Giorgio Canali - Poetry and the hammer

The interview is set for 8pm: by that time the sound-check should have long been over. Instead, at a quarter to eight, when I arrive at La Casa 139, they're still setting up the stage. Canali and I start looking for the quietest spot in the venue, and I suggest the bathroom. We grab two armchairs, drag them to the toilet, and start the chat.

My friend would like to know if, on your third solo album, people still ask you how Ferretti is doing.

(resigned) Definitely.

I burst out laughing. What do you mean, "definitely"?!

Look, he's doing great, that's the problem. The problem, or the joy, I don't know. It's just that a lot of people hate Ferretti, so for that huge number of people, the fact that Ferretti is doing well isn't good news. Ferretti is doing great, and he'll probably outlive them all.

He'll bury us all?

He'll bury YOU all: I'm immortal.

The first question I want to ask you is about the title of your latest album. From what I understand, it's exactly the image, the little arrow going down.

It's a bit of a semantic joke, really: "Let's try it and see if people get it," and people don't get it, so they just call it "Giorgio Canali e Rossofuoco," which creates another misunderstanding, namely: "I already have that record, I don't want it, it's just the cover that's different." "No, I swear, there are 10 songs that aren't the same ones."

Wouldn't it have been simpler to call it, I don't know, "Precipito"?

Too obvious. I like being direct, but sometimes being too direct doesn't capture how... convoluted I am. I like being a bit convoluted too. What I do know for sure is that the next album will be called "L'Album Rosso," and there's a live album, or rather it'll be a book of 13 or 14 stories, each paired with a live-recorded track. It'll be a book with a CD included, and it'll be called "Rosso Vivo," of all things.

Is this a personal or a universal descent? I get the impression it's universal.

It's a descent... that's been there from the start. The meaning behind "Precipito" has existed since the days of "Lazlotòz" ("Che Fine ha Fatto Lazlotòz?", his first solo album from 1998). There was this thing, this kind of... desire to... show it... live. Yes, it's like watching death live, a suicide, really it's just a suicide. Sometimes it's funny, it's sad, it's strange. It happens. It often happens that someone decides to end it by taking a flight. I've always thought that probably, once I've gotten tired of everything, once I've decided it's time to end it, what I'll want to do is fly.

It's been there since "Lazlotòz," six years now. Sentence after sentence, words kept getting added to words. I never found music that could capture that sense of vertigo, because what came out was fast, punky stuff, which made the idea rather banal - falling fast is easy, it's quick. That was it. Then I came up with a riff... a bit borrowed... that matched the atmosphere I'd had in my head for a while. Then I realized it was very, very similar - as a sonic and compositional idea - to a Pixies song that I love a lot... I don't even remember the title... I've completely erased it.

Let's hum it.

I really did delete it. I think it's on Surfer Rosa. I don't remember. I decided that was perfect, that musical atmosphere was perfect, and in the end everything else came out too. What had stayed inside for a long time, nothing but the urge to show itself in the final moment, considering one small detail that's funny, if you like: the moment you throw yourself into the void, you're bound to be mediocre because, however hard you try, you'll never exceed those 17 meters per second, due to a law of physics governing the fall of a body not through a vacuum, but through Earth's atmosphere.

It makes me think of the film — which you've surely seen — "La Haine".

Even Kassovitz stole the idea, it's not his, it doesn't come from there:.

Upstairs they're starting to make way too much noise. We get up and look for a door that's been taken off. We sit back down and I stick the little recorder between his teeth. Poor guy.

It's not Kassovitz's. Do you remember, maybe you saw it when you were little, "The Magnificent Seven"? A western film based on "The Seven Samurai", it was the American version of "The Seven Samurai" by... by... by...

Kurosawa.

Well done. Hollywood decided that a film as dense as "The Seven Samurai" could become some American bullshit with seven cowboys in a village of peasants. And at one point James Coburn says: "There's a nice story: there's a guy who, in San Francisco, falls from the seventh floor of a building." — also because back then more than seven floors was unthinkable — and as he's falling he keeps saying: "So far so good, so far so good, so far so good."

When I saw that line in "La Haine" and heard everyone calling Kassovitz a genius, I said: "I've got to do the same thing, I've got to steal stuff from other people too." Which I'm pretty good at, also because I have a great teacher, Ferretti.

But we won't say that and nobody will notice. Let's go back to... let's call it "Freccina".

Sure, "La Freccina in Giù"

It has a much more rock sound than "Rossofuoco" (his second solo album, from 2001)

You think so?

