Flavio Giurato - The Hermit Diver

We meet Flavio Giurato shortly before his concert at the Auditorium Novecento in Naples, the second-to-last stop on the tour promoting his latest album, "Il Console Generale", touching on memories of his years as a busker in London, impossible loves, sudden returns to the stage, and a whole new future still to be written.

To record your latest album "you needed neither a music stand nor written pages, no barrier between the microphone and the sound, all in keeping with the phases of the moon". So where does this stripping-down come from?

My whole recent output is very bare in sound, very stripped-back. On the last track, though, everything changes. I work the same way on "Il manuale del cantatore" too: there's "Mi-Lang", which, unlike the other songs, has a full, organic piano arrangement. I like the choice of playing things essentially, with few instruments, and then, at the end, offering a glimpse of what a more elaborate arrangement can sound like.

"Il Console Generale", to quote the press notes, "has a proposal for dealing with one's own fate in the face of the ever-lurking prospect of falling into line": but is it actually harder today not to fall into line compared to decades past, given the now almost endemic pull of social media, or isn't it?

Yes, I'd say it's very different now compared to the past, because there is precisely a forced, inaudible kind of alignment. The description you're quoting was actually written by Guido Celli, who also did the cover artwork - he's a poet, and we always work together on this kind of thing.

Who is the fearless cosmonaut?

That's me, on Ischia, since I'm an adopted citizen of Forio for the summer, listening to my little son sing this little chant that goes "intrepido cosmonauta, intrepido cosmonauta" ["fearless cosmonaut, fearless cosmonaut"]. I kept repeating it over and over until one day he told me, "You're fired", and I said, "What do you mean I'm fired? You can't fire me, I'm the fearless cosmonaut". So that stuck around, over the years. It's a song I now dedicate to my grandson, and it works as a lullaby introducing the track that follows, giving a sense of warmth, intimacy, an evening feel to the next song, which has a very different mood altogether, since it's about a concentration camp.

What do you remember of your years in London as a busker?

Yes, I was a busker, I played in the London Underground and on Portobello Road. I haven't been back to London recently, and I know it's changed a lot — in my day it was a friendly little village, now I even hear about knives, muggings, truly unheard-of things. My memory is of a special place and an irreplicable moment in history. Back then I used to go often to the Hard Rock Cafe to eat American food. I have so many scattered memories, especially of when I played in the Underground, which was very free — now I see that musicians even need a permit to play there. When I played there it was simply a place to meet other buskers and maybe swap tips on where there was less police around, or spots that were just warmer in winter. I actually had a whole map of spots where I'd play, one after another.

At one point you also sing in the Neapolitan dialect...

I've always used it, I've always been fascinated by Neapolitan, in the past I even did a song in Neapolitan; I love changing tone and language, it's a perspective I can't give up, it opens my mind. "Laura e il Cubano" actually came from something that really happened, because back in high school, in our group of friends there was "the Cuban guy," everyone knew he was Cuban, but one day Laura told me, "Look, the Cuban guy told me he's not Cuban at all" — so basically I based it on real events.

In "Ricarica", on the other hand, you sing "Non si ama chi non canta e non chi ama [...] Voglio effettuare una ricarica con te". Tell us more.

This song was actually written on Ischia. There's an old video of me singing it a cappella in front of my whole family. It's a song that tells the story of a desperate love affair between a Nokia charger and a Panasonic phone. Being different, they will never meet, which is why I then sing "le plastiche sconformano i polimeri, divergono", underlining even further an impossible union.

Thinking back to an album like "The Disappearance of Majorana", one has to ask: have you ever dreamed of an invisibility cloak?

No, but even as a young man my invisibility cloak was a camera in my hand, or a film camera. Being invisible in order to tell a story, that's all.

Today, do you think we're truly living through a decadent period in every respect, or do you see some light in it too?

I'm not a doom-monger, I'm convinced we're in a transitional phase between what has been the dominion of man and what will be the dominion of machines. So we just have to get on with it. Soon there will be the quantum computer, which will change our lives just as much as the ordinary computer did. We'll have to come to terms with the photon. If the electron got us to the Moon, the photon will get us to Mars. It will be the day when mankind realizes it no longer counts for anything as a species, and machines will make decisions on their own. So it's certainly an interesting era, since it bears witness to an inevitable transition.

Carlo Massarini once described you as "the underground river that resurfaces many miles further on, when no one expects it anymore." Is that true?

By now it's a label I carry with me (he smiles, ed.). It's very flattering to be a river at all, even an underground one. Actually, it's even more flattering, because there's more mystery to it — an underground river is more unpredictable. So I'm perfectly happy with Carlo Massarini's copyright on that one.

What memories do you have of the years with Mr. Fantasy?

What comes to mind is the Milan of those years, but also Tenerife. I remember all the Mr. Fantasy years very well, when everything revolved around Via Solferino, the twelve-room hotel that housed all of us, and there was always the right sandwich to be had. Milan is a city of hidden beauty, not as openly on display as Rome, but it's a wonderful city, I really love it.

Then in the 1990s you spent a period away from music...

It was useful for learning another trade, since I went to work at Rai as a director. In those years I did a lot of work with so-called outside broadcasts, which is a job that resembles filmmaking more than television, because you really have to set up a shoot exactly as if it were a film set. So I learned a lot in that field too, and then came the shift from analogue to digital, and the latter allowed me to start a craftsman's activity, making records in what I like to call my little artisan workshop. That's where my "maniera" albums came from, precisely without a music stand, without written scores, without barriers, without time constraints. The perception of time has changed by now, since it has kept pace with scientific progress.

In what sense?

Rigid tempo is fine for industrial production, marked by these fierce, split-second rhythms, but I prefer a tempo naturally dictated by a heartbeat rather than by a machine. That way I can say I love you or I hate you in a way where I might speed up a little or slow down a little. Whereas when it's the machine that decides the tempo, it all turns into the same mush, especially now that instruments are made with plug-ins, and plug-ins are all the same, so everything comes out the same way — everything gets standardized even with acoustic instruments, and I don't like that.

What have you been listening to lately?

The radio. Sadly it's been ages since I bought a record — I know that's bad — but for a while now I've mostly been listening to the stuff I've always listened to, in high fidelity of course, I still believe in that, since I've got the right gear and a professional idea of how to listen to music properly at home. But generally speaking, it's only the radio I listen to in the car that keeps me updated on new stuff.

Is there a song of yours you'd give to an alien?

Let's cut the cake and say “Atene 4,” which is actually on “Il Console Generale,” because it's the last piece I composed. An album of mine in English will finally be coming out soon too. I wanted to do it years ago, I've been saying it forever, long before my first Italian-language album even, but in the end nothing ever came of it for trivial reasons. It'll contain songs dating back to my London years, it'll be called “Recent Happenings.” To the alien, anyway, I'd leave “Atene 4,” also because I don't think there will be any more albums of songs from me. It's not that I'm quitting or retiring, God forbid — let's say I'll carry on down other paths, more tied to public performance, both theatrical and cinematic.

(March 16, 2026)

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