Italian flower-punk

This isn't a story about great music, nor about famous or celebrated bands. This isn't a story about virtuoso musicians. Some of them maybe are, others perhaps have become so, but deep down none of them ever really cared about being one. This isn't a story about famous bands: almost none of them made rock "History", nobody got rich, none of the protagonists managed to make a living out of their music. This is a tale of eternal Peter Pans devoted to messing around and chaos, of perpetual amateurs who never even aspired to turn professional. Almost none of them ever crossed the borders of their own region, their own city, their local village festival, many never even managed to release an album, and it probably never even crossed their minds to do so. Few of them can sing, others can't. Some can play their instruments, others less so.

But it's also a fun story, one about a handful of bands capable of unleashing chaos and joy, of making rivers of beer flow and setting off wild dancing and explosive "pogos" on every dancefloor they played, and, on occasion, of churning out songs surprisingly rich in original ideas.

This is the story of bands that didn't make it, because they never tried, and because almost none of them ever cared about making it at all. This is the story of Italian flower-punk.

The most demanding music critics, the refined palates, the connoisseurs, the aesthetes, the purists of "real" punk, those in search of the chimera of "Art" in rock music, those chasing poetic lyrics, sophisticated harmonic weaves or original compositions, can very well stop reading right here.

We, on the other hand, start from the beginning.

Twenty Years of Defeats

And to think my father wanted me to be a footballer

and to think my mother already saw me as a doctor

But instead here I am, screaming my lungs out…

After the punk explosion of '77, after Ramones, Dead Boys, Voidoids, Sex Pistols, Clash, Damned and everything generally referred to as the "first wave of punk", the movement fragments. In the '80s, the new bands and the surviving veterans shift the horizons. On one side, new wave is born, in its many facets, while hardcore, with sounds that grow ever more aggressive and fast, becomes the dominant genre within the punk movement.

Hardcore isn't just more abrasive, less catchy and further ratcheted up in violence, but it also stands out for lyrics that are often fierce, nihilistic, mature, and politically charged.

Italy too developed a tight-knit hardcore scene that earned respect even abroad, as shown by the wealth of literature that has emerged in recent years around Italian hardcore.

"Costretti a sanguinare", by Marco Philopat, tells the story of Virus and the Milan scene starting from the first wave of punk, while "I ragazzi del mucchio", by Silvio Bernelli (bassist of Declino and Indigesti), traces the history of Mucchio Selvaggio and the collaboration that developed during the '80s between Italian and Northern European bands, eventually reaching America and appearing on compilations that featured, alongside Italian acts like Negazione, Wretched, CCM, and Peggio Punx, major international bands such as Dead Kennedys, Crass or Butthole Surfers.

And then there were Kina — the Husker Du of the mountains — Raw Power, Nabat in Bologna, Dioxina in Rimini, the Tuscan Grand Duchy contingent, the anarcho-pacifist wing, the nihilist wing, the Oi! wing, and so on.

What failed to take root in Italy during those same '80s, however, was the more playful, carefree and uncommitted scene that essentially carried forward the approach launched by the Ramones: pop-punk (teen-punk, surf-punk, skate-punk, part of melodic hardcore, and so on).

Already at the start of the decade, Bad Religion, in America, had lightened up their sound and softened their melodic lines, but the lyrics remained committed and reflective, centered on unease, nihilism and alienation. To find the carefree spirit, the more playful side, and the more accessible melodies, one has to look to the Queers, Screeching Weasel, the Descendents, and the melodic punk of Lookout! Records. These are the forefathers of the sound and the typical punk-rock approach of the '90s, the one embodied by Rancid, NOFX, Offspring, Pennywise, and finally Green Day, whose album "Dookie" (1994) would finally make the genre explode in Italy, and with it, the specific subset we want to discuss.

Italian flower-punk

Loud and fast sound

The boundaries that define the genre we're about to explore are, truth be told, pretty vague. The elusive term flower-punk gets thrown around a lot, but pinning down a proper, widely accepted definition isn't easy.

The name obviously has nothing to do with the Frank Zappa song on the 1968 album “We’re Only In It For The Money”; instead, it comes from a compilation released by Mac Guffin Records in 1995, gathering tracks from around twenty Italian punk-rock bands of the time who had definitively broken away from the political commitment and severity of hardcore, both musically and lyrically.

