Giorgio Poi

It also happens that Giorgio Poi forgets an entire verse while singing a song from “Fa Niente”. “It's the first time this has happened to me,” he says at the end of the song, almost begging for some kind of absolution.

When he takes the stage at the Supersonic, with his Northern European looks, Giorgio is alone, guitar slung over a loose sweater. The venue is a little gem in the middle of the Peninsula, where, fortunately, good music is still played. Bomba Dischi's latest discovery opens the show with "Paracadute," and the guitar must be the same one he used to study jazz at the Guildhall School in London. Indeed, Giorgio Poi has actually studied music. He's another expat kid, a symbol of a cosmopolitan generation too often forced to leave in order to pursue their ambitions. He himself says that, from his point of view, Italy is a kind of oasis, an exotic place to draw from with a detached approach, perhaps even clearer and more considered. He does this by writing his own songs, but also by playing other people's.

Enrico Ruggeri (“Il mare d'inverno”) and Cristiano Malgioglio (“Ancora, ancora, ancora”) are reinterpreted with personality and slotted into a fairly short setlist, typical of someone whose back catalogue consists of just one nine-track, half-hour-long album.

“L'abbronzatura,” laid-back and understated, is a black-and-white snapshot of an Italian summer from the Seventies, as well as the red carpet for a jam session between the singer-songwriter, Francesco Aprili and Matteo Domenichelli (vocals, drums and bass, respectively). Closing your eyes a little means flying off to a beach on the Adriatic coast, your mind drifting to some hazy scene with Vittorio Gassman and Catherine Spaak, even though it's raining outside and Christmas is only two weeks away. When needed, Giorgio Poi, a multi-instrumentalist, can even pick up a flute and blow into it, improvising without raising so much as an eyebrow among those who've come to know him. The most lysergic musings suggest the band has been gorging on Tame Impala and a certain strand of Madchester psychedelic disco. At times it almost seems as if Mac DeMarco had materialized in the green hills of Umbria for no plausible, explainable reason.

The trio know what they're doing, they hold the stage with ease and plant a nagging thought in the minds of those who claim that... “there's not an ounce of talent left on the Italian indie scene, not even if you paid for it in gold.”

Somewhere in the middle of the setlist there's also room for the new single, titled “Il tuo vestito bianco,” which, in truth, isn't that new at all, having been written right after the album was mixed. “Il tuo vestito bianco” is Battisti for the smartphone era, or simply Giorgio Poi grappling with a girl who comes and goes like a pendulum swinging on the thin, docile thread of human relationships. She's beautiful, but she reels off a list of excuses as long as a grocery list: when you're busy, your phone's broken, you're feeling sick, you're in the middle of exams — getting her to answer is harder than touching the bottom of the sea without an oxygen tank.

The best songs, naturally, are saved for the end. “Acqua minerale” highlights Aprili's rhythmic skills, while Poi sings about the thin line between doing good and doing harm, between fighting and making love. “Tubature,” part surrealist, part didactic, is a sketch that blends Dalí with some realist painter; “un tuffo dal cuore alla pancia/ mi guardi e ti sbucci un'arancia”: even when he's saying nothing, Giorgio Poi says enough, and above all he does it with total sincerity and simplicity — the kind that comes from someone truly skilled enough to make it look easy. “Hai visto com'è strana la città?,” “Tubature” has a coda that would melt the Arctic, and indeed it even gets the venue's coat-check attendant singing along.

A lengthy “Niente di strano” brings down the curtain amid applause. It couldn't have gone any other way; at the Supersonic, Giorgio Poi breathed in freshness and sprayed around some color. What happened outside hardly matters; in there, instead, everything seems to stay just the same.

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