Helena Velena

Helena Velena needs no introduction. A figure as seminal as few others in the unfolding of the entire Italian counterculture, she has played a leading role in most of the movements that have sprung up over the last thirty years. The heady early days in the Bologna of Radio Alice in '77, her anarchist awakening, her beginnings with RAF Punk, the protest at the Clash concert in Piazza Maggiore, the saga of Attack Punk Records, the wholesale explosion of hardcore, the season of Isola Nel Kantiere, her cyberpunk theorizing, multimedia experiments, right up to her recent years as a fighting transgender activist: leafing through the key moments of our recent underground history, you can be sure her name will turn up sooner or later. But Helena thinks of herself first and foremost as a musician, so for once we're offering her a chat in which we talk “only” about music…

Your official self-definition is "semiotic-psychedelic guerrilla", but you once confided to me that you feel first and foremost like a musician…

One evening, a sort of fortune teller asked me what the most important thing in the world was, and I answered "Music!", to which she replied, "No, the most important thing in the world is love!" and I shot back, quoting one of my favourite records, David Crosby's "If I Could Only Remember My Name": "Music Is Love!". I've always thought music is the deepest and most complete form of expression, because it manages to cover the whole spectrum of feeling, and by carrying words along with it, it can touch on any subject at all. As a kid (or rather, as a boy) my biggest dream was to make music, but I made one huge mistake that had inevitable consequences: right when I reached the age at which you usually start playing, punk was arriving, and I fell in love with it. Being a professional musician while playing punk is unrealistic, so I trapped myself…

Later on I made a second mistake: I started devoting myself to record production, and out of a sort of anarchist guilt complex I found it too easy and selfish to press my own records, so I preferred to focus on other people's projects, neglecting my own. What's more: at the time I was rehearsing in a studio in Bologna called Harmony Sound, a technically top-notch place where I recorded various things (including a proto-rap album that Vasco Rossi's manager liked, and whom I later sued because he wanted to acquire the rights without paying me). I could never have afforded such a professional studio, but thanks to our shared political activism the owner gave me a huge discount and offered to produce a "serious" record for me with music by Lele Gaudi, who's now a reggae guru in London: well, I said no, a decision that in hindsight was insane… Ironically, now that I'd more than ever like to play and I'm active with several projects, I find myself in a historical period where making a living from music is totally impossible, unless you do vile things, at least in Italy. In short, by sticking to my principles I destroyed my own dreams…

Let's talk about your "roaring years". I'd start with the RAF Punk experiment…

Both had a very strange gestation, in terms of both the name and the line-up. The first one was born out of a graffiti tag I liked drawing around town. I've always been fascinated by the dynamics of armed struggle, and I was particularly drawn to the Rote Armee Fraktion, in which I saw a discourse different from that of the Italian Red Brigades (who were basically an armed party positioning itself as a revolutionary vanguard), one more tied to libertarian and countercultural drives. I was struck by the fact that it had been founded by a woman and had more women than men among its militants, and what intrigued me most was that early phase built on deranged flyers and actions claimed each time under a different acronym. When Baader and Ensslin were "suicided" in Stammheim prison, I went on strike from school all on my own, just to give you an idea of how involved I was! Some time later I went to London and discovered an anarcho-punk squatter collective that was also called RAF, though in that case it stood for "Rebel Anarchist Fraction", playing on the assonance with the Royal Air Force, the British military air force.

I in turn built a game that merged both acronyms, and when I later decided to form a band I realised that "RAF Punk" not only sounded good as a name, but carried multiple meanings, all fitting for the project I had in mind. The very first line-up consisted of me on vocals, my partner Laura on drums, Steno (later in Nabat) on bass and Mammo on guitar. Because the other two had other commitments, Laura and I started rehearsing on our own in a basement in Borgo Panigale that was also used by Carlo (who was also often unable to play with his band of the time), and with him a parallel group called Achtung Minen was born. We could say he never officially joined RAF Punk, he just found himself inside it! We started jamming and looking for other members to stabilise the line-up, which nonetheless always remained very precarious. For instance, Steno was in Milan at the time and could only play with us almost exclusively for gigs, and since he often didn't know the bass parts we decided to swap roles: on some tracks he'd sing and I'd play bass. The core has always stayed me, Laura and Carlo, with a lot of different people rotating around us.

