Antonella Ruggiero - A voice without borders

“Two years ago I felt like silencing my music on streaming platforms, now I’ve decided to go all in.” Antonella Ruggiero loves radical choices, and she confirms it with this digital U-turn that has led her to release, for the first time ever, both in streaming and download, her complete solo works (27 albums for a total of 372 songs). She tells us all about it in this wide-ranging conversation, which spans her solo career and her successes with Matia Bazar, touching on popular song, her tributes to Fabrizio De André, her passion for the Quartetto Cetra, and memories of her native Genoa.

How did this digital turning point come about?

I had really convinced myself to take everything down, but then the pandemic happened, then the war came along… In short, in such a dark period it felt right to send a bit of music out into the ether: it's the one thing that doesn't hurt anyone. It's my music, the way I wanted and interpreted it over these years. Besides, even abroad people had been asking me for a while how to find songs they couldn't listen to anywhere, since the records themselves had disappeared too. I wanted to settle the matter once and for all, so now everything has come back to light.

And that's no small thing. An enormous body of songs, on top of which are the 18 tracks reworked by Roberto Colombo on “Come l’aria che si rinnova”…

Those are eighteen tracks drawn from a very significant amount of my unreleased material – not other people's songs, not covers, etc. They struck me as pieces suited to this moment, but I wanted to give them a different sonic dress compared to the originals: the rhythm section was stripped away, bringing out, for instance, the texture of the strings, to create a more ethereal, rarefied sound. As the title suggests, the idea is to open a room and let in some fresh air.

So you're a believer in the idea that songs can evolve over time?

Yes, absolutely. They can change clothes, change intentions. That's part of the beauty of it too: not staying anchored to a single original idea.

Of this solo path of yours, which is always talked about far too little, which albums are you most attached to?

All of them. Because they allowed me to range from pop to singer-songwriter fare, from electronics to sacred and classical music, from folk song to world music. A stylistic diversity I wanted to sum up in a collection with a rather odd title, “Quando facevo la cantante”, quite a hefty volume in its own right!

You seem to have a passion for bulky collections, if I'm not mistaken…

Yes, because the people who have always kept following me know everything, but there are plenty of others who perhaps only ever stayed attached to my work in the Seventies and Eighties with Matia Bazar, and for them there's a need to summarize and condense everything I've done since as well.

Those are perhaps the ones who never came to terms with your leaving the band…

Right, they're the sort of people who reason as if Peter Gabriel had never left Genesis! But I see a positive side to it too: it means the seeds sown in those years bore good fruit.

In “Quando facevo la cantante”, there was also an interesting section in dialect, with covers of “Creuza de mä” by Fabrizio De André, but also “O mia bela Madunina”, “Amara terra mia”, “Addio, Lugano bella” and the brilliant “Crapa pelada” by Quartetto Cetra. Do you think it's important to preserve the memory of that slice of Italian song history?

It's a kind of song you don't hear much around anymore, but plenty of artists, even young ones, are picking it up today and reworking it in their own way. The ancient roots of our music remain: that's the fundamental thing, not to forget what's been done, also because songs are always part of history and geography. They're living testimonies of all the vicissitudes our country has gone through. Many young people go looking for them precisely because they tell an important part of the past.

Speaking of your fellow Genoese De André, among the many tributes you've paid him, there are also two concerts dedicated to “La Buona Novella”. What did that mean to you?

Yes, I did two concerts in Sardinia entirely dedicated to “La buona novella” with the Santa Cecilia choral orchestra and the musicians of Ensemble Laborintus, with Maria Antonietta Azzu as narrator. It was also a way of making up for the show I was supposed to do two years earlier, before the lockdown. Fabrizio wrote and said things that remain incredibly relevant to this day: verses and notes that will always hold true for every era and for all of us. Like Pasolini. Like Battiato. That's also why I like to revisit his songs so often - they belong to everyone.

Staying on Genoa, what's your relationship with your hometown, which you left as a young woman?

I've kept a bond through music, in particular: when I sing certain songs that talk about Genoa or that were written by Genoese songwriters, my mind is there, it's like an immersion in memories: childhood, adolescence... Then at 22 I left with the band, and since then I've seen less and less of it. But it's stayed etched in my mind.

What are your most vivid memories of the Genoa of your childhood?

I remember the working-class area, Cornigliano... that stretch of the Ponente sea always slicked black by the steelworks. They defaced a natural wonder. It was like installing smokestacks in Portofino. But in my memories there's also the old, medieval Genoa, where my grandparents lived. Then in recent years the city has transformed, it's changed its face, but inside me it will always be the Genoa of my childhood.

Fourteen years in Matia Bazar. You seemed very tight-knit, despite a few line-up changes: what was the secret to your harmony?

