Offlaga Disco Pax - Technical rehearsals for cultural resistance

There are records that, over time, stop belonging only to those who wrote them and become collective heritage. That's the case with “Socialismo Tascabile”, the debut album by Offlaga Disco Pax released in 2005, which today – twenty years on – is echoing again on a tour that has sold out everywhere, with extra dates added to accommodate an audience that hasn't just failed to forget, but has actually grown. Max Collini, narrating voice and political heart of the Emilian collective, welcomes us into this long conversation that spans not only the Offlaga reunion but also his parallel paths, from Sheet Music to his career as a monologist, right up to broader reflections on Italy today, social media, historical memory, street naming, and the meaning of the word anti-fascism in 2025.

Twenty years later

Look, Daniele and I dreamed up this tour for one reason only: we wanted to play our songs again. It's something we hadn't done in many years. Songs that, in fact, changed our lives. Before releasing “Socialismo Tascabile”, none of us imagined we could have an artistic career. That record, instead, projected us into a dimension we hadn't experienced before. Personally, I hadn't done anything artistic before that. I played my first show in 2003, at 36 years old. I started at the age when a lot of people quit. Enrico and Daniele were already playing music, they'd had bands, but none of us had big ambitions. The record's release in 2005 changed everything: it gave us direction and opened up a real possibility. On that possibility we built ten years of tours, albums, concerts, and above all a relationship with our audience. So the idea for the tour came from wanting to celebrate that record, using the symbolic excuse of the twentieth anniversary to play those songs again, revisit those ambitions. We were thinking of something simple: a few clubs, catching up with old friends, a kind of reunion. What we didn't expect was the response: over these ten years, without us realizing it, things happened that we didn't know about. New generations probably discovered that record but never had the chance to hear it live. The result is that today the numbers are double, sometimes even triple, what we had in Offlaga's best years, between 2008 and 2010. Something that caught us completely off guard, but that makes us enormously happy.

Are there a lot of young people at the shows?

I was convinced we'd be playing again for old wolves, so to speak – my generation or the one right after, the audience that was 25 or 30 back then and is now inevitably 45, 50, or even older. And indeed, those people came back, I saw faces again that I hadn't seen in years, and it was wonderful. What I really didn't expect at all, though, was the presence of twenty-five-year-olds, thirty-year-olds, university students, even high schoolers. More than once I found 18, 19, 20-year-old girls and guys in the front row. That's an audience we already struggled to reach twenty years ago. Even back then our records were made, at best, for university students. We basically never saw high schoolers, whereas today we do. I think there's a lack of substance in contemporary music, and that – even if we're talking about a niche, a minority – pushes some people to look for that substance elsewhere. If you can't find it in today's things, you go looking for it in yesterday's. Otherwise I can't explain why an eighteen or twenty-year-old would come see Offlaga and know every lyric by heart. I really do find myself in front of a very young crowd shouting the words better than I do, and I, for the record, need the music stand to remember them...

Is there some anecdote, some encounter from the tour you can already recall?

In Roncade, for instance, in the Veneto region, we played a sold-out show in an 800-seat venue. After the show a young guy, maybe around twenty, stopped to talk to me. He told me that as a teenager he'd been completely absorbed into the Lega far-right scene. And then, somehow, he ended up listening to Offlaga. That, along with other experiences he had, put him on a different path. I have to say this almost scared me, in the sense that we've never had a pedagogical approach to the music we make. But if someone gets closer to certain ideas precisely because of what we do, that's a beautiful thing. On another occasion a teacher told me that when she covers certain contemporary history topics in class, she has her students read or listen to “Robespierre.” That gets the kids curious, and then they go and google the references in the song to understand what it's about. Well, things like that really hit home.

Robespierre, cinnamon candies and other pop metaphors

One way to read it might be that Offlaga Disco Pax also have, in their own way, a pop sensibility in their writing. Would you agree?

