Lucio Battisti

After Us It Won't Rain

After Us, the Flood

The row that broke out between Mogol and Grazia Letizia Veronese, the widow of Lucio Battisti, following the recent airing of the RAI special dedicated to the late genius of Poggio Bustone, has stirred up a media storm that has gone on well beyond the usual back-and-forth.

Setting aside the disputes over the use of Battisti's catalog and the division of rights to those works (which are essentially the crux of this bitter feud), one of the sparks that lit the fuse of the aforementioned documentary "Lucio per amico. Ricordando Battisti" was the glaring absence – save for a few fleeting mentions of Mussida and Maionchi – of any reference to the artistic period known as "the white albums", in which Lucio Battisti worked with the Roman poet Pasquale Panella.

Panella had already made his mark on the Italian music scene thanks to his joint venture with another artist, Enzo Carella, certainly less famous than the composer from Rieti, but equally worthy of praise and of rediscovery, for anyone who hasn't yet had the chance. It was precisely listening to Carella's work that spurred Battisti to seek a change in stylistic direction, aiming for a more daring product from a melodic standpoint and, consequently, one that called for further progress in the lyrics as well.

In those years, new wave was taking over, along with the heavy use of keyboards and decidedly complex electronics: a wave that swept up Lucio too, by then determined to definitively turn the page on the glories of the past.

The 1982 album "E già" was the first work to take shape without Mogol. An uneasy record, more important than beautiful, where electronics plunge headlong into Battisti's sound, as had also happened with the two strongly experimental projects he'd made alongside his friend Adriano Pappalardo ("Immersioni" in 1982 and "Oh! Era ora" in 1983). In particular, it was while working on the second album with Pappalardo that Battisti first had the chance to work with Pasquale Panella: an early collaboration that immediately yielded good results and pushed both of them to try to go further than that small experiment.

Four years after "E già", amid silences, waiting (never before had Battisti let so much time pass between two albums), and mysteries surrounding his life, both public and private, "Don Giovanni" finally emerged: Battisti's first album built on lyrics penned by the enigmatic hand of Pasquale Panella.

It was a bolt from the blue.

The event takes me back to my adolescence, when a twelve-year-old, already particularly passionate about music, happened to hear on the radio the track "Misunderstood Friends," the lead single released to promote the aforementioned full length, and consequently convinced his beloved father to buy it, under the astonished gaze of the shopkeeper in a small provincial town, who saw a kid interested in a work with decidedly unapproachable features, instead of joining the mass of teenagers who in those years were drooling over people like Madonna, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet.

Naturally, I already knew Battisti's most famous songs, mostly because they were played on radio and TV, and from a few cassette tapes that were floating around the house thanks to my parents, but that strange sequence of eccentric names and surnames handed out at the start of the new track had, so to speak, magnetically captivated me:

Cassiodoro Vicinetti/ Olindo Brodi, Ugo Strappi/ Sofio Bulino, Armando Pende/ Andriei Francisco Poimò

and it still does, decades later, given that if at the time it might have seemed to me like a quirky, dazed list of unlikely characters, over time, digging deep into the story, the genesis of the work, and developing, like everyone, one's own personal musical background, it has turned into something far more complex and structured:

One went and soldered on/ One lives abroad on a whim/ One's lost their bearings/ One's taken to the bridge/ And plays the trans-Atlantic drifter/ One's growing blackberries/ One's getting older/ Because it is/ A noble scotch

are just some of the singular double meanings and literary wordplay that Battisti, obviously the invention of the razor-sharp Panella, recites as a commentary on some of the ambiguous friends listed. A gripping, catchy track that has no ambition to delve deep into feeling, yet lodges itself in the mind thanks to an intricate melody laid down with great ease: thus began the Battisti-Panella era, a completely new world, diametrically opposed to the Mogol years, one that would see Battisti's hunger to explore new territory and bet on himself flourish, at the very high risk of throwing away all that success, that wealth of evergreens that had secured him everlasting fame. That, however, did not happen.

