Cesare Basile - Instructions for keeping the Devil at bay

A situation I've always dreaded is getting a phone call that goes more or less like this: “Magda, there's this artist to interview, but he's only in town today, tomorrow he leaves again. Grab the recorder and run.” It happens with Cesare Basile. I call him just to say hello, and it turns out he's in town; I think it's a good opportunity to chat, but I have this nagging worry. He bursts out laughing: “If there's one person who doesn't need to prepare beforehand to talk to me, it's you.” Okay, so I turn on the recorder and improvise.

You know what, Cesare? I like “Seven stones to keep the Devil at bay”, and I think it shows that you like it too.

Yes, I like it. I really enjoyed making this record, and I liked it right after finishing it too. [smiles] That's usually not the case: it normally takes me a while to warm to my own records.

It's an album very far removed from “Hellequin song” and “Storia di Caino”, which I consider your Milan-period records. Even though there's growth from one to the other, I find them somehow “twins”, with very similar sonorities.

I don't know if that was down to the “Milan period” or just a phase I was going through. Maybe it weighed on me to think of them as records by a band. I don't know, but it's true: they're very similar records, bound by a very strong thread.

No, it's not easy! In general, songs should never be explained: you write the songs and then everyone does what they want with them. I've always believed that. What am I supposed to explain about a song? How would you even do it? I can explain the image of snow on the tender ones, sure, but even there, if I explain it, in the end I take something away from you: you can also take that snow on the tender ones as snow on the Monti Teneri, which don't exist. That works too.

Saying you wouldn't want to explain a statement you made is easy, because in a way it lets you off the hook. In the end, I don't know what kind of responsibility is involved in saying this is an album about absence. It's an album about absence in the sense that, after writing the songs, I realized that if there was something linking these tracks, it was precisely this feeling of the absence of something — which could be the absence of a love, the absence of God, or the absence of mercy. A lack of something you thought you'd known, or that you'd been led to believe you'd known, and that you no longer have.

"Storia di Caino" strikes me as the least immediate record you've made so far.

I don't know, I still haven't figured that out...

I get the impression that the voice is more a part of the song now, an element of the music, so less "independent".

I'm still trying to get used to how loud the voice is on this album. I think it's the album where John (Parish, the producer, ed.) took the biggest risks when it came to the volume of the voice.

It's definitely a more choral album. On the other hand, I'm convinced that, compared to previous records, the lyrics on this album speak much less about myself and much more to others. I tried not to revel in my own words just for the sake of reveling in words, which is something I often do, I admit. This time I tried to tell more stories.

Since we've brought up "words", let's jump straight to the literary questions.

I haven't worried too much about finding a publisher.

The book as an object scares me, those pages bound together, that you touch, read, smooth out. I don't think I feel capable of giving birth to another one just yet. I publish my stories on Myspace with a lot more detachment. It's definitely a way of not committing myself, and I'm fine with that.

I know I can work on songs without any problem: I could defend them against the whole world. I don't think, even though a lot of people believe the opposite, that I have the same mastery when it comes to writing — I feel a kind of shyness about it. Let's say I'm starting to break the ice.

You find a lot of inspiration in books, from Derek Raymond to Pirandello, by way of Ray Bradbury and all the way to the Bible.

I'd also add advertising, and everything you hear out on the street... I think anything that carries the flavor of a story can be useful for writing a song.

I find inspiration in books, in short stories, in poems. I keep finding it in the Bible, because it's probably the book of books: it contains every story there is. I read the Bible without venturing into religious territory, and I believe it's the matrix of all storytelling. I'm not the first to say so — Faulkner said it too: in the Bible you have the reservoir of every story that has ever been told by human beings.

The way you handle stories drawn from the Bible, though, strikes me as a bit irreverent.

You think so?

Well, God doesn't come off looking too good!

Hmm, I don't know… No. Why not? …The point isn't whether he comes off looking good or not: God is a character in that book. I don't think God is there to look good. In the case of the songs I write drawing on episodes from the Bible, I think he's just one element among many.

Plenty of people have been angry at God, even Job. Maybe because they too felt his absence, and if you feel the absence of something you believe in and love, and that thing somehow doesn't speak to you, or maybe you're the one who can't hear it, you feel an absolutely legitimate rage.

Even David Maria Turoldo always talked about this God, and shortly before he died (I think he had cancer) he said: "Well, the reckoning is coming." And he was a man of faith!

I think I humanize the stories I write drawing on the Bible. Let's put it this way, I make them earthly.

Yesterday you performed a reading from Bobby Sands' diaries. Will it become a show you take on tour?

It came about entirely by chance and I don't know what will become of it. We (Cesare Basile: reading from "I Diari di Bobby Sands"; Lorenzo Corti: guitar; Christian Calcagnile: drums; David Muldoon: reading from James Joyce's "Ulysses") had a lot of fun doing it and it was completely improvised. It's the kind of work I enjoy. And I think that, especially right now, reading and telling people about "I Diari di Bobby Sands" is important. It would be great to keep doing it, precisely for what people can take from his story, beyond the political situation Ireland was living through at the time; I'm thinking of when Bobby Sands says: "Everyone, Republican or otherwise, has their own particular part to play" - actually, I mean when he says no one is too young or too old, too big or too small to do something. Today we should keep telling ourselves that, because there's certainly something to be done.

Let's close this literary parenthesis and get back to the music.

It would be if it were intentional. If I sat down and told myself: "I absolutely don't want to do something I've already done before," that would be nerve-wracking. I'm convinced that songs guide you, that they tell you how they want to be dressed. The Delta blues thing is, maybe more than a way of playing, more of an attitude toward the songs. That's really what's been with me in recent years, and it's more a way of searching for the right clothes for the songs.