A band that, despite the name, was not very punk, closer to the Crassian idea of a chaotic, fragmented "total music"…

The music was driven by the same spirit as the name: "punkifying" things coming from other fields. The gigs were multimedia, multi-material performances where you'd find all sorts of things: reinterpretations of Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers" or the Fugs' "Kill For Peace" with footage of 1960s clashes with the police projected in the background, or a "Children Of The Grave" by Black Sabbath played with double drums and paired with an orgiastic dance inspired by the Tafurs, bands of ragged followers who tagged along with the crusaders committing looting, rape and even acts of cannibalism. Different pieces of music and references were tackled with a punk edge and turned into a bacchanal of chaos and noise. There was this attempt to push beyond the limits of the punk of the time: it's no coincidence that whenever I happen to hear one of our tracks during a themed DJ set, I realise it's completely different from the rest of the setlist. There was never a straight 4/4 kick drum, slowdowns and speed-ups abounded. Tim Yohannan, reviewing our first 7" on Maximumrocknroll, called us "a cross between Discharge and Crass", and I find that a wonderful compliment because those were our most immediate references! Later on, our main influence became Black Flag, with their constant stylistic transformations. We also started listening to a lot of metal, especially bands like Venom or Voivod, who made up for their lack of instrumental skill with great imagination.

The idea was that tracks driven by such a strong sense of freedom in their content had to rely on equally free structures, they couldn't turn into dance or pogo songs. Then of course, another important factor was that we simply couldn't play at all… We felt a bit like Woody Guthrie: not being a great musician, he'd take other people's compositions and tweak them until he'd made them entirely his own, and it's curious that he later became the reference point for every folksinger! Laura couldn't play regular rhythms, and those weird odd time signatures let us experiment a lot more, even though technically it could be seen as a limitation. What I regret is that this mechanism evolved more outside punk than within it. Doing something different because you can't quite manage the conventional way was, for instance, a trait of bands like Suicide, Pop Group, PIL or Einsturzende Neubauten, while the hardcore purist punks preferred to keep listening to the Dead Boys… Another band I loved that everyone else despised were Sigue Sigue Sputnik, who followed the same logic: guitarist Tony James wanted to create a band built entirely around image and recruited members purely based on their look, and their music was so distinctive precisely because nobody could play! Much more so than the Sex Pistols, who, aside from Sid Vicious, were all things considered decent musicians… Saying "I've decided I want to play" is still fundamental to me, I think every punk band was born that way. There was never any idea of becoming professional musicians, partly because when the scene started we felt duty-bound to keep music secondary to political activism, and partly because once Attack turned from a punk fanzine into a proper label, it became a full-time commitment.

Since you mentioned it, let's tackle the Odissea-Attack Punk story…

That was born by chance too. During our first rehearsals with Carlo we came up with another project called Aldomoro, graphically rendered with a cross between the final R and O forming a sort of T, so it could also be read as "Aldomorto" ["Aldo dead"]… Under that name we made much more improvised, experimental stuff and we also played live, including a gig in Piazza Santa Croce in Florence where we performed in workers' overalls. One time Carlo came out with the guitar riff from Stiff Little Fingers' "Alternative Ulster", which we turned into "Al Tempo di Valzer" ["In Waltz Time"]: it came out as such a cool punk waltz that we said to ourselves "this deserves to end up on a record!", and we started figuring out how we could get it out as a 7". When we realised that making a record was complicated but ultimately doable, we thought "if we're going to put in the effort, we might as well put it into something serious", so we dropped Aldomoro and focused on a compilation featuring four bands from our scene (Anna Falkss, Bacteria, Stalag 17 and of course RAF Punk): that's how "Schiavi nella città più libera del mondo" ["Slaves In The Freest City In The World"] came about.

Which you gave as a gift to Scritti Politti…

It happened in a fairly curious way: they'd made this record called "Skank Bloc Bologna", in which they described our city as the homeland of youth culture. We went to visit them at the squat where they lived (now those were people who practised what they preached!) and brought them two things: our record and a book published by Bertani titled "Bologna marzo 77… fatti nostri" ["Bologna, March '77… Our Business"], which documented that year's clashes, Lorusso, the tanks… The point being: in Bologna we earned certain things the hard way, facing harsh repression, because it wasn't at all "the best-governed city in the world", as Zangheri's pompous rhetoric and the Communist Party's propaganda claimed… As you know, shortly afterwards one of the three members took over and turned Scritti Politti into a commercial dance-pop band, so there was no further political elaboration, perhaps built on the material we'd brought them, which who knows what became of… Musically, at the start they were very interesting, another demonstration of how not knowing how to play can become a strength. Sadly, the guy who kept the band's name went on to do some repellent things from then on… One thing I've never understood about Scritti Politti is why they had to mangle Gramsci's "Scritti Politici" ["Political Writings"] into that odd spelling… A bit like Durutti Column: I mean, what would it have cost them to spell it right, given that everyone knows the guerrilla fighter was named Durruti?! These misspellings crack me up. I can understand it when the Japanese do it, since they have to switch between two types of characters, but when the English do it, it just shows their complete lack of respect for anything at all… They told me they wrote it that way because "it sounded better", sure, let's go with that…