For "Don Giovanni," Panella adapted his lyrics to music Battisti had already prepared, a dynamic that would never be repeated again over the course of their future collaboration.

One of the strengths of "Don Giovanni" lies in Battisti's ability to forge new harmonic structures without completely abandoning his own style. The use of strings, horns, concrete percussion, and piano, mixed with the innovative electronic sounds that were so intriguing him at the time, achieves an almost perfect synthesis on this record, one that departs from the jagged, overly fragmentary choices of the previous, much-debated "E già."

The rarefied, elegant lines offered by "Things That Think" smooth out a poetry conjugated almost entirely in the past tense, gaining sense, balance and definition in every line, between one Panella-esque neologism and the next:

Nowhere did I go/ Not one bit did I think of you/ And nothing did I send you/ As my keepsake/ On the edge I leaned out/ Over such lovely abysses/ On a sweet tedium reclined/ My love, I ignored you

almost a counterpoint to the concept of love that, with Mogol, had always taken on more straightforward contours. Here, the foremost human feeling is viewed with detachment, as if it were not a cornerstone of existence. The other side of the coin, however, offers lyrics wrapped around music much more traceable to Battisti's background. The overall feeling settles somewhere between disorientation and certainty, but it's an invigorating confusion, a breath of fresh air.

Confirmation of all this comes in the rhymes of "Have a Good Cry," an irreverent take on the pains of love, somewhere between synth-pop and jazz sketches:

From the windy mountain of my feelings/ I leaf through a recipe-rose in the air/ The beginning is already incriminating/ She undid her chignon, then took it off/ And bald with love, a billiard-shine gaze/ Her cue ball rolls onto the felt/ And the cue stick of sin/ There's so much naked truth

The jagged Panella turns a list of food products into metaphors for the flutters of anticipation sparked by love songs, an absurd recipe book that puts on the same level someone moved to tears by a song and someone who feels joy opening a jar of jam, reactions deemed exaggerated, almost embarrassing.

Battisti dons the cloak of the consummate sonic explorer and puts it fully on display amid the mysteries hovering over "The Double of the Game," an intricate track driven by substantial bass lines that reinforce a lively arrangement, gliding along with grace, among the most intriguing and successful cuts of the entire tracklist:

⟦Q1⟧

It's always love that is the fil rouge tying everything together, here centred on betrayal.

As is obvious, such a concept could never have been handled by the duo according to the classic conventions. Lucio's winding melodic structure moves in lockstep with Panella's lyrics, which surprisingly depict a man who discovers, unbeknownst to him, that he's the secret lover of his own woman — the very woman he believed to be his official partner. She, overwhelmed by utter despair, confides in him that she used him solely to deceive him, all without the knowledge of her actual lover, who at this point turns out to be the inconvenient third party, unaware of the presence of the one who preceded him, who instead, surprisingly, knows everything. In short, a love story turned upside down, convoluted, and for that very reason all the more intriguing, one that flows perfectly and marks an irreversible distance between the old Battisti's profile and the current one.

If anything, the situation grows even more tangled in "Feathered Mother," probably the most enigmatic track on the record. A man suffers a serious car accident, from which he emerges thankfully unscathed, but is left with intense moments, lasting just a few seconds, in which every single fragment of memory brings him back to living through that dreadful episode, every detail, every small vision of what happened. An event that will mark him deeply on an emotional level, for his whole life, over time:

⟦Q2⟧

As already pointed out, on this record the template of the so-called love song takes on unexpected shades, often turned completely upside down, at times rendered with merciless sarcasm. In "What a Life He Led" too, the protagonist finds himself caught up in acknowledging the despair of a woman for whom he feels nothing. Amid elegant synth-jazz flourishes — somewhat as already heard in "Have a Good Cry" — the deceitful man leads the woman before him on, repeatedly exclaiming the words "Ti amo"; an insincere feeling that plunges the woman into utter passivity, that of someone waiting for events to unfold while fully aware that what she hopes for will never happen:

⟦Q3⟧

The album's B-side, made up of eight tracks in all, delivers two of the most precious gems in the entire Battisti-Panella catalogue.