Mmmmhhh. I'd say so. It seems a lot closer to "Lazlotòz" than to "Rossofuoco"... and then you gave the group a name, it doesn't feel like a solo project anymore.

The band's name was already on the other album. If you saw the posters for the "Rossofuoco" tour, "Rossofuoco" was written big, with our names written small underneath. Mine a bit bigger (we laugh) because otherwise, according to concert promoters, nobody shows up. That's not really true, people don't care that much about my past. I've realized, over more than 200 shows, that I have a very different audience than the one I'm used to with CSI or PGR.

All the tracks are in Italian. Was that a deliberate choice?

I stopped living in France. I used to think in French. For 10 years of my life I thought in French, and most of the crap that came into my head solidified in French. Translating it would be a very. intellectual operation. I try to limit the use of intellect in my stuff, I prefer it to come out from inside my gut rather than from inside my brain. Even though I realize that, anyway, the universe. we can call it "poetic", because that's how the shit I write gets defined in anthologies, but. . . . I've lost my train of thought. See? I'm old.

Live, though? All Italian songs, or the occasional one in French?

I'd love that like crazy. Over the years, though, I've noticed that in Italy, doing a song in French during a concert takes away half the tension you've built up until then, and apart from 4 or 5 fanatics who keep shouting: "La Démarche des Crabes! La Démarche des Crabes! La Démarche des Crabes!", everyone else couldn't care less about "La Démarche des Crabes" — actually they feel rather. I'd say "insulted", because then, when someone doesn't understand that you're saying very intelligent things, that are very complicated, that are words in a very abundant flow, they think: "Damn, this guy's saying a ton of stuff and I don't understand a word. So what do I do now?" and rather than feel ignorant — because that's what it comes down to in the end — they say: "Fuck it, I don't care." It's normal. Like when you're faced with a subject like philosophy, I'd rather just say I'm not interested. Truth is I don't understand a damn thing about it because during philosophy class in high school I was playing cards.

The live, direct-to-tape approach. You've always used it — does that mean it works well for you?

I mean that, in my opinion, for rock'n'roll it's the only way to do things.

Do you think there's a difference between rock and rock'n'roll?

No. It's just the term I use. It's rock'n'roll, but it could just as well be rock. Fairly hard, electric music, often with someone who, instead of singing sweetly, screams. It doesn't change much from pop to rock, only the final outfit. I'm sure I could do the whole last album in a hyper-pop version with really boring, stupid arrangements. It might even work better.

Try it!

Doubtful. I'd need to find a voice to do it. It's not mine. My voice is raspy.

Musician, composer, singer, producer, sound engineer, consultant, friend, and maybe even cook and dishwasher too. But how much does the record industry actually involve you? Do you just "do your job", or do you feel involved, maybe even from a marketing standpoint?

One thing I've never done is have an actual label, be part of the embryo of an actual label. I've always been a marginal figure in these things. Even with Consorzio Produttori Indipendenti I was someone who collaborated with them, I wasn't the one who "thinks it up", then "brings people in", then "tries to make things happen with these people". If I'm honest, I'm pretty much at war with the record industry in general because, one way or another, in my opinion we're in the hands of a bunch of idiots. Everywhere, including in the small world of the scene. Then there are a few cases that redeem themselves, but more often than not they're the very cases most looked down on by those who think they've got it all figured out.

And that brings me to the next question, which, brace yourself, is going to be a nasty one.

Vai!

The record industry is in crisis — do you think the record-making world is too? Let me explain: "Turn off the sound, love — There's nothing to hear here — In the brothels of post-rock — Anaemic types whine inside the reverbs." "Questa È la Fine" is a very pessimistic song, and that could well have been an especially emphasized passage, but you also recently stated: "Italian indie is elite music for shitty little hipsters, made by shitty little hipsters, who wallow in self-satisfaction over their own shit, and sell it to other shitty individuals who buy 200 records and are happy."

That's about the size of it. It's a portrait of the Italian situation. I'm actually quite fond of certain shitty little hipsters. But when you realize that the music world is in the hands of rehashes of formulas already seen elsewhere that work elsewhere, but it's elsewhere, it's a different universe. Seeing things like Il Ramarro Banana Contro la Grande Depressione really bothers me. Seeing and hearing very sad, whiny things just because it's fashionable to be sad and whiny, otherwise you're a loser, really bothers me. I can't help it. I have the same kind of reaction I might have had in the '70s when punk arrived and there were all those losers of shitty singer-songwriters, some of whom were also absolutely brilliant and great, but they'd become a real pain in the ass, and it's sad to think that "experimental music" in Italy has become a pain in the ass. Because it's really ugly if you think about it. Going digging through things and hoping that Negrita will make a wonderfully beautiful song.