I've actually always wondered about that. I have a nice little anecdote tied to "Schiavi nella città più libera del mondo" myself, as it happens: at a vinyl fair in Milan I found it on a rarities shelf with a nice "30 euros" sticker slapped right over the printed words "Do not pay more than 2000 lire"! It struck me as an unwittingly punk gesture, I would have wanted to buy it just for that… But above all, did you ever expect a record like that to become a collector's item?

Ha, of course not!

Speaking of improbable encounters with disreputable Englishmen, is it true that Crass released the first CCCP record in England?

Yes, that's true. We went to visit them at the famous Dial House - getting there was quite an undertaking, but it kicked off a very deep relationship. We also met John Loder, who was sort of the hidden member of Crass: he wasn't an anarchist punk but an ordinary person, who lived in a little house with a garage converted into a recording studio, in a bourgeois neighbourhood like Swiss Cottage. He was, however, a very sharp guy, with a real drive to make music, and when Crass met him they realised he was the rational, organised type they needed. Together with him they founded Crass Records and started recording in his studio, managing to produce records that were extremely well crafted, even though they too had absolutely no idea how to play: drummer Penny Rimbaud was maybe the only one who could vaguely keep time, the others were an absolute zero... At the time they were perhaps underappreciated because of the contrast between the classic tight hardcore sound and theirs, which was almost like rap, but listening to them now I think they remain wonderful records, and that's also thanks to John Loder, who was truly great at his job. We became friends and started distributing his stuff in Italy. When CCCP ended up in our hands we thought it would be nice to try to release them somewhere else too, so we played it for John and he said, "Fine, we can do that."

The record came out in England on Attack Punk Records, but the actual copies were pressed and distributed through the Southern Studios network, Loder's company under the Crass Records umbrella. So yes, you could say Crass released CCCP, even though only our label was credited on the record. By that point Southern had already become the outfit producing all the side imprints connected to Crass, like the sub-labels for bands such as Conflict or Subhumans. Around that same time, incidentally, they set up a partnership with Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound, and we ended up distributing that stuff in Italy too - some seriously wild experimental dub records, like the work of Mark Stewart And The Maffia. Reggae, sadly, soon revealed itself to be a rather macho, sexist and homophobic genre, but from '76 to '82 the two subcultures were almost interchangeable: one was white rebellion, the other Black, and they were like sisters to each other. Bob Marley himself, after all, wrote a song like "Punky Reggae Party", which name-checks all the punk bands that played reggae. And it's true not just for the Clash but also for PIL, who after Jah Wobble joined effectively became a punk-dub band, and to us that seemed perfectly normal, just as it seemed logical that bands like Discharge fused punk and metal to try out other paths. Nowadays, on the other hand, every genre is codified, and bands just stay within those boundaries, without experimenting with crossovers...

Speaking of punk bands converted to the metal demon, I've never quite understood this story about you appearing in a Black Flag video...

It's a really funny story. What happened was that Joe Rees, founder of San Francisco's Target Video, came to Bologna - he'd filmed loads of Californian bands and was touring Europe showing these videos. He wanted to shoot something in the city, so we gathered in Piazza Maggiore and started filming. He caught me on camera making a rude gesture towards the town hall while shouting, "Black Flag against the council of the freest city in the world!", and at a certain point two guys showed up saying we had to hand over the tape, because two plainclothes policemen had been filmed - namely, them... It sounds insane now, but back then even worse things happened. Luckily Joe had just changed the cassette, so the tape he handed over was blank, and we managed to get away with the rest of the footage! The episode amused him so much that he decided to use that footage: for some strange reason we'd written "Black Flag" on someone's back (misspelled, too, missing the C...), and he cut that bit together with my footage at the start of the "My War" videotape, which collected live Black Flag footage. Sadly it was never digitised, maybe because of some licensing issue. For the record, there's no trace whatsoever of those two plainclothes cops in the footage...

