Eugenio Finardi - Return to Rebel Music

The time "to drop the bullshit and start fighting," for Eugenio Finardi, is never over. White guru beard and the same sweet smile as ever, the Milanese singer-songwriter has dusted off all his energy for "Jittery", his new album, produced by Max Casacci of Subsonica. A return to songs in Italian after 16 years of experiments that took him from fado to rock, from blues to contemporary classical. A return that seems almost driven by the need to depict an Italy of hardship and social injustice desperately crying out for attention. A bit like Franco, the protagonist of one of the most moving songs on the record...

"La storia di Franco" tells a real, dramatic story - can you tell us about it?

It's a case that's happening more and more often: the drama of separated fathers impoverished by separation and often kept away from their children is one of the silent tragedies of our time, one of the collateral effects of this terrible crisis. The song was inspired by an encounter: every Thursday I have lunch with my daughter Elettra at a Chinese restaurant on Milan's ring road, and one day, leaving that restaurant with my daughter, I ran into a man begging for money who said to me: "Eugenio, don't you recognize me?". I looked at him more closely and it turned out he was a record executive, one of those who in the '80s, the golden age of the record industry when millions of records were sold, used to accompany foreign singers around Italy, living the good life of touring artists on promotion: lunches, hotels, etc. (today it's a bit less like that, he smiles). Then his wife left him for another man and after that his life fell apart, until he found himself begging for money. But what struck and wounded me even more was what he told me afterwards: "I haven't seen my daughter in 5 years". I was there with my own daughter and I felt that very deeply. The lyrics came out of that, and then Giovanni Maggiore, my guitarist, inspired by the lyrics, wrote the music. Obviously it's a fictionalized story...

...but it's an emblematic story of Italian reality in these years - in fact in the lyrics you say: “Lei pensa che io sia in Africa a combattere la povertà/ E infatti la combatto/ Ma la mia guerra è qua”. Poverty, in short, is no longer some remote issue to associate with some exotic country in the Third World.

Of course. The other day I walked past one of the soup kitchens for the poor in Milan, run by friars. It's a place with a big courtyard inside: usually you don't see anything because there's room for everyone in the courtyard, but instead there was a line 200 meters long. I was in a taxi stuck in that queue and I could get a good look at who was waiting: lots of Italians, young people, people in their forties or fifties... I was really moved by a story I read a few days ago: a father took his children to that soup kitchen, telling them: "See, kids, today I managed to take you out to a restaurant". These are things that touch you, that wound you...

Talking about your latest album "Jittery", you said it's "a record of struggle against a new Dark Age": what exactly were you referring to?

There was the era of the 60s and 70s when so many rights were won, if we think of the civil rights struggle in the American South, Martin Luther King's fight, Gandhi's battle against colonialism, Nelson Mandela's against apartheid, and all the battles for women's rights - just remember what women's lives were like in the 50s compared to today. But starting with the election of Reagan and Thatcher, these rights to equality have been eroded bit by bit, and now we find ourselves in a situation where a tiny handful of "princes" - even if they call them "sovereign funds" - can ruin entire nations, entire regions, entire economies with a click of a mouse, pulling the ground out from under hundreds of thousands of families. And we're seeing this happen all over the world. I'm half American, so I try to read the American press every day, and I can tell you that the most discussed topic right now is exactly this: inequality and social injustice.

Your "Musica ribelle" was an anthem for an entire generation. Does music still have that power for you today? And is there anyone who knows how to channel it in that way?

Today's rebel music is made by rappers, and in some ways they hit even harder than we did, since we never actually named names. Rappers have no qualms about it. They hit hard.

So are rappers the new "singer-songwriters", in a sense?

Yes, I think it's in the nature of things for language to evolve, even though there are still singer-songwriters today who tackle these themes. I have to say, though, that the artists of my generation have softened up a bit. In fact, a lot of people were surprised by my return to these kinds of subjects.

Indeed, some of the lyrics on "Jittery" are pretty harsh - maybe we'd gotten out of the habit of hearing that...

I've also been to Africa with Doctors Without Borders, and I really liked a principle in their charter: "treatment and testimony". It's not enough to treat people, you also have to bear witness, just as Emergency does too. And I believe that bearing witness through song should be part of what we do as singer-songwriters. After all, I don't come from the French school, which is more ironic and metaphorical, but from the American tradition of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, "Grapes of Wrath", that folk music born out of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

You were a leading figure in the historic Cramps scene run by Gianni Sassi, a world that ranged from folk to blues, from prog to the singer-songwriter tradition - what made that scene so rich? And could you share a brief memory of Francesco Di Giacomo, the singer of Banco, who recently passed away?

Let me start with Francesco, because thinking of him moves me, and since we're in Rome it feels right to talk about him. Francesco was a special person that everyone loved. And he's the one I owe my "freedom from Finardi" to. It might sound strange, but this new album of mine is my first record of original songs in Italian in 16 years. Sixteen years in which I ranged from blues to rock to contemporary classical music. But it all started with a Portuguese fado project, born out of a meeting in Recanati with Francesco Di Giacomo. He ran into me and said: "Aho', a Euge', c'hai vojia de canta' er fado?" (we laugh...)

I didn't know it was him who suggested it to you!

