A memorable set

A live performance that, watching it again today, is still jaw-dropping. In 1988, CCCP landed on Rai 2, on "D.O.C.", the music show devised by Renzo Arbore and hosted by Gegè Telesforo and Monica Nannini. Almost twenty minutes of live TV, in the heart of the notoriously starchy Italian public broadcaster, for one of the most astonishing appearances ever granted to an Italian band so far removed from any notion of conventional TV entertainment.

"D.O.C.", after all, was a rare thing in late-1980s Italian television: a daily slot devoted to live music, able to draw in artists like Chet Baker, James Brown, Joe Cocker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Solomon Burke, Ivano Fossati, Fiorella Mannoia, Francesco De Gregori, Lucio Dalla and many others. It aired from Rai's Studio Uno on Via Teulada in Rome, and for one short but intense season it brought to the afternoon schedule a vision of music television that was cultured, curious and open-minded — light years away from what we have today.

On 21 March 1988, it was the turn of CCCP Fedeli alla Linea. The band led by Giovanni Lindo Ferretti and Massimo Zamboni had just moved to Virgin and released "Socialismo e barbarie". They had carved out a sizeable niche of devoted fans, but remained a foreign body by the standards of TV pop. Rather than splitting their songs between the opening and closing of the show, the Emilian band asked for a single unbroken block, almost a self-contained mini-performance. Ferretti explained it live in the studio: "We have a male dancer and a female dancer [Fatur and Annarella], so in that sense we're a composite line-up. We asked to have a block of songs so as to show the variety — what we believe to be the variety — of CCCP."

The performance that aired is still jarring to watch today. Into the Rai 2 afternoon schedule burst pro-Soviet aesthetics, Emilian punk, physical theatre, inverted ideological liturgy, the disorienting presence of Annarella, "distinguished soubrette", and the unruly energy of Fatur. The sequence included "Live In Punkow", "CCCP", "Per me lo so", "Rozzemilia", "Oh battagliero" and "Tu menti": a short, tight set, about as far as you can get from a reassuring promotional guest spot.

Here below is the CCCP's full performance on D.O.C.

Watching that performance again today, what stands out most is the context. This wasn't some late-night niche slot, nor a specialist channel, nor an alternative fringe show: it was Rai 2, in a primetime-accessible slot, on a mainstream public broadcaster. An experiment that speaks volumes about the freedom granted at the time to Arbore and his production team - but also about how unthinkable it would be today to imagine anything like it on a mainstream network schedule.

A few months earlier, CCCP had also appeared on "Giallo", the show devised and hosted by Enzo Tortora, where they were interviewed by Dario Argento. Another strange, one-of-a-kind piece of television history, further proof that the band's presence on Rai stands as one of the most fascinating heresies committed by Italian rock on television in the 1980s. And who knows if even the notorious housewife from Voghera approved.

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27/04/2026