.

Fantastic. Look, I wanted to save this question for later, but given what you've just told me, talking about freshness, about stimulus, I'd say it's worth bringing it forward. Alongside the 24 Grana reunion you've also released a new track, "A raccolta", featuring Clementino. Is it fair to expect new songs from the band, or even a new album?

Well, first of all let me point out that there are actually two new tracks. The other one, which we care about a lot, is called "Orso", a song released for a compilation put out by Black Candy and curated by Lucio Leoni, featuring contributions from many names from the Italian independent scene. It's a song dedicated to Lorenzo Orsetti (an Italian anarchist and anti-fascist who fought alongside the Kurds in the war in Syria, ed.), as is the whole album. Obviously, given 24 Grana's political history, writing a song about him meant a great deal to us. It's a track we haven't played live yet, but we certainly will soon, because it really fits our profile. I don't know if you've happened to hear it...

No, unfortunately it slipped past me, but I'll listen to it as soon as we finish the interview.

Great, thanks. Anyway, yes, in due course we definitely want to write new music together. We have this obstacle of Armando living and teaching computer science in London, you know, teaching takes up a lot of time. And then our way of writing has always been very much based on jam sessions, on spending time together, so I don't know if we'll manage to write new singles or even an album any time soon, but it's clear that it would make us all happy.

Perfect, so there's hope.

Absolutely, but it should be, like all the other albums we've made, a record that makes sense. We would never make one just to satisfy the market. You know, we've always operated on completely different logic.

For better or worse, you just have to look at how many of the most acclaimed albums of recent years were inspired by the pandemic. Did you write anything during this bizarre period?

Yes, of course I wrote some songs too. I also recorded a few demos, and we'll see what becomes of them. For me, writing during the pandemic meant confronting a very intimate, solitary kind of writing. There was so much information coming from the media that, for someone like me who has always found his stories by walking around, meeting people, sniffing out stories in the air, being confronted with everything coming at me from social media and television didn't really move me as writing material. So I found myself writing about things happening inside me, and I don't know if that's good material for an album.

But let's talk about you. This year you celebrated 25 years of your career, and you did it in the best possible way: with a new album. "Play With Me" is what we might call a true collaborative record, on which a great many hugely important artists from the Italian alternative scene performed some of your most iconic songs alongside you. What was it like reworking your own songs and those of 24 Grana, adapting them for each guest? How did you go about it? Tell us something about the creative process behind the record.

Well, it was all a matter of trust and mutual esteem. Alfonso Bruno and I did all the vocal and guitar parts, revisiting "Ballads", the live show we've been touring together for a while now, and then we entrusted the songs to friends I've met along my artistic journey. Riccardo Sinigallia, Cesare Basile, Paolo Benvegnù, Marina Rei, for instance, along with others I knew less well but liked for certain qualities, including dialect ones. Like Lucio Leoni, who shares with me a real love for the outskirts of the city, and who, not by chance, I had play around with "Nuova Gianturco". It was partly for fun, partly a way of counting up friends, but above all to see how the songs would respond once placed in the mouths or hands of artists and colleagues I admire. It really was a great satisfaction, because knowing that other performers wanted to play with your songs is, for a songwriter like me, certainly very rewarding. A real point of pride.

You even had some of these artists sing in Neapolitan! I'm thinking for instance of Pierpaolo Capovilla and Marina Rei, the former from Varese and the latter from Rome. I imagine that must have been fun. How did you manage it? Marina in particular seems like a natural with our dialect...

Yes, Neapolitan isn't new to Marina, we'd already done two tracks together. She actually has roots in Campania. Her father was a great Neapolitan drummer, Vincenzo Restuccia, who worked with everyone, from being bandleader for Ennio Morricone to playing with Squallor, while her mother is from Salerno, a cellist at the Teatro Verdi, if I'm not mistaken. So Neapolitan and Salernitan are in her blood. With Pierpaolo, on the other hand, it was different, we had a lot of laughs. He was thrilled because whenever he comes to Naples he has the time of his life, he loves the Neapolitan language, and he really liked the lyrics of "'O diavolo"...

Actually I have to say it suits him perfectly, he's got that slightly Mephistophelean stage presence.

(Laughs) Yes, he plays the devil better than I do. I always say I like it when other people sing my songs, because I can't really sing them myself. It's lovely to hear them sung by other voices.

"Metaversus", which for many is one of the most important Italian indie albums of the end of the millennium, and for many also your masterpiece, draws part of its inspiration from a science fiction novel, "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. The "metaverse" we encounter in the book, and therefore in your song "Nel metaverso", isn't all that different from the virtual reality of the same name created in recent years by Mark Zuckerberg. You could call it a prophetic source of inspiration... if twenty-three years ago someone had told you the "metaverse" would actually come to exist, would you have believed them?

Maybe not that it would be called the "metaverse", but I was absolutely convinced we were heading straight into it. That was sort of the point being made: I was coming out of years steeped in collectivism, and I always said, sniffing the air, that I had the impression everything was pushing toward an exasperated ego and individualism. And so I got the urge to steal that word, and not just that, because "Snow Crash" really is about exactly this, about people who turn into an avatar and spend more time in the virtual world than in reality.

Which is in fact exactly what's happening.

Yes, and for the title I used a Latin term, almost as if to set the concept in stone.

"Nuova Gianturco", like other tracks in your discography, is deeply tied to Naples, your city. Now let me ask you a slightly mischievous question. Is there a neighborhood - or two or three, so no one gets jealous - that you feel particularly attached to? And why?