Yes, that's exactly how it happened. He was on tour with Marco Poeta, a guitarist from Recanati who was passionate about fado and Portuguese guitar, and Francesco, by getting me involved in that project, gave me my freedom - he made me realize I could do things beyond Finardi. Because in the end, being a singer-songwriter is a privileged sentence to always sing those same 20-30 songs, if you're lucky enough to have that many. A great privilege, as I said, but for someone who's also a musician, at a certain point it becomes a gilded cage.

As for Cramps, I was sort of the kid brother of Area: the label was essentially founded by Gianni Sassi, the great father figure, along with Demetrio Stratos and me. We met at Lucio Battisti's Numero Uno, and then went on to found this new record label, this new idea of music.

Another mentor of yours was Fabrizio De André, right?

Yes, Fabrizio was looking for someone to open his shows, he used to say he needed "someone who'd empty the pockets of the young crowd" (we laugh). And so he chose me - I owe him a great deal, and a real friendship grew out of it too. Once I even hosted his son Cristiano at my place, after he'd run away from home following an argument.

These days you're taking “Jittery” on tour. What are your live sets like?

These are very rock shows, with a band of guys young enough to be my kids. We've put together a thoroughly enjoyable show, which you can also watch in a streaming preview on my Facebook page. We're also running “open stage” contests to share this experience with promising young artists, who get to open the shows. I'm genuinely happy to pick up my electric guitar again, with an extraordinary band I've written this record with and worked with for three years. The only one missing is Max Casacci, guitarist of Subsonica, who produced the album and is currently busy with his band's new project.

“Jittery” comes from a rich team spanning several generations of musicians: besides Casacci, the project also involved Manuel Agnelli of Afterhours, Vittorio Cosma (formerly of Pfm), Patrizio Fariselli of Area, and even two members of Perturbazione. How did you manage to blend all these different approaches together?

It's a record made across three generations. A record with a real urgency, a very electric, tense spirit, which comes from the fact that the backing tracks were recorded live: we all played together, unlike what usually happens today, with pre-recorded backing tracks and albums built up in layers, like a puzzle. Instead, we shut ourselves in a recording studio on Strada del Drosso in Turin, one of the access roads to Mirafiori — the one used to bring in the spare parts for the cars being assembled there, a symbolic street in its own way, really. We got together for three days, writing about fifteen musical phrases and ideas. Then we recorded the backing tracks for these pieces, and I wrote the lyrics, spurred on by Giovanni (I'm exactly his father's age...). Then came the generation of forty-somethings: Casacci loved the work and became my full partner in this self-financed project. We went to his studio on Via degli Artists, in Turin, and then Manuel Agnelli and Patrizio Fariselli came in too... and the last track on the record is actually done in a Cramps style, and in spirit it's a bit reminiscent of Area's “La Mela di Odessa”.

Another one of your classics, “La radio”, told the story of the legendary era of the first free radio stations, with the famous lines “E se una radio è libera, ma libera veramente, mi piace ancor di più, perché libera la mente”. Do you think the internet has now taken over the role that those radio stations once had?

Yes and no. In the sense that the internet has this problem of anonymity, it's more impersonal. Web radio and web TV are very much alive, but they're still a different medium, one that maybe still has to reach full maturity. Free radio, back then, was truly an art form. Abroad, of course, it had already existed for years, but in Italy there was a monopoly, and its arrival marked a new era. There was no DJ behind the glass with a technician — you were the one setting the pace with two microphones, the turntables, the cassette player, the phone. You ran the whole thing yourself, with no playlist, bringing your own records from home: you could really leave your mark, with instant communication that reached everyone at the same time. The internet, on the other hand, has a slight time lag.

I was also referring to the idea of being able to communicate “from below”: on the web, anyone is free to express themselves as if in front of a radio microphone.

Yes, that's the principle. I also think the internet is a tool whose full potential — and dangers — we haven't yet fully grasped. It's a tool that still needs to be brought into focus.

Two years ago you were at Sanremo (with “E tu lo chiami Dio”): would you do it again?

As a guest, gladly; as a competitor, I don't think so, I'm past that point now. Besides, I'm not a mainstream, crowd-pleasing figure, I'm not cut out for Sanremo: it's just too much of an ordeal for me.

But Vecchioni went too, and he even won!

Yes, but he's more of a mainstream figure than I am. In the public imagination he's the classic singer-songwriter, while I'm more niche. Even among singer-songwriters I'm a bit of a case apart — I actually have more in common with Afterhours and Subsonica, all things considered. I think I'm the first of the indie artists and the last of the old-school singer-songwriters.

Indeed, you've always been an outsider, even back in the '70s. Today, though, I see a lot of homogenization, a lot of carefully calculated poses, even among so-called “alternative” or “indie” singer-songwriters. Do you agree?

It's a bit like photography. If you look at the first photographs from the 1800s, people just stood there not knowing what expression to make, without posing. They had no idea how to represent themselves. Then, with the arrival of television, everyone learned how to pose, and today all the kids even take “selfies”... And something similar has happened with singer-songwriters: nowadays people start out thinking “I'm a poet” and carry on from there. We were rougher around the edges — I became a singer-songwriter because that's the label people stuck on me, but I thought of myself as a rock singer like Rod Stewart. Then, as life went on, I delved deeper into certain themes and effectively became a singer-songwriter, but that's not how I started out. I wanted to be Mick Jagger, but then I didn't have the physique for it... (we laugh)

(extended version of an interview published in the newspaper “Leggo”, March 13, 2014)

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