Come on, that's unthinkable!

It can happen! It's impossible for Il Gatto Banana to do anything truly good, because it'll always be thrown off by the crooked mindset of these individuals who, the moment they see something that might work, turn their noses up at it.

So it's not just a matter of... not feeling like experimenting?

No way! And besides, what experimentation is there in that? They sound like Comencini soundtracks. Even Comencini, for "Pinocchio", would probably have rejected them, saying: "This stuff is too idiotic!" And when I hear this music I get pretty pissed off, it's just not possible. Vollenweider, rediscovering him now and making him out to be somewhat difficult because you throw in some dissonances - I mean, I was listening to him 25 years ago and it sounded like the same stupid music that... what was his name... Richard Clayderman and those people who churned out big Christmas piano tunes.

You were "born" as a sound engineer and sampling expert, and you come from an electronic background. How did your past prepare you to be a punk musician, if it did at all?

At the start of the '80s I decided to change tack. It was a strange thing. I realized I needed a bit of self-discipline to understand certain things: because it was great to say, "Come on, let's mess around, we can't play, let's just do our own thing." That was great, but I'm convinced that in Italy there was no fertile ground for that kind of approach, because the only thing that came out of that moment onward was CCCP, and CCCP are anything but punk. So the ground wasn't there to do that kind of stuff, and I decided to renounce everything I'd put into my head - I started dressing in white while everyone else was dark, cutting my hair really short, and tackling the world of electronics with the first MIDI samplers, which for 99.9% of the people making music at the time was stupid, modern, incomprehensible stuff. For me it was bread and butter. I did that for a few years. From '82-'83, from the birth of the MIDI Protocol, up until the end of the '80s when I met Gianni (Maroccolo) and started working with Litfiba. From there I ended up on the last CSI album ("Tabula Rasa Elettrificata", 1997) as co-producer with Gianni - I handled the technical side - with a wealth of knowledge about electronics and everything else, and Gianni wanted to throw it all in the bin. From that point on I said: "Okay, a) I'm never working with Gianni again; and b) I'm never working with a machine again."

PGR, CSI and CCCP. So many prolific, independent minds. How do the songs come about? Something must surely have changed over so many years of collaboration.

Giovanni often says something I think is very true: that he's been making the same shit for 25 years. It's the way he makes it that changes. The concepts and ideas have changed radically because we ourselves change enormously. If you read any lyric from the first two CCCP albums and then read a random lyric from the latest PGR album, you realize how those two people who wrote those lyrics are two completely different people, and yet they're the same people. It's not some kind of temporal schizophrenia, it's simply a way of changing. Then, every time, we try to reinvent a whole universe for ourselves - like at the end of the '70s, start of the '80s, when I said: "I'm sick to death of punk improvisation now, I want to understand how a different kind of album works." At the end of the '90s CSI decided to die, then, a couple of years later, they resurfaced trying to radically reinvent themselves. We threw so much material in the bin! At least a dozen hours of gorgeous stuff, which however reminded us too much of CSI, in order to make a completely unsellable, completely stupid album, like the first PGR record ("Per Grazia Ricevuta", 2002). We're definitely very proud of that album. But you see, there - when we talk about experimentation - we had someone even more out-of-it than us guide us along the way, because he's 10 years older than me, so he's a good 56 years old, a guy named Hector Zazou, who at any rate has the ability, the knowledge and the genuine snobbery needed to say: "This is 'off' music, this is 'in' music." Then again I'm exaggerating about his definition of "in" music, because for him anything that isn't completely grating and dissonant is stuff for dim-witted petty bourgeois types. But having someone like that around teaches you that even past 40 you can still learn things.

Did you also do something for cinema, or am I wrong?

Aside from the soundtracks I did with CSI, I worked on a couple of occasions with Davide Ferrario. I did the entire soundtrack for "Guardami" (the story of a porn star who falls ill with cancer), Davide's most ill-fated film, which went to the Venice Film Festival and got slammed by both left-wing and right-wing critics, because sex, pornography and terminal illness apparently can't go together - it pisses off the Catholics and it pisses off the Communists. It was a very harshly treated film. For me, the one real shortcoming of that film is that it lacked a bit of the poetry that Davide later managed to find again in a wonderful film like "Dopo Mezzanotte". I don't think he'll ever make another film like that, one with all the poetry that had been missing up until that point.