I think the references in our lyrics are pop, in that they're tied to everyday objects and personal experiences. I tell small, autobiographical stories that speak to the heart of anyone who's lived through similar things. That's the power of pop music: identification. A lot of people tell me our songs reflect their state of mind. Even though we don't make classic pop songs, our audience recognizes itself in the narratives and in the sonic fabric.

Some of these images have a density that triggers a different kind of memory than the rational one. Take, for example, the image of the television picking up TeleCapodistria, in “Cinnamon.” The scene isn't so different from someone today fiddling around on the Internet trying to pick up some anomalous signal that brings them content that resembles them. In that way it becomes something that cuts across generations. That's probably what brings people together.

Paraphrasing the title of one of your books, could we call it “antifascism without rhetoric”?

I really like this analogy between me watching TeleCapodistria ten years ago, and a high schooler today fiddling around on a computer looking for something different from everything they're being fed. It's the same spirit, in the end. I too was looking for something that came from far away, almost unimaginable. Today information is everywhere, there's much more of it than I had as a kid. But there's also a huge amount of background noise. If things like Offlaga manage to emerge from that noise, it must mean something. Certainly, the audience that comes to our shows has a certain cultural, social and political awareness, and already knows our songs, if only from having heard them on some streaming platform.

A neo-sensibilist collective

Can you explain the definition “neo-sensibilist collective opposed to democracy in feelings”? When did you start calling yourselves that? 

It's a slogan that came to me spontaneously, and it was one of the first identifying elements of the project. I've always liked the idea of collective identity a lot. Three male individuals, each with a creative role, who nevertheless have to get along. Let me try to explain “opposed to democracy in feelings” too. Democracy is based on the principle of 50% plus one. But in a romantic relationship – in a couple, so between two people – 50% plus one equals 100%. If there are two of us, the 100% is the two of us together, and 50% is just one person. In practice, total consent in love was only ever achieved by regimes: the rock-solid ones, like the Bulgarian regime or Maoist China, where people voted with 99.99% approval. That's the point: feelings don't work according to democratic logic, because feelings are dictatorships. When you love or are loved, there's no mediation, no vote: there's only the absolute.

In “Sensibile”, taken from the album “Bachelite”, you write: “the word 'sensibile' remains ambiguous and open-ended/Just like the NAR's involvement in the events of August 2, 1980/Francesca Mambro is thanked in the credits of an album titled/'We've waited patiently for 40 years, enough is enough!'. They're sensitive too”…

For that song I took a punch in the face that knocked me flat, I nearly lost an eye over it. In 2013, during a Massimo Volume show, I was attacked backstage by Dario Parisini. I didn't know him at all. Apparently, years after that Disciplinatha album came out, he had decided that was the moment to settle some personal score. While I was talking to Emidio Clementi, he came up to me, said nothing, and threw a punch at my face. He knocked me down and then ran off. He never apologized, never got in touch. I chose not to report him, even though the whole thing happened in front of about twenty people. I could have, sure. But in the end I let it go. He died a couple of years ago, so maybe there's no point going back to it now. The point is that record, in which his band said things like “non siamo fascisti, siamo buoni”, reflected more of an aesthetic pose than an actual political stance. The real issue is about language. It's always the same theme: the careless use of words. There's sarcasm, there's hyperbole, sure, but the idea that words matter is fundamental. Nanni Moretti, for instance, built a whole career on it.

Dictatorships and freedom

Yet the importance placed on words is lately being accused of being a way to limit freedom of expression. How do we square that?

Which is exactly the opposite of the truth. People who take words seriously would like everyone to do the same, because words carry weight and are often like stones: they can hurt. Yet nowadays, if you use a certain respectful and inclusive way of expressing yourself, one that in some way accounts for differences and complexity, you get labeled as someone trying to impose something. On the other hand, people invoke a freedom of expression that supposedly allows you to say whatever you want, insults included, the least inclusive and most offensive language included, but heaven forbid anyone points it out. 

