Senzabenza - Italian Flower-Punk

2017 marks the recording comeback, after a full 15 years, of one of the cornerstone bands of Italian punk-rock. We met the band just a few days before the release of “Pop From Hell” and what follows is the account of the entertaining chat we had with Sebi Filigi (guitar), Nando Ferdinandi (vocals and guitar) and Max Bergo (drums), with whom we retraced not only the story of Senzabenza, but also three decades of Italian punk, and much more… 

Welcome back, Senzabenza. A new album after 15 years, broken up only by the recent 7-inch “Especially For You“. Why did it take so long?

SEBI: Our records have always been a troubled affair, so even though we'd thought about it several times, we were scared of the idea of getting back into the studio for a long stretch. The spark came when Max (Bergo, the band's drummer, ed.) decided to set up a comfortable home recording studio, which let us work in total relaxation, with the drawn-out timeframes required by our current respective life situations. And, above all, with complete artistic freedom.

Your live activity, though, never actually stopped…

S: No, that's true, it didn't. Ours is a bond that's also personal, one that's held us together for almost thirty years: getting in the car to play a show and meet friends of a lifetime all over Italy always fills us with joy.

Let's go back a ways: in the early '90s you were one of the first bands on the Italian independent scene to emerge from a small provincial town. Certainly the first to do so from Latina, a place that has always suffered from its proximity to Rome. How was such a miracle possible?

S: We formed the way a thousand other bands form: as a consequence of the boredom young people who are passionate about music suffer when they find themselves without any stimulation from the place where they live. If we found a decent following even outside Latina, it was because we were managed and well promoted (it has to be said) in the early '90s by our label at the time, “McGuffin”, before a series of disagreements over precisely the management of the band forced us to end our relationship with them.

NANDO: I completely and utterly disagree with Sebi. In the '90s we broke through because we had a sound that nobody else had at the time. Punk in Italy was almost exclusively identified with either hyper-politicized hardcore or straight edge, especially in the Rome scene. I'd say we were among the first to bring melodic punk rock in the style of Hard-Ons (Australian hardcore-punk band known for lyrics full of strong humor and lighthearted themes, ed.) to Italy at a certain level of quality, and I believe that was the main reason we achieved, in our own small way, a degree of success.

You came up right alongside the explosion of the golden decade of Italian independent music, yet you never really belonged to any “scene” — you always stayed a bit apart, doing your own thing, going firmly against the grain at a time when collaboration between bands was all the rage (just think of the C.P.I. experience): was that down to objective difficulty getting into the “circuit,” or a deliberate strategic choice?

S: I'd say the former. I'd trace it back to how easily we were (and still are) often labeled “pop-punk” in the worst sense of the term, not helped by our complete indifference to the literary content of our lyrics in favor of a purely metrical delivery.

And yet in those years you were among the very few to find significant opportunities abroad — Afterhours and Marlene Kuntz, for instance, also tried, with very poor results, despite having an “international” sound...

S: Hats off again to Paolo Cavalcanti and his McGuffin, a true champion of persistence and persuasion, at least up until “Gigius,” and that was back in 1993. From 1995 onward, though, he got caught up in delusions of grandeur, turning down some excellent record deals that came in from abroad, including one from Fat Wreck, which was riding high in the punk scene at the time. He also wouldn't go along with the idea of having Joey Ramone produce our album “Deluxe,” and our refusal to budge on this opportunity unfortunately led to a falling-out and even legal disputes. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, one we could never have said no to.

Aside from the exception of “Vol. 4” (1999), you always opted to sing in English. Could that choice have hurt your career? I'm thinking of a lot of other bands (Afterhours above all, but there were several) whose commercial fortunes shot up precisely when they switched from English to Italian...

S: In terms of commercial success, sure, insisting on singing in English in Italy is basically suicide. When we tried our hand at Italian, we got help writing the lyrics because we felt dangerously exposed in front of listeners who pay attention to the words before the music. It didn't work out with Italian, maybe because at that point we didn't have much to say, and the people who tried to help us, despite their good intentions, didn't manage to pull it off. On top of that, singing in Italian came paired with a “musical shift” that saw us deliberately move away from the melodic English-sung punk of our early days toward a sound that was much more sixties oriented — a turn that threw off the people who had followed us up to that point.

N: Here too I completely and utterly disagree with Sebi. The lyrics on “Vol. 4” were fucking awful. Almost all of them were mine, and they were really bad. After a round of edits they got even worse. I dream of re-recording that album with the lyrics rewritten in English and a less pretty-boy sound.

How much has the music scene changed between the '90s and the new millennium? Is it harder to break through and find opportunities today? If so, why? How much have the mechanisms operating within and around the music business changed?