My own personal definition, however, is even more restrictive, to the point that some of the bands included on that compilation don't actually qualify, by my standards, as "pure" flower-punk.

To try to clarify things, I'll attempt to draw some lines of demarcation based on a few accounts I've gathered personally from fans and musicians within the scene:

“The three key words for understanding pop-punk are: irreverence, fun and Ramones”.

“People jumping off the stage into the arms of the crowd, partly because the audience is an integral part of the show”.

“Musicians who have no problem hanging around and goofing off with the people who come to see them, without acting like rock stars”.

“They've created an alternative world that moves almost entirely outside the mainstream and outside the rules of the market”.

“A scene that sustains itself through selfless, no-frills collaborations”.

“They've managed to build a scene that, despite all the criticism and mockery from snobs, music critics and assorted dinosaurs, has kept going, like it or not, for more than 20 years”.

These are mostly clichés, useful at best for sketching out a first vague idea. So I'll try to outline some more concrete boundaries:

– Clear ties to the Ramones, running through Queers and Screeching Weasel, into pop-punk and melodic hardcore, all the way to that whole range of bands stretching from Bad Religion to Green Day.

– A further, very specific connection to bubblegum-pop, garage and surf-rock (just like the Ramones): heavily effected guitars and infectious choruses, often sung by the whole band, indebted to 1950s doo-wop.

– A fascination with the televisual imagery (trashy or otherwise) of the late 70s and early 80s, the period when most of the scene's representatives were presumably going through their formative years – think Japanese cartoons, heavily present in the lyrics, along with commercials, robots, TV shows and sci-fi in general.

– Speed: the tradition already established by hardcore is carried forward, but at the same time it sets itself apart through easy, if sometimes catchy and sticky, melodies, in contrast with the harshness and technical skill found in so many performances within the hardcore school.

– Maximum simplification of song structure (the famous three chords) in pursuit of the killer, irresistible chorus.

– A singer distinguished by a deliberately harsh voice, a delivery full of imperfections, and a performance style bordering on the amateurish. We're a million miles from the canons of "bel canto". There are usually two registers at play: on one hand the carefree tone of any teenager, an ordinary voice, the same one you might hear from your high-school deskmate or the friend you meet at the pub in the evening; on the other, the broken, weathered voice of a dockworker or a terrace chant leader.

– Lyrics centred on "low" themes tied to adolescence: girls, unlikely romances, sex, a generalized hatred of authority, banal and comic existential woes, generational detachment, the boredom and diffuse anger typical of provincial life, work troubles, school escapades, right down to every kind of vulgarity displayed with the sensitivity that – precisely – a teenager might have. Looking closely, then, the themes are more or less always the same; but it's above all the approach (more carefree, spontaneous and deliberately less mature) and the melodic element that mark the most important differences from hardcore and from contemporary indie rock.

– Political commitment rarely flaunted, at best only hinted at through naive slogans, cheap provocations often more suited to scandalizing than to expressing any real stance, or else handled with irony, playing up the comic side. The idea that seems to come through most strongly whenever political or social themes are touched on – what really matters to these kids – is the wish to set themselves apart from everyone else: to assert their own independence and their own difference from the rest of the world, without explaining themselves to anyone ("We do whatever the fuck we want").

– Open hostility towards the uniform. The parallel with much of hardcore is obvious, but here too there's a shift downward: whereas in hardcore "the cop" can be attacked as the symbol of something bigger, as the anonymous representative of power, of the "System", of that "cage" against which young punks lash out, in flower-punk the policeman/carabiniere/riot cop becomes a subject just like us, who does, yes, stand opposed to us, but on our own level. He becomes human, becomes a "person", no longer a symbol. The protest arises because the enforcer of the law finds himself in conflict with those adolescent goals to which the flower-punkers aspire: smoking joints, getting drunk, losing it, driving irresponsibly, occupying spaces, playing at full volume, supporting other bands, pogoing at gigs, causing all kinds of trouble... The "cop" is nothing more than the obstacle standing between the child's "everything, right now" and the adult world. From “Bastardo poliziotto, tu sei il re della città/ Ma quella tua divisa prima o dopo brucerà/ Col ferro e col fuoco ripuliremo le nostre città!” we move on to: “Come farò a spiegare alla mia mamma questo occhio nero/ Son caduto a terra lei mi dice ‘non è vero’/ E queste impronte di scarpe belle nere?/ È stata una fibbiata di un carabiniere”.