Social media's fault too?

Social media is the founding element on which many discussions are built today, often deeply ideological ones. In my personal experience, I've observed how the radicalization of digital spaces is also the result of the ability of certain politicians or influencers – especially on the far right – to put out simple, immediate slogans, while on the left, where there's more complexity and reflection, it becomes much harder to find an effective communicative synthesis. There's often a lack of direct language. This despite the fact that, yes, the concepts pushed by the far right are often empty, superficial, but they work precisely because they're easy to grasp: few words, punchy slogans. Take the term woke, for example. But what does it actually mean? It's become almost fashionable to say “the dictatorship of woke”, but what would that even be? The dictatorship of the fact that I want to be more inclusive toward minorities? That I want to be empathetic toward experiences and cultures different from mine? If that's a dictatorship, then maybe we need to rethink what we mean by freedom. Because often, behind these controversies, there's an unsettling reality: discriminating is cheap and yields a lot of short-term results, because it gives people the idea that they can say whatever they want, without being ashamed of any prejudice. But in the long run, what matters is the economy, employment. And then maybe it'll be enough to go and vote to change the prevailing mood. I just have to look at the Spanish government, after all, where policies, and results, are different, including in economic terms.

Ok, but shouldn't a musician just think about playing music, a singer about singing, and so on?

That's what the world around us would ask of us. In a society centered on individualism and on defending the self and one's narrow personal circle, song lyrics reflect this social closure and atomization. That's why they talk about the weather. In recent editions, Sanremo seemed sponsored by a weather company. All the lyrics talked about rain, sun, wind, snow, just to fill empty content, using more or less symbolic elements. But even that gets tiresome after a while. It's no coincidence that this year songwriters like Brunori and Lucio Corsi made it to the top spots. Their songs, not exactly standard or typically Sanremo-ish, had something to say. An artist shouldn't conform to anyone's thinking, not even their own audience's. Look at Vasco Rossi: his audience probably thinks differently from him. He's maybe in a position where he can afford to, but still, the work he's doing on certain values, certain themes, makes me quite fond of him.

Technical rehearsals for a lineup

Getting back to Offlaga, how has the interaction been with new member Mattia Ferrarini, who took on the legacy of a wonderful musician and dear friend who passed away, Enrico Fontanelli?

We picked up where we'd left off, trying to recreate the sound of our concerts back then. We also used a lot of Enrico's original instruments. Mattia plays his bass, his keyboards. At the same time, though, we gave him the freedom to reinterpret those sounds and those songs in his own way. We didn't want this to be a purely archaeological exercise. In some songs, for instance, we used to use pre-recorded backing tracks, whereas now we've replaced them with sequences programmed live, work done with machines, but performed in real time. That's given the live shows more richness and variety. Mattia has done an excellent job. We could have taken an easier route: hired a session player, given him the record to learn, and got everything ready in a week. Mattia is like us when we started out: passionate, without much of a career behind him, but with deep listening skills, a sensibility, a way of doing things all his own.

During this touring period, did you feel the urge to work on new material?

It's a question without an answer, because there is no new material, but then again there's never even been time to think about it. Our goal is to put together, within a few months, the best possible show. Respect for our repertoire has to be absolute — we'd never perform a song we're not able to play properly. On top of that there's a sense of responsibility toward a very large audience. It also seems hard to imagine tackling new material after all this touring, but who knows... what I would like, in any case, is to make a new record with Max Collini.

From Offlaga... to Offlaga

Is your solo path, and the one with Sheet Music, also behind this comeback?