"Il diluvio" blends a dreamlike, at times jarring lyric with sublime harmonies built on razor-sharp samples, a combination that even today is hard to fully unpack, let alone back in 1986:

⟦Q4⟧

The track can stand as a symbol of everything contained within the album and of the new artistic direction taken. Battisti is well aware of having set out on an arduous, uneven path, one many would find questionable, that will certainly spark debate, but it is precisely the essence that had for some time been emerging from his unconscious: the desire to express and let people hear a different side of the artist who had for many years delivered joys tinged with all manner of shades, now no longer felt to be close to his current nature. "Il diluvio" definitively buries the Mogol era: a song about songs, a tombstone laid over the often fleeting notions of classic sentimentality, the cornerstone of thousands upon thousands of past compositions. "...After Us, the Flood..." runs a line from the song, translating a maxim by Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, who urged her lover, the then-king of France Louis XV, not to dwell on the dramatic consequences that would follow the defeat at Rossbach against the Prussians: "Après Nous, le Déluge!". Panella seems to convince Battisti that the old story is over and that farewell is the right move to make at this point. What will happen afterward? Who knows — perhaps disaster, but perhaps not.

In the title track, if anything, the finger pointed at the artistic relationship with his old friend-and-collaborator (though never, it must be said, at the personal one, which would always remain unbreakable) becomes even more evident. It's said that the track "Don Giovanni" was Battisti's direct response to Mogol, who had aimed barbed words at him, after the end of their professional relationship, in the lyrics of the track "La massa indistinguibile," performed by Mango and included on the album "Australia," released the previous year. Reality doesn't seem to contradict this theory. It was widely known how irritated Battisti had grown at being seen — admittedly in a somewhat exaggerated light — as a mere singer of catchy little tunes. Hence his strong desire to shed that image. The scarf hung on a hook, drawn by the artist himself in watercolour for the album cover, is, in this respect, highly significant.

In the lines:

⟦Q5⟧

I'll wear whatever you like: I'm just the coat hanger

Panella brilliantly and concisely encodes the discontent Battisti had always felt at being merely the face and voice of someone else's thoughts. The song replays the by-now familiar device of a narrator addressing others. Here the protagonist, as mentioned, is the singer himself, in an open confrontation with the lyricist, almost as if he were writing him a letter:

What boredom on this tour/ Of never going back/ To the numbing routine/ Of singing lightly/ About love in earnest

In these lines Lucio's unease at endlessly having to churn out emphatic, conventional declarations of love is plain to see. The singer now seems to be claiming his own space, his own identity as a thinking person, now guiding the lyricist to set down whatever crosses his mind:

And write/ That I don't exist down here/ That I am/ The deception

Panella, in this song especially, seems to seize the moment for his own benefit too. By serving as the lexical instrument Battisti used to give voice to his own ideas, the writer was doing nothing less than unleashing in Lucio all that force of thought he had never been able to share with others - perhaps, it's fair to say, because he wasn't quite able to master it with the poet's own refined dialectical skill.

Despite the radical break with the past, "Don Giovanni" would become the third best-selling album in Italy in 1986, even reaching number one on the charts, a position it held for ten consecutive weeks, and twenty-five weeks in the top ten.

The experiment could be called a success, setting in motion that tortuous, obscure, avant-garde path, brimming with invention and new patterns, which would go on to gradually gift fans four more gems of cerebral beauty - and which could certainly become the focus of further in-depth media coverage of Battisti's career, an artistic period too often, and wrongly in this writer's view, dismissed as lesser compared to the Mogol era. The judgment is obviously a personal one, but the objective certainty is that this album marked the start of the second half of the artistic match played by Lucio Battisti, an intricate, sprawling, uncomfortable stretch of play, and perhaps precisely for that reason all the more compelling, forever offering fresh clues to be carefully examined.

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19/02/2026