S: Honestly, I don't think the scene has changed all that much. Breaking through on your own terms is just as possible today as it was back then, and it still takes a good deal of courage and stubbornness. Maybe back in the day a modest investment in studio time was enough to record a decent-ish demo, plus tapes to duplicate and t-shirts to print. Today, unlike before, bands are forced to put up serious budgets just to get noticed. Crowdfunding, though, I find a genuinely out-of-place tool.

N: I pretty much completely disagree with Sebi. The punk scene today is remarkably full of great bands: the problem is that absolutely nobody goes to shows anymore. I'm talking about the North, which is the scene I know best. In the '90s, even a gig by a fairly unknown band never drew fewer than a hundred people. Today a hundred people is a tough milestone for anyone who isn't called Punkreas, Derozer, Shandon, or a handful of others.

And yet today, with the internet and social networks, shouldn't everything be easier compared to when, to get a foot in the door, you had to mail self-produced demo tapes to record labels that (almost) never replied?

S: And in fact it's infinitely easier to put yourself out there today, but I think you have to do it entirely on your own steam, including in terms of financial investment.

Given all that, shouldn't it be easier nowadays to break through internationally? Why do so few manage it? Is it a matter of sound, language, organization, or what?

S: Well, in the punk-rock scene those barriers have pretty much disappeared these days, not only thanks to the internet and social networks, but also because the genre itself has certain built-in qualities — spontaneity and directness of musical content — that make it easier to break down borders, especially if you use the passe-partout of singing in English. I can assure you there are plenty of musicians who have real, extensive relationships (not just virtual ones) and build genuine “punk-rock families” around the world, playing shows wherever they go.

N: Yes, actually there are a lot of Italian bands who play abroad all the time. Even in the United States, like Manges, for instance.

S: Definitely. As I was saying before, there's no doubt that English can act as a kind of passe-partout. In Italy it can be a double-edged sword, because a good chunk of punk-rock listeners are more drawn to politically charged, politically incorrect Italian lyrics than to the musical content itself. But that's a trait of us Italians (I wouldn't call it a flaw): a song matters more for what it says than for its actual musical component. Across all genres.

N: I have to disagree completely with Sebi again. There are tons of melodic punk bands who couldn't care less about the lyrics and still have a devoted fanbase — I'm a fan of quite a few of them myself. I won't name names, because I might end up mentioning someone who actually does care about lyrics, and end up looking like an idiot.

Over the years you've shared the stage with a lot of major bands, both Italian and international. Could you give us a quick rundown of the main names, pointing out the experiences you remember most fondly and the ones you enjoyed less?

S: I remember writing down some memories a few years back about the shows we played alongside Ramones in Italy between 1992 and 1993. It takes very little to rank that experience among the most beautiful and rewarding of our career. On other occasions we shared the stage with NOFX, Fleshtones, Hard-Ons, Skiantos, Rubinoos, Damned and many others. The worst experience I remember goes back a few years, when we played in Rome alongside the Norwegian Yum Yums. That night we managed to break 4 strings in the space of two songs with no spare guitars on hand!

N: To the list of foreign bands Sebi mentioned I'll add Screaming Trees.

You surely have some fun anecdotes to share with us…

N: One time we were recording in a studio in New York and decided to bet on a horse race on TV. The bettors were me, Sebi, Paolo Di Gaetano, Max Urso, Joey Ramone and Daniel Rey. Ten dollars each, obviously each of us picking a different horse. There were 8 horses running and we covered 6 of them. Naturally, one of the two horses none of us had bet on ended up winning….

S: One of the things that still cracks me up to this day is the scene of the parish priest of the Santa Rita church, here in Latina, pacing nervously back and forth at the back of the parish theater's stage while the Australian Hard-Ons were playing — we were opening for them back in 1993. You have to understand, we were part of the organizing committee, and to convince the priest to let us use the theater, I had to translate some of the Hard-Ons' lyrics to reassure him they weren't offensive, or at least not unsuitable for a parish hall. The Hard-Ons are one of the filthiest bands to have ever set foot on a stage — go read the lyrics to songs like "Suck'n'Swallow" or "Dickcheese"! Luckily, every now and then they'd also slip in a little love song like "Girl In The Sweater" or "Made To Love You", so naturally those were the ones I translated, and I managed to convince the priest. But once the show started, the band brought out their full "metal" side, performing shirtless (actually, literally in their underwear!) and headbanging the entire time. The priest climbed up on stage to make them stop, but we held him back and nothing happened — still, seeing him in his cassock with his hands in his hair, surrounded by those hellraisers playing like there was no tomorrow at deafening volumes, was surreal and hilarious at the same time. The Hard-Ons themselves fondly recall this episode somewhere on their website.

Speaking of Joey Ramone: perhaps not everyone knows that your 1996 record — "Deluxe: How To Make Money With Punk Rock" — was actually mixed by him in person. Tell us about that experience and how you managed to connect with such a legendary figure.