When they came to play in Italy, though, you boycotted Black Flag, for reasons similar to those behind the legendary protest at the Clash's Piazza Maggiore concert, a watershed event for the movements of the time...

We had long been waging a battle with the city council to get spaces where we could play our music - the kind of places that would later become the occupied social centres, which at the time basically didn't exist. When we found out they'd organised that concert, it struck us as unacceptable. The fact that it happened to be the Clash was incidental: the council wanted to put on a big free show, the promoters had the Clash on offer, and they said yes. The point is that for us it meant something completely different: how is it that we can't get a space for our Bologna punk scene, and you hand us a punk concert from on high as a gift? No way! On top of that, there had already been the political attack from Crass, who in a famous song of theirs had accused the Clash of selling out by signing to a major label, and for us that was one more reason to protest the whole thing. We made a flyer and handed it out at the concert, and the result was a clash with punks who'd come from various Italian cities, interested only in the music, people who hadn't developed any political awareness around building a collective and securing a shared space: basically, everyone was just doing their own thing... So the conflict was both with the public authorities and with the other punks. The funny thing was that "Ciao 2001", the biggest-selling music magazine of the time, published the flyer in full, which we didn't expect from a magazine that still had Eric Clapton on its cover - that gives you an idea of how strong that ferment was. Another interesting thing is that in the following years everyone we'd argued with admitted we'd been right, that it was important to take matters into our own hands and organise ourselves.

But the episode everyone always asks me to tell is the one from the next day: I was walking down via Indipendenza and under the portico I ran into Joe Strummer, completely out of his mind... I told him what we'd done and explained my reasons: we were protesting against the council but also against their music, which in our view had become commercial. He replied, "But have you really listened to our new album?", meaning "London Calling"? I admitted I hadn't, and he told me, "You should have, listen to it: you'll find out our music beats with the rhythm of the heart." With that line he both proved me right and made me realise we'd misread them: they weren't a punk band anymore, their music had become something else, music of the heart, that is, reggae. In the following days I went back and listened to it again and found it wonderful: it simply wasn't punk music anymore, so our whole argument was beside the point. It would have been like accusing the Police of not being punk enough - what would that even mean? To give you another example, another band we loved dearly were Hüsker Dü, who went from being the fastest hardcore band on earth ("Land Speed Record" was a bomb!) to playing this depressed, melancholy music, which was nonetheless still beautiful. The fact that they'd signed to Warner Bros. didn't matter, because the records were fantastic and they'd somehow kept their promise, staying within the tracks of alternative culture. Sure, it felt strange when we went to see them live and found ourselves at a show that wasn't run by us, with a sea of "normal" people in the crowd, but it made sense: that's the power of the market, which takes people wherever it wants. Lots of bands that weren't necessarily playing punk still moved within our circuit, and we recognised them as one of our own: like when Mudhoney asked us to let them play at Isola Nel Kantiere because they'd lost a date, or the Soundgarden show I organised in Bologna. Later those bands blew up and became hugely famous, though never marketed from a boardroom the way Nirvana were - I've never managed to like them, even though the individual members might have had punk credentials... These might sound like ideological arguments, but I think sometimes they're legitimate.

Totally agree, I've never been able to stand them either. Out of all the many records you discovered and produced with Attack, is there one you love in a particular way?

The answer might shock you, because you'd probably expect CCCP or Disciplinatha, but actually the record I'm proudest of putting out is the one by Bandamagnætica, a band that in a sense never really existed... It's a very funny story: they worked with Susy Blasi and Patrizio Roversi on "La Tv delle Ragazze", doing bits where they shouted things over backing tracks. One had a microphone, another a trumpet, and the third an electronic drum kit and a synth, and they'd built themselves battery-powered amps that they wore on their bodies, so they could walk around while playing. Theirs was a performance, more than a musical show. I was invited to one of their theatre pieces, entirely built around transforming sounds tied to sports broadcasts: it was such a curious thing that I decided I absolutely had to produce a record of theirs. We recorded some genuinely strange stuff, and we even brought in Sandro Ciotti, who introduced the band with that distinctive voice of his, and I dreamed up an absurd promotional strategy: I spread the rumour that Bandamagnætica would be opening for Madonna's next tour, and that buying the record came with a free pass to get in (and it really was there, but it was just a piece of paper)... Everyone who's heard it has told me that in some way we anticipated things like acid jazz or trip hop. In short, for me it's the coolest thing I've ever done! One of the members, Frank Nemola, went on to make a name for himself as a session musician and producer, and now he even plays with Vasco Rossi.

