Frigidaire Tango - The Return of Frozen Tango

“We simply reopened the drawers, and there was a lot of interesting material.” That's how Carlo Casale explains the main reason behind the reunion of one of the leading bands on the early-Eighties Italian new wave scene: Frigidaire Tango. We met Carlo and Stefano (aka Charlie Out and Steve Hill) to have them tell us everything surrounding the band's newly released album, L'illusione del volo, out on La Tempesta.

“After our last concert in 1986, there was no particular trauma, no falling out,” Carlo recalls, “we simply ended things by drifting apart, and everyone went their own way. On the other hand, it's fairly normal for a band to start its decline after five or six years.” At the peak of their success, in 1984, Frigidaire filmed a documentary for Rai1 directed by the talented Piergiorgio Gay, titled L'ultimo concerto, which captures with disarming honesty the eternal conflict between the desire to make music and the need for recognition as a proper job in society. In that footage, this tension is so palpable it seems to foreshadow the band's end. Let's start from here, and ask Carlo and Stefano whether it's still so hard, in Italy (and especially in the Northeast), to make a living as a musician: “At bottom there's a flawed idea that the artist isn't a professional figure. It's not merely a populist issue: just look at the huge problems with state funding for the world of music. Only classical musicians have any real hope in that regard.”

According to Stefano, though, the problem also lies in how people approach making music these days. When we ask for his take on the state of health of the local music scene, Stefano doesn't mince words: “Yes, there are people doing something, but nothing that strikes me as exceptional. There's almost a distorted view of the craft, as if you had to go through appearing on TV no matter what. Just think of TRL: you go on, you come home happy, but you've probably burned yourself out from the start. The same goes for talent shows and anything like them: it's the damned television diktat of appear, appear, appear. And there are no venues left that put on live music.” On this point, Carlo (who has run the Shindy Club here in Bassano for years) focuses on the rise of electronic music: “A large chunk of people, young people especially, listen to a kind of music that doesn't even involve a guitar: they're no longer interested in seeing a band with instruments playing live. Add to that the fact that there isn't much money circulating, and it's understandable that venues find it much easier to bet on a DJ set: it costs little and draws a lot more people.” So, more broadly, can we really say rock is dead? “Maybe so,” Steve says caustically, “or at any rate there's a real lack of the kind of social movement that used to go hand in hand with the birth of a genre: think of punk, of new wave itself, of grunge... Today kids seem to be far more passive.”

A genuine, no-compromise reality, distinctly Italian, like the independent label “La Tempesta,” actually shows that there is ferment out there, and of very high quality too: it's the ideal environment for a free-spirited product like that of Frigidaire Tango. Stefano is in fact convinced that this label's success stems largely from a sincerity and transparency that have long been absent from the majors.

L'illusione del volo is the fruit of a two-year gestation. “Here's how it went,” Carlo explains, “after the celebratory box set came out in 2006, we started writing the record. It was ready, all the songs in English. Partly at Stefano's suggestion, partly because of interest from La Tempesta (which only releases music with Italian lyrics, ed.), the idea came about of writing the songs in Italian. Eighty percent of the songs were rewritten from scratch, and now critics are finally talking about the lyrics too.” Critics who, from many quarters, have praised the return of Frigidaire with great enthusiasm for a record clearly free of mere nostalgia-driven intent.

The band's two founders are indeed in complete agreement about the genuineness of this record. They insist on this quite a bit, almost as a point of pride amid a sea of prepackaged artistic products: “This music was born, conceived and played, first and foremost, for ourselves. L'illusione del volo was made for the pleasure of making it: that's the ideal condition for making art, with no commercial or economic need behind it. It's authentic through and through.”

It's no coincidence, then, that Stefano states without hesitation that the high point of their career is right now: “There's greater awareness, mostly because of age. You try to bring out the best, you're self-critical but also more patient. The result is that this record, even though we've been listening to these songs for two years now, is still in our cars, on our stereos or on our iPods: we genuinely love it!” Carlo seems to echo the point: “This record had no pretensions, we had material and we felt the natural need to put it out. It's not calculated, it came out the way it had to, very varied.” And what became of the English-language songs that were already finished? “They definitely have a future, we're thinking about the format: we could sell them at concerts, press them on vinyl, or put them up as a download online. There's no rush, anyway.”

A record with such varied shades of light, free of any obvious genre reference, is held together by a single strong leitmotif expressed through various nuances in the lyrics: it's the theme of freedom, told on multiple levels, from the political-social outcry of “Mescola le razze” to the intimate confessions of “Paura del tempo,” or the beautiful “Le cose capite.” Carlo tells us the reason behind this choice: “Actually, we only realized afterwards that all the lyrics expressed a similar idea. What seems to be missing today isn't just freedom, but the awareness of what it actually means to be free. Many people don't realize that freedom must first and foremost be active, not passive. And maybe that's exactly why young people are so passive, because amid total indifference they believe they feel free.”

The only track with its own separate story is “New wave anthem”, a dreamlike tale built around the names of the bands that starred in the new wave scene of those years. “The words came about partly just for fun, but with Stefano's music, tinged with melancholy, and the arrangement we created for the record, they turned into a little gem, something magical, as rarely happens in music: that's when you realise you're carrying a message that doesn't seem to come directly from you.”

We wrap up the chat with a few words on the future of Frigidaire Tango: a reunion that's anything but casual, it seems. “We've got plenty of drive and creativity,” explains Carlo, “in 2010 we've got around fifteen dates lined up across Italy. Soon we'll also be shooting a video, in Parma, for the song ‘Soffia’: we won't give anything away, it'll be a great surprise.”

For anyone still unsure, Frigidaire Tango are well and truly back: the Tango really is still on ice, and everything suggests it'll stay there a while longer.

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