S: Through Paolo di Gaetano, president of the Italian Ramones fan club and our tour manager at the time (1996), a copy of "Gigius" made its way to Joey and he liked it a lot, so he simply offered to produce our next album. It seemed too good to be true to us, but incredibly, our label wasn't interested. As I mentioned earlier, we slammed the door and went our own way, accepting the offer. Once recording was finished, a delegation of Senzabenza flew to New York to mix the tracks together with Joey. It was an unforgettable week: we worked during the day at Baby Monster Studio, on the twentieth floor of a building near Union Square, and at night we slept at the Chelsea Hotel. That week we also squeezed in a couple of shows at Cbgb's, a dinner invitation from Arturo Vega, who cooked us some flawless rigatoni with tomato and basil in his legendary loft on the Bowery, as well as a stop by the Ramones' rehearsal room.

In the second half of the '90s — when the majors realized there was money to be made in Italy's underground scene — your records were distributed by Sony. What happened after that?

S: The unsold copies ended up incinerated! Sony-NOYS (an anagram of Sony Italy's indie division) did absolutely nothing to promote the record, probably relying entirely on our fan base — which, however, fell apart as a result of our switch to Italian lyrics and the new musical direction we'd taken. But "Vol. IV" is, in my opinion, a good record, and sooner or later it'll get the justice it deserves.

N: Dear Sebi, it'll get justice if we redo it in English.

Let's talk about "Pop From Hell": from the first listens, I seem to notice new musical directions, though still well grafted onto the stylistic continuity with your past. How does this new work position itself relative to your classic albums?

MAX: "Pop From Hell" is a rock record where you can taste all our main influences. From punk to garage, from power-pop to psychedelia. It's an album with different atmospheres and "environments".

S: To sum it up, we could call it "Power Pop". There's also a big, and initially unplanned, return of vintage keyboards, with various Hammonds, Rhodes, Mellotrons, Farfisas, Voxes and the like. This was made possible because we got a big hand in the studio from Daniele Nonne, the keyboardist we had back in the days of "Vol. IV", who we'll never stop thanking. In my opinion, "Pop From Hell" slots in right after "Deluxe", picking up a few psychedelic cues filtered through the classic power-pop of '79-'81. There's no shortage of pretty driving tracks either. It's a very varied record, even in terms of sound.

There's a funny side to this: right before starting the recordings, Senzabenza's bassist had to bow out. Instead of recruiting a new travel companion, you decided to entrust each track to a different bassist...

S: Yes, that was a great idea of Nando's. Work had barely started when we found ourselves without a bassist. It upset us quite a bit, but we were too determined to shut the project down. The idea of bringing in guest bassists, recruiting them from bands in a similar vein to ours that we've often shared the stage with (in most cases genuine friends), turned out to be a winning move right away, and we got real enthusiasm from everyone involved. Not to mention the performances, all excellent and inspired, which enrich the album even further.

M: What makes "Pop From Hell" such a varied work is precisely the presence of the sixteen bassists who took part in recording the tracks, each with their own sound. Sixteen bassists, one per song, each playing their own part free to interpret and arrange it however they liked, and... damn... having sixteen bassists on one record is a privilege, we're talking about the bassists of the best Italian punk-rock bands!

I know that your songwriting almost always originates from Sebi's initiatives. How does the Senzabenza composing process usually work? Has it changed over time?

S: No, it's always the same. I strum something on acoustic guitar, and when I feel like I've hit on something good, I spend half an hour trying to shape a structure for the song. I always try to finish quickly, because I know that if I come back to it later, I end up rejecting it. Then I picture some lyrics, get them down with 90% of my attention on the meter and the remaining 10% on the literary content, and make a demo using a drum machine. If it convinces me at that point, it moves into the rehearsal room under the hands of the other Senzabenza members, who add their own touch. We arrange everything together, sometimes we change something, other times we turn the whole song upside down, but that's roughly always the process.

Whereas the technical side of things, dealing with recording issues, is more in Max's hands, right?

S: Right. Max has recently become very passionate about "sound" in its more technical aspects, so the recording of "Pop From Hell" was his work. Daniele, the keyboardist I mentioned earlier, also joined in for the mix.

M: We recorded the tracks in my garage, which we've turned into a rehearsal room. Initially we were aiming to get a pre-production to use only later for working on the arrangement of the songs. Having a rehearsal room at home lets you do everything in much more depth than we were able to in the past. We then decided to use those recordings for the album, so I ventured into mixing. Daniele Nonne, besides writing the piano, synth and organ parts, was essential help in completing the mixing process, complete with automations and finishing touches. The mastering, on the other hand, was done by Ettore Gilardoni of Rocketman Records, who finished the job at Real Sound studios.