The forces of law and order become almost the flip side of the flower-punk imagination: they don't quite come across as likeable, but they get pretty close, since they too are turned into comic caricatures (the "blue dogs"). It's a bit like the relationship between Inspector Zenigata and Lupin, or – better still – between Commissioner Basettoni and the Bassotti Gang.

One last feature, in fact – one that in a way sums up all the previous ones, once again recalling the Ramones – is the regression to adolescence. A retreat into the impulses of youth, into lightness and lack of commitment. The parallel with adolescence keeps coming back in flower-punk: that explosion of simple but genuine, direct and impulsive ideas and feelings that all of us have felt at least once in our lives. You constantly run into gut-level, unreflective rebellion, provocation for its own sake, and the problems, strong feelings, genuine thrills and craving for fun typical of young people... The spirit of adolescent silliness.

Speaking of silliness, in some respects one is tempted to think even of the Skiantos – not by chance a key reference point for almost all flower-punk bands, alongside that Alberto Camerini we'll come back to later – when it comes to a regression into childishness. Of course, Freak Antoni's silliness was conscious and calculated, whereas here we're closer to the shallowest whim and frivolity, yet the weapons used are the same: drawing on low themes and settings, using youth slang, filling the lyrics with common, banal objects, and (again in contrast with the previous punk generation, which tackled political/social issues, important causes and deep feelings) a retreat to the narrow confines of one's own world with no great pretensions – one's own backyard, the bar, the community centre, one's own circle of friends, acquaintances and small if entertaining experiences, just as happens in the first act of the Skiantos era, for instance in "Permanent Flebo": “Ero a casa di mia zia/ è arrivata polizia/ che volete andate via/ mi faccio un permanent flebo”.

Clearly the connections remain only formal, aesthetic. "Punk", after all, is first and foremost an idea. And of the context and conditions that gave rise to that idea, nothing at all was left by the '90s.

It's simply a revival like so many others we've already lived through, and others we'll go on living through in that endless cycle of ebbs and flows so typical of rock history.

The feeling, though, is that this revival is, for once, explicit, openly declared, without pretensions. A declaration of love, a citation, a grand homage to a genre that, beyond the sounds and the look, shows itself above all in the impulse to shock and in its opposition to all the rest of contemporary music.

Before 1994: the pioneers

Per essere sicuro di far male a qualcuno

mi alleno contro un muro

to pogo a little harder

As already mentioned, the underground scene of independent bands whose main goal is not so much to become famous or to leave unforgettable albums for posterity, but rather to have fun and play as many gigs as possible up and down the peninsula, explodes with real force in 1994 – the first key date in this story – the year the Green Day break into every chart worldwide with the album "Dookie".

Green Day had already been around for a good 8 years by that point, having already released a couple of moderately successful albums, and they catch the attention of the majors, in particular Reprise Records. It's with this new label that "Dookie" comes to light, quickly becoming a commercial smash with 16 million copies sold, helped along by heavy rotation on MTV.

Just as had happened a few years earlier with grunge, which with the success of the Nirvana went from underground phenomenon to mass genre, "Dookie" storms the upper reaches of the charts, bringing punk-rock back into vogue, even among generations who have no idea what the original punk was.

Riding this wave of success, in the following years thousands of new bands proliferate, and older ones already in existence return to the spotlight too, like Offspring or NOFX, for instance.

In those same years, Italy witnesses the explosion of independent music, and alongside acts like Afterhours, Marlene Kuntz, Timoria and Bluvertigo, a rougher, more boisterous punk-rock also explodes, one that will lead to flower-punk.

Before 1994, it's worth mentioning among the "pioneers" a handful of bands coming from the most disparate backgrounds, who each had the merit, in their own way, of sowing the first seeds of a revolution still to come, alongside their own individual paths shaped by different musical backgrounds and repertoires. First and foremost, the Paolino Paperino Band.