Of course, that doesn't mean I'm not also proud of CCCP, who came about in a similar way, if it's true that at the start they too were more theatre performers than a rock band: I was the one who convinced them to write songs. They're two bands I basically "invented", you could say, except Bandamagnætica was a fun game, while with CCCP everything ended very badly, and in fact I don't much feel like talking about it... At the start, though, it was really lovely, even clashing creatively with the market: when I brought the first CCCP record to our distributor he gave me a dirty look, because there couldn't be a punk band singing in Italian (maybe he hadn't noticed that all our records were in Italian, even though it was hardcore stuff with barely intelligible lyrics)... I gave him ten free copies, and a few days later he came back to buy a few thousand. Thanks to CCCP we were able to make many other records, including the one by Disciplinatha, which I'm also absolutely proud of. The whole business with them was a bit more complicated: that whole negative narrative was carefully constructed, including the famous thank-you to Francesca Mambro, which a lot of people didn't take well... Then there are the two and a half Raw Power records, which were truly amazing, even though I lost a ton of money on them... We recorded the first one with John Loder! Their problem was that one of them lived in London, another in Poviglio, another in Pisa, and the last one in Reggio Emilia, so they wrote and rehearsed for the very first time in the studio! It's one thing for the Beatles, who could spend a month in the studio, and quite another for us... Result: the record didn't come out well, cost too much and didn't sell. Nowadays their guitarist even plays with Ligabue, did you know that? Another thing I'm proud of is the I Refuse It! album, which is an experimental hardcore masterpiece, even though they stayed completely unknown: if they'd been born in America they'd have been massively famous! The singer, Stefano Bettini, now makes reggae music as Il Generale. Another phenomenal record that had a terrifying gestation was the one by Contropotere, which Maximumrocknroll called "punk-jazz". Want me to go on?

Please do!

Alright, let me also mention Lucky Strike & co., who I met through roundabout ways: while moving in the anarchist scene I ran into Pino Bertelli, a famous Situationist photographer who was also interested in music, and he introduced me to this pop band with an extraordinary female voice. Musically they weren't bad, but it was the lyrics that struck me. Usually Bertelli himself wrote them, but the track that pushed me to produce them was drawn from a letter written from prison by Ulrike Meinhof, in which she said she couldn't bear having the lights on 24 hours a day with white walls, so at her first period she used the blood to add some colour to the walls: I found it such a sweet, poetic thing that I fell in love with it, even though as a song it was pure Italian pop, in the style of Matia Bazar. Obviously I didn't sell a single copy, because the commercial music market only works with mega-promoted things, and for the punk scene it was completely off target, but despite everything I'm glad I did it. But also the Devastatin' Posse, a rap combo from Turin: I ran into one of the members again in New York and found out he'd become part of the Rocksteady Crew, the group that invented breakdancing! And shall we talk about D.Ablo? A Berklee University professor called it the first rap record to tackle gay themes! A line from that record was picked up by 99 Posse in "Rigurgito Antifascista". Then there were Incinerator from Catania, who played this extreme metal partly sung in dialect and using Sicilian instruments, a very forward-thinking thing that anticipated certain crossovers typical of black metal, crowned by Claudio Sorge as the Italian record of the year. I once had a photo of me together with their bassist and Tom Araya of Slayer, sadly I lost it... That bassist later joined Extrema, who are fairly well-known today, and I produced a great thrash metal record of theirs. I was also supposed to work with Paul Chain of Death SS, but nothing ever came of it.

Ah, then there are Tampax... I remember giving a test pressing of one of their pseudo-rap records with pornographic English lyrics to the US servicemen at Aviano, who had a disco inside the base and danced to it, cracking up laughing... It was very Beastie Boys, who if you think about it also started out as a hardcore band, and you know who distributed their first record? John Loder and Crass Records, again! You see, it all comes full circle. We never actually released that album, nor another record of theirs with a hilarious song called "O' Dio", which they played in Pordenone at an evening organised by the local parish, where of course they had the power cut on them immediately! The only one we did release was a wonderful experimental record, a bit like Flipper, with a tracklist on the cover that didn't match the actual grooves and completely made-up lyrics... Among the foreign acts, I fondly remember Jonee Jonee, an Icelandic band whose single "Blàr Azzurro" we released on blue vinyl, with a blue label and blue sleeve, with no information whatsoever! A record with no guitars, just bass/drums/sax/voice, weird but beautiful. And then Look Mummy Clownes, featuring former members of the Eratics, a legendary London underground band. And let's not forget the very earliest material by Borghesia... The second compilation EP I released, "Papi, Queens, Reichkanzlers & Presidennti", was also hugely important to me.