Like your previous records, this one also has several guests. But while before I had the impression they were musicians dropping by the studio to say hi and ending up with an instrument in hand, on "Storia di Caino" I get the sense they were musicians specifically brought in to play that part on that track.

The musicians featured on the record weren't casual presences: we'd already decided they'd be playing before we even went into the studio.

There's Rodrigo D'Erasmo (of Nidi d'Arac) on violin, with whom I share a love of Nick Drake, and his presence felt completely natural. I think he's the one who gave this record's sound so much.

There's Giorgia (Poli, who recorded the bass parts on "Hellequin Song") who played baritone guitar.

There are female choirs. There's Vera Di Lecce (of Nidi d’Arac), Daniela Ardito, Manuela Malfitano, Micol Martinez.

There's Robert Fisher of Willard Grant Conspiracy, with whom I wrote a track.

There are no occasional guests; these are all people with whom it had been decided beforehand.

How did you work on the track with Robert Fisher? (with whom Basile shared the stage during the American musician's last Italian tour)

We worked over the internet. I sent him the backing track and the first part of the lyrics. He wrote the second part, sang it in his own studio, and sent it back to me.

Your characters have always had very strong identities. Men who are proud and yet defeated at the same time, and women who are suffering and proud, bearers of love and sleepless nights. Even the dogs seem to have a very defined character.

That's exactly why it's worth telling stories about these characters. I wouldn't be interested in writing about someone who doesn't have at least a well-defined character.

Maybe I tend to turn them into symbols. They're part of particular stories through which I hope to reach something more, and to turn an object, a person, a dog into a tool for looking beyond the story itself. For that to be possible, the character has to have, as you say, a very precise identity.

Could we say you have a sort of passion for anti-heroes?

Passion… I don't know if you could call it “passion.” Probably, as I used to say back when I made my first solo album, quoting Curzio Malaparte: “L’essere umano si riconosce nella sconfitta”. Actually, when I think about today's winners and the ideology they represent, I feel enormous pity and irritation! If the ideology of today's winner has the physical features (because that matters too) and the vital colors of someone like Berlusconi, it disgusts me. I'd rather talk about losers, or in any case about men in defeat.

You've produced records for Songs for Ulan, Jains, Twig Infection and others. How do these projects come to you, what do the artists expect, and how do you approach it?

I think artists expect help, which is exactly what I ask of John when I have him produce my records.

The role of producer is very important to me, because it's the only way I have of looking at my own songs from the outside. If I had to produce one of my own records, I'd struggle a lot: I wouldn't be detached enough to be able to decide what's best. And that's what I try to do with others too: since they're not my songs, I think I manage to keep enough distance to cut and stitch things together in a way the songwriter themselves can't, because they're too attached to their own work and convinced that every single comma they put in is beautiful.

Why is it that if you call various… artists “singersongwriters” [in the Italian sense, “cantautori”], they get offended?

I think it's people of my generation who take offense, although I don't think everyone reacts the same way. I'm getting used to it now, I used to be much more reactive. Maybe because “cantautore” doesn't sound like “songwriter.” I much prefer to think of myself as someone who writes songs. It's partly a matter of vocabulary, but it's also tied to my youth: I think I had a very contradictory relationship with what was the invasion of the “cantautori.” It seems to me they represented a period that was musically quite poor for Italy. Apart from De André, of course.

Is fear a sin? (a line from “Finito Questo” goes “Ho un peccato di paura – Che si fa beffa di me”)

Absolutely not, unless it turns into a habit. Generally speaking, I think fear works a bit like an alarm bell: it's good that you feel it.

What is Eskimo Friends?

It's an initiative started by a group of Italians who have lived in Luxembourg for a while and who are working to promote a certain kind of Italian music abroad. Last year they put together a compilation of Italian artists specifically to spread the word about that scene out there. They also organize concerts at Dqliq, one of the venues where a lot of us have played: me, Songs for Ulan, Atletico Defina, loads of people.

In June you'll be doing a reading there.

Yes, though I don't know yet what I'll be reading.

What language will you do it in?

In Italian.

Did moving from Catania to Milan (after living in Rome and spending many years in Berlin) help you? If so, in what way?

I don't know if it helped me. It was more of a necessity... Coming to Milan was a response after getting stuck for years in Catania and coming back from Berlin. If I had to choose a city to move to, I preferred somewhere that made sense logistically.

At first it was a logistical choice, but today I think I've learned to appreciate this city, which, despite everything, seems to have some beautiful and meaningful corners.

Can you tell me again how you started playing music, and about your grandfather?

(Cesare laughs, I respond with playful pestering)

Come on, it's sweet! I want to put it in the interview!

For me it's a lovely memory, something important.

My grandfather was a barber, and like all barbers – at least in Sicily, I don't know if this tradition existed elsewhere in Italy – he played an instrument, he played the violin. On Saturdays he'd meet up with other barbers, once they'd finished work, for these sessions where everyone played their own instrument.

He used to tell me that whenever there was another violinist around, he'd make sure the other violinist couldn't see his hands, because stealing was the fundamental thing when it came to learning to play. When I started playing guitar, the first thing I told myself was exactly that: "Learn to steal. Watch how others play, because nobody can teach you to play. You have to watch people's hands and reproduce what they do."

But as a kid you wanted to play drums! Which is what you're doing now.

My parents never bought me a drum kit, for the usual reasons: drums made a terrible racket. So I bought myself some little bongos, which I ended up playing with drumsticks. I made an even bigger racket, but it was the only way to get the volume I wanted.

How old were you?

I must have been 13... That's why I eventually fell back on guitar.

Milan, March 18, 2008

The photo of Cesare Basile was taken by Fabio Stefanini and used courtesy of the photographer.

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