It was a fairly unified vision of how to approach music, of what to do... Everyone had their own mind, their own ideas, their own background, but there was a strange, particular kind of chemistry that held us together. That's how we made it to the end of those long fourteen years together. Then, as happens in every band, someone feels like leaving, like freeing themselves from what might look like small chains. That happened to me in 1989.

In that case too, you decided to draw a line and leave the group for good. Have you ever regretted it?

No, not for a second. Those 14 years of life in Matia Bazar were extraordinary. But in 1989 I decided that was enough. Above all, I wanted to stop: I took a seven-year break. And then I started up again with all these projects, which I could never have carried through while staying in the band. It was all very clear: I gave everyone a year's notice, sending a letter to the other members of the group. We saw out the last concerts together with the utmost seriousness, and then we went our separate ways, with no regrets.

Which phases of the Matia Bazar saga do you remember most fondly?

The early period in the '70s, the one with the songs that made us famous around the world: we toured everywhere from the USSR to Japan, from South America to Europe, precisely because they were much-loved hits abroad too, regularly played on the radio. And then the period of the electronic turn, the one with albums like “Tango” and “Aristocratica”.

So, speaking of radical choices, that was a real Elettrochoc, to quote a famous track of yours from that period. How did it come about?

The four of us partners – me, Stellita, Golzi and Marrale – didn't want to stay tied to what we'd already done, even though it had been hugely successful. At the time we were all immersed in the new sounds coming especially from England and Germany: post-punk, new wave, electronic music. We wanted to bring that sound to Italy, and we found the right person in Roberto Colombo, since he was already making very distinctive music that we liked a lot. So we brought him into the band to make that project happen, and he became our fifth man. Then, once that chapter ended, another one opened with "Ti sento" and so on, right up until that fateful 1989 when I said goodbye to everyone.

What did you feel seeing Matia Bazar with other singers? Did you follow them? And is there anything in that later output that you felt was close to your original experience?

I never had any problem seeing the Matia Bazar name used with other singers. It was right for them too to carry on, even if in a different way. The voices were different, the genres too, but honestly I wasn't very interested in the records they released.

Is any kind of reunion, even a momentary one, out of the question?

It wouldn't make sense: sadly two of us are no longer with us (Stellita and Golzi, ed.), only two of the original core remain, and it's nice that the memories stay tied to what we did in those years: it's all there, and it stays there. And no one can touch it.

Have you stayed in touch with Marrale?

Yes, for a while we lost touch, then we reconnected. We laugh, we remember the good times we shared…

Let's talk about your voice: a natural gift, or also the product of study and experience?

At the root of it is a natural gift. That said, starting out right away and learning on the job, live on stage, helped me: while you sing you listen to yourself and move forward. I never took any kind of formal lessons, except for a few opera-singing lessons in 1981 (but that teacher only showed me how to do good closed-mouth vocalizing before going on stage). I've always been alone with myself when it comes to my voice, and I still am, because it's an extraordinary means of communication, one that also lets me interpret everything I've tackled, from old folk songs to more modern ones. It's a challenge never to sing the same way twice: I step into those worlds, the way an actor would. The voice is an instrument: you can use it however you like, as long as you treat it well. I've tried to preserve it and use it in the best possible way.

Speaking of opera, have you ever thought about trying your hand at that field too?

No, never. That's another world you have to approach from a very young age, with great rigor and dedication. There you can't do as you please, you have to perform exactly what's written. It's a challenge fought on completely different ground. I've only sung certain opera arias because I loved them, making them my own without any other ambition.

Who are your favorite female singers?

I remember that in the Seventies one singer who struck me enormously was Nina Hagen, an East Berlin singer totally free to use her voice in an extraordinarily anarchic way. Then the great blues and rhythm 'n' blues singers. In the Eighties, Sade, Kate Bush, and more recently Bjork, who has such a distinctive and interesting path of her own.

And among Italian singers?

I'll go back in time and say Lucia Mannucci of Quartetto Cetra. They did things so sophisticated and difficult that no one has ever managed to surpass them. Then I'd mention Caterina Valente, a versatile artist who wrote and sang in a truly special way. And then so many others, of course…

These are dark times: is Empatia, as you said, what we need right now?

It's the only thing that can save us, because these are difficult, dark years, and none of us can know how they'll turn out. We're all powerless, and it's hard to find hope even for the younger generations.

At least music has been freed from the restrictions that penalized it during the pandemic. Will you be playing concerts this summer?

Actually, over these past two years I managed to play a lot of concerts around Italy, within the limits allowed, and I have to thank everyone who managed to organize them in complete safety. Now we're freer, and we'll see what we can do: I'm putting together the schedule for this summer's concerts, where I'll be performing songs from my solo repertoire as well as tracks from Matia Bazar, perhaps in a new guise with different arrangements.

(Originally published in the newspaper Leggo)

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