Today technology opens up scenarios in the recording studio that were unthinkable before. For a punk band, the usual rule is "first take's the best", tending not to overdo the post-production work in the studio. In your case, though, there's often a noticeable attention to finishing touches...

S: Well, the recording process has always interested and fascinated us. We've always preferred situations where we didn't have to worry about watching the clock, so we've always tried out different solutions, different sounds, just for the pure pleasure of doing it. For "Deluxe" we shut ourselves away for a couple of winter weeks in a house on the Latina coast, and set up a proper studio, living together the whole time. Once the "working" day was done, it was fettuccine with porcini mushrooms and cream time, then we'd sprawl out to watch Ed Wood horror movies.

Nowadays at your shows you can find a fairly mixed crowd. Alongside nostalgics of early punk, there are quite a few young people too. Is it that you're good at breaking free from a certain image, managing to connect with new generations, or is there a renewed interest in the sounds of a certain "catchy" punk?

S: I don't know if there's a renewed interest, actually, I don't really think so. The power-pop/melodic punk genre always stays fairly segregated in a ghetto for the benefit of a few enthusiasts. We've historically "freed ourselves" quite easily from the classic punk image, because we've always wanted to put elements into our music that have nothing to do with punk. Just consider that at twenty we recorded a "punk" album that included a cover of Dukes of Stratosphere!

But do you still recognize yourselves in the "flower-punk" label?

S: Absolutely not. For us that definition already ended with "Gigius", back in 1993.

N: And once again I completely and totally disagree with Sebi. I identify with it fully, because it's a name that evokes fun punk-rock with psychedelic and power-pop contaminations. In my mind flower-punk has always meant that. Even today.

Right now in Italy, would you say there's still a "punk" scene?

S: Yes, definitely. There are excellent bands who've had a huge following for more than twenty years, and we've often shared the stage with them.

N: There are also tons of great newer bands. These days it's really easy to see a punk band on stage that absolutely kills it, even if it's only been around for a couple of years.

Any names?

S: Derozer, the legendary Punkreas, Gerson, Latte+, Tough, The Leeches, Rappresaglia, The Crooks, The Chromosomes, but there are so many...

N: for me Rappresaglia and Lazy Bones belong in the pantheon of the greatest bands of all time. Then my favorite punk-rock bands are: Derozer, Punkreas, Crummy Stuff, Leeches, Thee STP, Gerson, Latte+, Chromosomes, Tough, The Crooks, Shandon, Klaxon, Donald Thompson, The Manges, Mondo Topless.... and I'm surely forgetting some, which I'll regret later...

What were you listening to regularly in the '90s, and what do you listen to now? Has the evolution of your listening habits affected your songwriting style?

S: In my case, my listening habits have stayed more or less the same. Compared to the early '90s though, as I've gotten older I've lost interest in bands that insist on offering something "new/original/never heard before"; something I found interesting in my youth, but which now actually annoys me. The result is that I still love roughly the same music, if anything I've massively expanded my exploration of bands and artists I didn't know, who were active in the periods my listening attention is focused on, so basically I'd say 1966 to 1969 and 1976 to 1981.

N: In the '90s I mostly listened to whatever Sebi pointed me towards. One name above all? They Might Be Giants: brilliant! Then I was totally hooked on the American "three chords and go" scene, especially Screeching Weasel and early Green Day. The Ramones deserve a separate mention, since I've always listened to them and always will.

Speaking of audiences. You've played a lot in Italy, but also quite a bit both in the rest of Europe and in the United States - what differences have you found in the audiences, the venues and the organization between Italy and the main foreign countries?

S: It might sound like a cliché, but the same place where we excel in warmth and hospitality is where we fall miserably short in organization. It's incredible to think that a band that's traveled 700-plus kilometers in a van shouldn't be welcomed, treated and hosted properly. But that - let's be honest - happens in places where people improvise as live music promoters without really knowing what they're doing. In places where there's been an established organization for years, you can find perfect situations: venues that run smoothly, kind and helpful people. There are plenty of places like that.

N: You know though, it's maybe a bit of an exaggeration to say we've played a lot in the rest of Europe and in the United States. All things considered we haven't played abroad all that much, especially considering there are bands in Italy today doing 15-20 dates abroad every year.

So what's cooking now? A tour to support the new album? How will the setlist be structured? I imagine it'll be a mix of new songs, classic tracks and a few covers.

S: Yes, the setlist will be that kind of mix. For now we're planning about ten shows, carefully chosen, scheduled between the end of April and all of August. Then the plan is to start work on another album. In another 14 years, obviously!

N: After the tour we're going to focus on re-recording "Vol. IV" with English lyrics and seriously heavy sound.

(Photo by Enrico Berardi)

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