Ardecore

Rebibbia is not San Quentin and Ardecore are not Johnny Cash. Let's get that straight right away, for those among you who might already be drawing improbable comparisons. We say this because it's easy to imagine a concert inside a prison, but actually attending one is a completely different matter. The first thing you notice, once you get past the obvious architectural barriers of grates, bars and impassable gates, is the total absence of rules inside Rome's Casa Circondariale. Don't get us wrong, discipline here is military-grade, but we're talking about all those unwritten rules that define a live show as it's commonly understood.

As always, it's easier to explain with examples: how many concerts have you seen with a lethargic crowd, utterly incapable of clapping along despite repeated requests from the band on stage? How much smug, snobbish nonchalance have you seen motivating the audience into lukewarm applause for whatever support act happened to be playing? Well, forget all that, all ye who enter here. It takes just the first acoustic notes from openers The Clokers, a little-known blues outfit playing in a stripped-down lineup for the occasion, to fire up the crowd. Actually, let's be precise about it: it's above all the inmates who teach a great lesson to the fifty outsiders who came in mostly to witness "the event". While the latter remain, for the most part, fossilized in their hipster poses like die-hard Amaro Strega drinkers, it's the prisoners who make the difference: seated at the back of the theatre, they seem free of all those shabby overlays that life as free men relentlessly imposes on us. Aplomb, savoir-faire, appearances, and half a dozen other bits of nonsense you won't have trouble adding to the list. It is instead a beautiful thing to hear them clap at the first cue, shout, and even joke around with both bands, stripping the musicians of that air of reverence with which they're usually accustomed (and allowed) to play.

It's still quite early — just gone five in the afternoon — when Ardecore take possession of the ramshackle stage set up for them, surrounded by a hundred or so curious and well-disposed people, including an inmate to my left who asks me to point out which of them plays drums. The lineup is a stripped-down foursome, Sarah Dietrich's flourishes are (not) missing, and Giampaolo Felici goes back to picking up an acoustic six-string after their latest, rather rowdy, electric outings. The house lights slowly dim until only the stage lights remain on. "They've put us in the dark, we can't see you anymore. I ask because, on other occasions, that's a good excuse to sneak off..." From the back of the room someone answers: "Wish I could get outta here!" and then adds: "Not because of you, though!" This is the only light-hearted moment of the entire show. A rather strange thing indeed, and anyone who has seen the Roman band in action at least once can confirm just how much irony usually runs through the banter between songs from mastermind Giampaolo Felici. We suspect the reason lies in a precarious balance between the looming shortage of time available and the situation itself. But of course, there's no way to confirm that. If anything, we would have put the "insiders" up front and the outsiders at the back. Then again, those decisions aren't ours to make.

What's certain is that this isn't the first time Ardecore have set foot inside a prison. As musicians, that is. Besides having played a stone's throw from Regina Coeli years ago, Felici had already been inside those very same walls of Rebibbia back in 2005 — during an evening that at the time also included some cabaret. Among the audience made up solely of inmates, as those who were there now recall, there were more than a few problems getting rowdy comedians and bitter serenades to go down together in one sitting. This time, though, it's different — this time it's serious business. Technical issues aside, there's a kind of kinship between Ardecore's music and the world of prisons. No need to dress in black, no need to trot out well-worn commonplaces about Italy's notorious prison situation, no need to pop amphetamines like a perfectly misunderstood artist, no uncomfortable stools to perch on, no Dandini and no Mannarino — the concert, from the opening note of "Son stato carcerato" to the closing "Lupo de fiume", passing through an explosive "Per quella lei ci muore", takes on the shape of a truly out-of-the-ordinary experience.

The result could be called epoch-making, if we set aside all the clichés of a standard performative show: there are no encores, nobody sings along to the songs, chances are many in the crowd don't even know them all, yet the attention paid to Ardecore's every word is almost obsessive. Parsed out like a rosary, word by word, to draw out a meaning quite different from the usual Trastevere-style singalong. Not necessarily more high-flown, but certainly less folkloric. This, perhaps, is the one thing that can be likened to Johnny Cash's experience in San Quentin prison back in '69. June Carter herself said: "I don't know if explosion is the right word, but in those men — the inmates, the guards, even the warden — some kind of inner energy turned into anger, love, laughter..." So, not just any concert. And not just music. If it were only that, we could mostly complain about the sound system's very low fidelity. It is instead something more. A piece of reportage bordering on subversive attitude. Organized by Traffic Live together with Live Aid, with support from the City of Rome, this is an event surely worth repeating again and again, ideally trying to further narrow that inevitable barrier between outsiders and inmates which characterizes this kind of project.

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