When Offlaga broke up, I could have shut everything down right there, disbanded myself too, so to speak, because I hadn't done anything like this before and could have simply gone back to not doing it. But the point is that with Offlaga, over ten years, I discovered the possibility of expressing myself through performance, and I wanted to keep going. Obviously it was a different dimension. Without a band, I knew perfectly well I'd never reach the same numbers. But that was never a problem for me: it's part of the game. I did a lot of things. The records with Jukka Reverberi under the name Sheet Music were essential to keep perceiving myself as an artist, even a small one. Then, when Jukka went back to working full-time with Giardini di Mirò, an empty space opened up that pushed me to reinvent myself as a monologuist. The two tours, "Max Collini legge L'indie" and "Storie di antifascismo senza retorica", went very well; the second one even became a book, which sold 5,000 copies. Sure, the numbers matter, but more than anything it was a way to explore another side of myself. My solo work, or the work with Sheet Music, kept a connection with the audience. Maybe if that connection hadn't existed, this comeback wouldn't have happened either.

Looking back now, what's your assessment of the Sheet Music experience?

It was fundamental. It let me rethink myself, work in different ways, with a different musician, and still pull it off. I'm not a classic singer-songwriter, I'm a lyricist. And Sheet Music gave me the chance to express myself in a new form, in an artistic dialogue that worked. And then there's the personal, human side of it. Jukka is one of the few true friends I have. When I have doubts, moments of difficulty about things happening around me, talking them through with him is always precious. We're in touch often, even if we don't see each other that much. But the contact is constant. He and Arturo Bertoldi — with whom I wrote "Storie di antifascismo senza retorica" — are reference points for me: cultural, social, political.

Places, future and memory

Street names — now that you're touring Italy again with the band, and having toured it extensively with the shows we've discussed — have they changed since the days of "Piccola Pietroburgo"? Does the provinces still hold onto that identity as guardian of a socialist spirit?

In my view, one of the most dramatic problems facing the provinces today is the exodus of young people. Every time I happen to visit a provincial town, it still moves me to see certain traces of the past. There isn't always a Via Berlinguer, maybe, but a Via Togliatti, yes, that one's almost everywhere. But then I realize there are no young people left to even ask: "Who was Togliatti?" And that's because they're not there anymore, they've left. Street names don't get changed — not so much for political reasons, but for practical ones: to avoid changing addresses, documents, utility accounts, which would inconvenience residents. So everything stays as it is, even though the surrounding context has completely changed. One example that makes me smile, as paradoxical as it is: in Reggio Emilia, Fineco's international headquarters is located on Via Rivoluzione d'Ottobre. It's an almost comical contrast: European financial modernity housed on a street named after the Bolshevik revolution. But change the name? Impossible. Not even a right-wing administration would do it, because it would be a huge logistical headache for residents. But the problem runs deeper: street names today no longer reward memory, because the people who should be its custodians, the young, aren't there anymore. This is creating a two-speed Italy: on one side there are the outskirts, the small towns, increasingly empty and abandoned, with very little investment, healthcare cut to the bone, poor services. On the other, the big cities keep growing, often chaotically, but still capable of offering opportunities. I'm no demographer, but it seems to me the picture is pretty clear. The falling birth rate makes everything worse: there are fewer and fewer young people, and they count for little politically too. And among those with talent or ideas, many choose to leave, because they see no future here.

And are you a pessimist?

By nature I'm not a negative person. I'm not an optimist either. Let's say I have what's called "pessimism of the intellect": whatever optimism I have, I keep it at a safe distance from reason. But we need to start rebuilding, however hard that may be. I'd like the fundamental principles of the Italian Constitution not to be changed — if anything, to actually be put into practice, because the opposite of the word fascism isn't communism. The opposite of the word fascism is democracy.

How will you celebrate April 25th?

Offlaga, and I with them, will be at Monte Sole, one of the symbolic sites of Italian memory, to commemorate one of the gravest Nazi-fascist massacres of the Second World War: the Marzabotto massacre. For a band like ours, having been invited to take part in an event like this is a tremendous honor. And I know I risk sounding rhetorical, but I say it sincerely: it's an enormous privilege to bring our songs before that audience, in a context of memory so universal and profound.

(April 24, 2025)

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