There's certainly no shortage of choice, then...

In general there has always been a lot of love in the work of Attack and its various sub-labels. Do you know that out of 80 records I produced, not one was based on a demo (and we got a ton of tapes)? Only stuff I discovered myself and fell in love with. The problem is that it was marginal stuff that didn't sell a damn thing, and to scrape together money I had to do things like putting up posters for Pino Daniele concerts... I spent one New Year's Eve locked in the office with no money for food, another at home with no electricity because I couldn't pay the bill... Everything I earned I reinvested into making more records: if that's not love, I don't know what is. Eighty records in ten years means eight records a year, that is, one record every thirty-five days — basically an industrial-scale operation run as a self-produced venture. Apart from CCCP and Disciplinatha, my records were always loved abroad and ignored at home. I think of Raw Power, who once took part in a battle-of-the-bands show in Los Angeles alongside a young Guns N' Roses, at a venue with two rooms where both bands played at the same time and only the one who drew more people got paid: they won hands down, I swear! That style was ripped off wholesale by American metal bands: in a ranking put together by some American magazine, I don't remember which, they were placed eighth among the best live bands, even beating Metallica! And in Italy they play in front of 100 people... I remember the people at "Rockstar" interviewed Sonic Youth during an Italian tour, and when asked to name an Italian band they liked, they mentioned Tampax, and the journalist obviously had no idea who they were... Not that you necessarily need to be American or British to build a following: Celtic Frost are Swiss, and that didn't stop them from becoming one of the coolest bands on planet Earth!

It has to be said that we had zero business sense: for instance, whenever a record sold out its pressing, instead of reprinting it I'd use the money to make a new one. Looking back, it was suicidal, and I wouldn't make certain choices again if I could go back. Like, I told Marlene Kuntz to get lost when they sent me a demo tape, just because at the time they sang in English... Not to mention refusing to have bands sign contracts, out of some anarchist notion of mutual trust: Virgin could never have poached CCCP from me. Another mistake was that, once I finally managed to get a bit of free press coverage in some papers, I stubbornly kept pitching underground stuff, when the rules of the business dictate that you should promote something that's already working — but that was only explained to me afterward... When I shut down the label I felt a sense of liberation, because I thought I'd no longer have to spend all that money producing music I loved: maybe someone else would take care of it, and I could just enjoy a record for what it was! Recently three different bands approached me suggesting I relaunch Attack to put out their records, but it's too demanding — now I want to focus on my own music and on ours (Helena and I play together in one of her many projects, ed.). Let someone else put out other people's music, which these days doesn't excite me much anyway. I've already done my part...

I'd say so, definitely... And out of the countless legendary figures you've crossed paths with, which one are you most attached to?

Sorry to repeat myself, but if I had to pick just one, I'd say John Loder, for sure. I remember that back then I hadn't transitioned yet, and in London I'd take the chance to dress as a woman, and he always treated me in a completely normal, respectful way. He also chose to work with us rather than with other projects that might have earned him more money (and he got quite a few offers!) because he cared about staying within an underground scope. He was the entrepreneurial side of Crass, never credited, only insiders know who he was, but he was every bit a member of the band. After all, even if you're an anarchist commune, from the moment you decide to start a record label — and therefore a commercial venture — you need someone capable of running it, reconciling the libertarian element with the business world. He was the perfect person for that, he knew how to work with marketing but as an anarchist, which was fantastic. There was a very strong bond with Crass in general — we were actually supposed to put out a 7-inch with them as RAF Punk, though in the end, for a whole series of reasons, it never happened.

Another beautiful bond is the one with Jello Biafra: we reached a level of closeness where we'd swap records like trading cards... A few years ago he came to play with Guantanamo School Of Medicine at Forte Prenestino; we'd lost touch for a long time, but after the show he spotted me in the crowd and came over to hug me, saying he'd been looking for me because he'd recognized me in the audience! It was so wonderful because the last time we'd seen each other I was still Jumpy! I asked him how he'd recognized me and he said, "Yes, yes, I already knew you'd become a woman in the meantime!" The last time he came to play with Bloody Riot as a backing band, I picked him up by car the next day for an interview that ended up in a documentary about Disciplinatha; we spent a whole day together, it was wonderful.