Well, the neighborhoods I feel most attached to are these. First of all, my own area, so let's say the whole northern part of the city, from the outskirts to Colli Aminei, an upper district, and the whole area heading towards Scampia. Then the historic centre, obviously, where I fed myself on all the sounds of Neapolitan music. That's really where you go to gather music, so to speak, the way you pick strawberries and cherries in spring. And then definitely Gianturco, which somehow showed me the outskirts smiling, thanks to the activities that used to happen there in the '90s. Obviously I'm talking about Officina 99 (the famous Neapolitan social centre, ed.), the first place I ever came across where grassroots activity was carried out to help the neighborhood, and where, above all, a free culture could express itself. The very sound of 24 Grana was born because at Officina you could experiment, unlike in pubs. So I always have this image of Gianturco as a joyful procession of people.

For a whole series of reasons and coincidences, I think of the cinema of Sorrentino and Martone, of the renewed tourist momentum, of the mysterious Liberato, with whom, despite starting from completely different sounds, you share a certain use of the Neapolitan language, but also of My Brilliant Friend "streamed" all over the world thanks to HBO, as well as various international investments made in the city — lately Naples is really on everyone's lips. I'm telling you this as someone from Campania transplanted to Berlin: everyone really is talking about it, and talking well. We could say the city is experiencing a sort of relaunch on a global level. This is obviously bringing a lot of excitement, but also a progressive gentrification. Is the city really changing? And how?

Well, dear Michele, first of all let's say you've mentioned all things that I love a great deal too, in short things that show off a beautiful flag of Naples. A flag that we, before anyone else, have to learn how to fly. I'm also glad you see all this from Berlin, which besides being far away is also a very interesting filter, a lens. That said, I now live in Salerno, not as far away as you, but I too look at Naples from a different perspective. I'm obviously still fascinated by it, still in love with it, but I can see that quite often, when the city looks too much at its own reflection, it shows its limits. It's clear, then, that Naples has a tourist vocation and gentrification is a direct consequence of that. It's not something that only concerns Naples, it concerns our whole way of living, football as much as music, and above all the exploitation of a city's artistic and cultural heritage. As always, let's hope the city ends up in good, aware hands, because Naples has the strength and energy, and always will, and it's clear that the more free spirits are allowed to express themselves, and the less the focus is on rhetoric and postcards, the more the image and the city itself will grow.

Yes indeed, you've said some very important things, it takes good and aware hands. They're two very different cities, but Berlin itself is no longer the crossroads of alternative cultures it was for a good decade after the fall of the Wall — sadly, it's increasingly moving towards a depersonalizing, London-style gentrification.

Yes, it's true, Berlin is a city I adore and visit regularly, since my sister-in-law lives there.

Well, you'll have to come play a show here then, I do have a few contacts.

Let me know, Michele. Berlin, by the way, has a wonderful Campanian community, it would be lovely. It's actually one of the cities close to my heart where I've never happened to play, neither with 24 Grana nor solo. So if we come up with some ideas, why not...

You're very active with songwriting workshops, which, come to think of it, aren't a very common thing. The singer-songwriter is often seen instead as a kind of solitary performer, whereas you seem to believe in the possibility of the role being a collective one. Working together and drawing songs out of that. Can you briefly explain what to expect from taking part in one of these workshops?

Exactly, that's precisely the point, this lone-wolf business. I grew up a bit like an odd one out, like a lone wolf as you say, also because among my circle of friends I was the only one who dabbled in songwriting, so I could never compare notes with anyone, except by reading the odd interview from back then about songwriting. So when people started referring to me as a songwriter, as an author, I thought that somehow my experience could be passed on. That I could hand over information I had somehow worked through, share it with someone else, so to speak. And so I thought a good thing to do would be to bring together singer-songwriters, songwriters, not necessarily singers... since everyone ends up singing the songs they write anyway (laughs). So around 2016 this idea of the workshops was born, also thanks to the Fondazione Alfonso Gatto, a poetry foundation here in Salerno's historic centre, which gave me a space to use. So I made a post inviting people to meet up, a bit like an AA meeting, in a completely horizontal way, among singer-songwriters. In the first years, kids who were真really just starting out showed up, and now they know pretty well how things work. Some of them are already trying to record something, in some cases even a whole album. Then I told Dario Sansone of Foja about my experience, and that's how a workshop was born in Naples too. Later I was brought in by some friends, both from Rome and Turin, for similar experiences, and that let me enrich even further the idea of what a songwriting workshop could be. Let's say it's almost like going to the gym, you train the creative process, and you train it precisely because you're together with other people. There's constant exchange, you don't feel alone. And in the end, the only way to get a song out is to actually try and write it.

Could you point us to some interesting names that have emerged from these experiences of yours? Someone who's already recorded something that might be worth discovering, perhaps.

Sure. There's Verrone, for instance, who really has some beautiful songs and should be releasing something more fully-formed soon. Verrone also has a lovely song together with Beef, a singer-songwriter from Salerno. Verrone, on the other hand, is from Naples, so there's a nice exchange between Naples and Salerno going on, and their song, released recently, is called "Rivoluzionari". Then there's Aliante from Pontecagnano, who've just released an album, they're also really interesting. Then, you know, over all these years of workshops I've seen around fifty singer-songwriters pass through. Many of them will bear their first fruits right about now, after the pandemic held them back a bit, both in terms of releases and bringing people together live. These last ones I mentioned, Aliante, played a beautiful concert at the Chiesa dei Morticelli here in Salerno just last week. They can definitely make an impression. And I'm particularly proud of them too, because I've known them since 2016, and seeing them now, so aware of their own abilities, makes me really happy.

Francesco, that's all the questions, thank you so much for your time, but above all for the wonderful insights you've offered.

Thank you, and please do say hello to Berlin for me.

Of course, and maybe we'll see each other there.

That would be lovely, thank you!

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