They're making way too much noise upstairs and I can't hear what he's saying. Let's switch bathrooms.

How is it here?

Seems a bit better...

But there's more reverb, can you hear it? Anyway, we were talking about "Dopo Mezzanotte". I saw it in the rough-cut stage, I never saw the final version, I never go to the cinema, but I know it's the version that ended up in theaters, with a few dubbed voices and a few things changed, and there he did manage, at last, to find the poetry he'd never quite managed to find before, because Davide has a bit of this shortcoming: he's very good at writing stories, but he often clings a bit too much to being rigorous and straightforward with an idea, and loses sight a little of the poetic side of the things he's saying. I loved the soundtrack a lot.

We worked in more of a "professionalistic" way, rather than a "professional" one: I had the film's decoupage and from there I started writing the pieces, going around the set with my musical themes recorded. Real work, not the usual business of just slapping songs on top. A very, very worthwhile experience. Then I did a couple more documentaries with Davide again, and we worked more or less always in this way, with him telling me: "Look, we're going to tackle these, these and these themes, you write some things, then you give them to me, I listen to them and try to let the music influence me too." It's always very nice and positive. I'm sorry that my only collaboration with the world of cinema is limited to working with Davide, because by now we know each other so well that maybe it's better we stop.

No way!

Yesss!!! It would be interesting, for me, to find someone else who could give me different kinds of inspiration. Anyway, with Davide there's a perfect understanding, and every time I give him the demos for the new album, I know for sure that two months later he'll tell me: "Listen, at first it kind of sucked, but... it's fantastic." We laugh so much.

Ok, politics. Because meeting you and not talking about politics would seem like a waste. The problem is that politics makes me really nervous.

Not me.

Exactly. That's why I ran to my little French grandmother in a panic to ask her for help, and she tried to calm me down. I explained your love of France and your passion for fire. She asked me how I'd managed to get an interview with a terrorist, and she was really disappointed when I explained that you were a musician.

The funny thing is, and I'll bring up Davide again, when I made "Rossofuoco" I told him: "Davide, I'm calling this album 'Rossofuoco.' Do you like it?" And he goes: "Do I like it? I'm making a film called 'Rosso Fuoco'! It's based on a story by Cesare Battisti (the terrorist, exactly) and it'll be really hard to finish, but I absolutely want to make it." So I tell him: "Fine, then I'll change the title and call it 'Fuochi Supplementari.'" He calls me back two weeks after listening to the demos and says: "No, you're not calling it 'Fuochi Supplementari,' you're calling it 'Rossofuoco,' because this kind of magic, these mysterious things that happen, to me, they have to be this way, no question about it." Come on, "Rossofuoco" is nice. He even has a production company now. "Dopo Mezzanotte" is produced by Rosso Fuoco. These things are really strange and really peculiar.

Great. So: concerts, new album, book with CD. And then?

(Laughing) I'll die.

You can't: you just said you were immortal!!!

So in 2027 I'll have my first breakdown, and I'll fake my own death and retire to Kenya.

Want one last question?

Go on!

Any question you like, say whatever you want.

I'll give you a hard time.

Is there a question that no one has ever asked you, that you're always waiting for?

Can I make an observation? Yesterday I rewatched "The Meaning of Life" by Monty Python, and there's a bonus DVD with extras and... and all the Monty Python are so sad today. Sad, and maybe... that's a bit too strong a word, but there's a kind of squalor about them, and it makes me really sad. If I realize that in 15 years I'll be in that state, I hope someone has the good sense to bump me off. I can't stand the thought that those people, who for me, for 20 years, were an absolute icon of intelligence and wit, are now nothing more, nothing less, than some random Vianello.

If someone gives you the Christmas Star edition with the "Il Senso della Vita" dvd on disc 1 and the "making of" on disc 2, you might as well throw disc 2 away.

Fine, I'm still waiting for "Brian di Nazareth" anyway

That one, though, will never come out in Italy: it's too smart for the Italian market. Plenty more laughs.

I head home with "Surfer Rosa" spinning on my iPod and a laugh that refuses to stay put, bursting out whenever I think back on how much fun I had. Meanwhile I try to decide what to cook for dinner, and my mind drifts back to Brian smearing slogans on the walls of Jerusalem…

(Milan, December 15, 2004)

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