Then there's Black Flag, with whom there's a whole series of strange connections: an ex of mine worked at Italian Records, which distributed SST releases in Italy, and from talking on the phone so much, she and Greg Ginn fell in love and ended up living together in Lawndale... They were about to get married, then it fell apart and she came back to Italy. Another ex of mine had a relationship with Dez Cadena. I've also always had a good relationship with Henry Rollins, who remains my vocal reference point. In 2000, for Pride, il manifesto asked me to curate a special issue of Alias on LGBT music, and I threw him into it too — even though he's completely straight, he's always been the perfect model of the alpha male, the one desired by every man, in spite of the stereotyped, so to speak "gay" image attached to most gay musicians... The crazy thing is that in the US, these people are all considered major figures: for instance, when Kira Roessler won an Oscar, or when Lorna Doom died, it was covered by every newspaper over there, while here it's still niche knowledge for insiders...

I've come to terms with that by now. What about regrets, though?

One, basically: never having put out a record by Skiantos, because I thought they were too big a band for me... And the crazy thing is that years later I told Robertino this, and he replied, "Why didn't you tell me? We'd have done it right away!", and you could tell he meant it! Unfortunately, by then I'd already shut down the label...

I'd spare you this one if I could, but it's the standard question: what do you make of our none-too-comforting musical present?

I'll tell you something that might sound provocative, but I really mean it: I think the whole self-production phenomenon, born in my era, while democratic in that it let anyone make records, on the other hand lowered the overall quality level. I mean, I chose bands according to a certain logic. Even most of the foreign names we loved weren't self-produced at all. Think of the SST roster: they were all handpicked bands. Would they have done the same things if they'd self-produced? The first Germs single is self-produced and is unlistenable, while the official LP, properly produced by Joan Jett, is wonderful. Bands used to break through when someone decided to invest money in them and produce well-made records. Now self-producing has become the norm, and indeed there are far more bands than there used to be. Every day on Bandcamp or Soundcloud an endless amount of stuff comes out that nobody listens to, and that you often find available as a free download, as if whoever posted it were the first to realize they can't actually sell it.

Also because now you don't even need an instrument anymore — you can make music not just with a computer but even with a phone, given how simple the new apps have become. For some strange reason, though, the idea has stuck around that there has to be a band, especially in this country: the other day I was watching some dreadful band on TV singing over a lip-synced electronic backing track (to check, I did a test that always works: I had Shazam listen to them, and it recognized them instantly...), and for no reason at all there were two guys standing there with acoustic guitars, obviously unplugged, as if you still needed to show up with instruments to look credible! Italian television is still stuck in the '50s — even in the '80s, when everything was pure synth music, there still had to be someone onstage with a guitar... It made me think of when New Trolls did that memorable TV performance where you could hear a thousand instruments, but the seven of them showed up with just acoustic guitars. Except that was a brilliant provocation...

Right...

But then it happens that YouTube Italy puts together a playlist of the best new artists, and you realize eighteen out of twenty are rappers, not a single band: something's not adding up. All solo singers, the whole idea of the band has simply vanished. Very worrying, it has significant sociopolitical implications. And it's always the same old reheated soup, twenty different tracks by twenty different artists that all sound like they came off the same bad record. But then not even real rappers — if only there were someone who could actually rap: nowadays it's only these pseudo-trap acts doing well, singing with Auto-Tune (singing, not rapping!). Little love songs for kids, but dressed up in punk style, with dyed hair and studded jackets... This really bothers me, it means selling a transgressive aesthetic with extremely reassuring content. It's a product completely in tune with the logic of the "new thing on the rise", which is actually just the old thing rotting away... All this rage and resentment conveyed through such a well-behaved, respectable medium is a strange thing. Besides, it's obvious they're not having any fun, they're dead serious, whereas we used to have a blast... When you hear them talk like little managers of themselves, in perfect Italian, with a deep knowledge of the business world, you really want to answer them with a line or two from John Lydon, and you know what the real problem is? That I too find myself thinking with an outlook turned toward the past...

What can you do, they're simply shrewd operators, they've figured out that music is now driven by twelve-year-olds who watch talent shows and dream of becoming famous, so they make music for twelve-year-olds. In a way, talent shows have also distorted punk's message. For us it was: you've got no talent? Doesn't matter, if you feel like playing, start a band and screw it. Now it's: you've got no talent? Doesn't matter, television can make you famous anyway. The point is that this creates a generation of kids who all do the same things, and it's disturbing that record labels are willing to spend all that money on such garbage. These people play two shows a night in clubs, with expensive tickets, and still sell out every time, while a band like Assalti Frontali still plays today in social centers in front of a few hundred people... For us, the mainstream and our music were truly two separate worlds, whereas now they somehow blend together.

I would have preferred to end on Skiantos...

That doesn't mean there isn't still a lot of great music out there — the point is that most of the time it's artists rehashing things that have already been done a million times over, records that might be extremely well-crafted (after all, they're recorded with Pro Tools, with quantized drums, pitch-corrected vocals, and so on) but rarely thrilling. It's absurd, because nowadays you could experiment while having far more opportunities to get noticed, and yet almost nobody does... Back in the day, every new release was amazing: the new DOA record, incredible! The new MDC record, incredible! The new DRI record, incredible! Every band that came along was different, had new traits and a unique way of interpreting the genre — evolution was constant. Speaking of new wave, Bauhaus were completely different from PIL; speaking of punk, Discharge were a whole other thing compared to Black Flag. Nowadays, on the other hand, bands sound "like"... They stick to a standardized sound, nothing comes out that breaks the mold. No wonder younger listeners rush to check out bands from the '70s and '80s, years when people actually explored, when creativity and experimentation were what mattered. Stuff that didn't sell (those same acts have bigger audiences today than they did back then) and survived only because costs were rock-bottom, but it gave everyone making and listening to it a strong sense of belonging to the scene.

Nowadays a ton of records come out constantly, and they're all the same — perfect copies, but copies nonetheless, with few real sparks. This applies to major scenes too: the New York hardcore scene, the San Diego emo scene... There are few areas where I still see a real drive to innovate: I especially follow neo-crust and the countless black metal scenes around the world (particularly the Ukrainian one, which many mistakenly consider Nazi when it's actually just anti-Russian) — situations that tend to be fresher and more open to cross-pollination. It's no coincidence that this music has a low "moshability" rate, which in these genres is exactly the marker of how commercial something is... Then again, there's D-beat, which I could never get enough of: even though those bands are always the same, seeing them live is still pure orgasm! It's also worth saying that in Europe we've never managed to build a genuinely European counterculture, whereas in the United States something that works in California also works in Wisconsin.

True...

This mind-boggling homogenization touches every field, including dance music, especially in our country: go to any club and you'll find that same tech-house everywhere, which exists basically nowhere else, and it's absurd because there are hundreds of different types of danceable electronic music out there! And yet you won't find a single venue playing, say, jungle or Dubstep — and this goes for both squats and commercial venues alike. Sadly, it's especially true when it comes to the LGBT community: just a bit of soft, not-at-all-hardcore techno, or else commercial trash, as if it were unthinkable for a gay person to dance to anything else... Always fun, "gay" stuff, because obviously a "queer" can't possibly dance to speedcore. There was even a time someone gave me grief for doing a gabber DJ set, because they considered it fascist music... Other times, though, the opposite happened, maybe in some pretty rough social-center settings: I'd play "real" techno and people would come up to congratulate me because they were finally hearing something with some balls, instead of the usual snooze-fest they were normally forced to dance to!

And now cassettes are even back in fashion! A while back I went to see a band playing a kind of electronic psychedelia — the music was really interesting, but what struck me was that they only released it on cassette: why? It's one thing to put out a hardcore or black metal album that way, but if you're making electronic music, what's the point of putting it out in analog, on cassette?! And those photocopied black-and-white covers are making a comeback too: back then it was a necessity, today it's an aesthetic. When something becomes an aesthetic, it means you're celebrating the past, turning backward and closing yourself off, and that's never a good thing. The same goes for all this new psychedelia that's exploding again, especially in Germany: they make '70s music better than the '70s bands did, and even their look seems to be straight out of that era. Sure, some manage to pull it off in a situationist way: I recently listened to an album by a Canadian dub producer where the track titles were mashups of words from the kraut scene, like "Soon Over Yeti" or "Amon Dream", stuff like that... They're very well-made records, I do listen to them, but is it really possible we can't move forward anymore? Then again, maybe even Jimi Hendrix would be forced to self-release these days...

Ride the wave of great music

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