The band, from Modena, had actually been active since 1987, and their first self-produced demo – "La Prima Paolino" – came out the following year. A second self-produced cassette was released in 1988, after which came two mini-LPs and one LP, right up until they split in 1994.

It would be reductive to pin the label "punk-rock" on Paolino Paperino Band's music (even more so "flower-punk", which is effectively a subgenre in its own right). Their sound is a rather atypical crossover embracing funk, reggae, ska, hardcore, even rap, and only in certain moments does it edge into decidedly punk territory, as in the now-legendary songs "Fetta", "Alcool puro", or "Compagno cittadino". These are tracks that undoubtedly set the tone for all future homegrown punk-rockers, so much so that Paolino is unanimously considered one of the most important bands of the scene, both for their extreme yet ironic approach and for the foresight of some of their lyrics, often so sharp that they still feel relevant years later. With the 1988 song "Candy's", the band reworked the theme tune of the famous anime series "Candy Candy", twisting its lyrics with allusions to drugs, vandalism and crime, thereby launching a formula that would go on to define flower-punk's fortunes.

Starting in the early '90s, from Latina, Senzabenza took their first steps, with a sound clearly indebted to Hard-Ons (the Australian band known for their humor and light-hearted lyrics backing typically melodic punk-rock). Their first album, from 1991, has a title that's already a manifesto: "Loud and fast sound".

In the Roman underground scene of those years, we find ourselves amid strong politicization, developed above all through straight edge. Senzabenza's approach, then, comes across from the start as going against the grain, but the band has talent and soon becomes a reference point for what will come to be called "flower-punk", helped also by a remarkably high level of quality – perhaps even too high to really belong in this story: the band, in fact, will earn excellent reviews in specialist magazines, will be named "new punk revelation" by the American fanzine Maximum Rock'n'Roll, will tour all over Europe, will open for the Ramones on their 1993 Italian tour, for NOFX in Bologna in 1995, and will even record their third album co-produced by Joey Ramone and Daniel Rey.

Considered "the most famous Italian pop-punk band in the world", they are to all intents and purposes an international act, helped in this by singing in English, which allows them to broaden their audience and reach as wide a public as possible – a choice also shared by other bands such as the Milanese Crummy Stuff, or Manges and Peawees from La Spezia, to name just a few of the best known. Many of the bands that would go on to make up this odd little underground scene we're dealing with here, by contrast, have no such ambitions, nor any interest in broadening their audience or reaching as wide a public as possible; on the contrary, they sing in Italian, often in slang or in their own dialect, and the only thing they want is to be understood by their friends, their tribe, their gang of loyal fans.

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In any case, despite this obvious diversity, musically speaking flower-punk is born with Senzabenza. And with Punkreas. Similarly to what happens in the Roman scene, Milan too is still steeped in the moods of the hardcore wave, that antagonistic, counter-cultural, existential strand that had Virus as its reference point. Punkreas, formed even before Senzabenza, in 1989 in Parabiago, grew up in that environment before gradually distancing themselves from it. After all, they come from the same background: social centers, squats, independent self-production, word of mouth and homemade tapes. Punkreas established themselves as a sort of missing link, with lyrics initially closer to the experience of '80s Italian punk, but which little by little take on a more ironic, carefree direction, while musically they move towards an increasingly polished, increasingly hybrid sound, more in tune with new generations.

Their first self-produced demo from 1990, "Isterico", has a rather uncatchy sound, still very close to hardcore, with rare, barely-sketched melodic touches. It's with their first official album, "United Rumors Of Punkreas", from 1992, and in particular with the tracks "Occhi puntati" and "Disgusto totale", that Punkreas effectively become the godfathers of the entire movement.

Also in the Milan area, roaming around during the same years, were Blak Vomit, a punk-rock outfit that positioned itself as a spokesperson for urban subculture, with harsh, realistic lyrics; musically, they were far removed from hardcore but definitely couldn't be lumped into the flower-punk cauldron either. The band leaned toward a sound still rooted in new wave and post-punk, which over time became more melodic and accessible, but in doing so took a path completely different from Punkreas, moving through indie territory and a fair amount of traditional rock — to the point that Le Iene (the later incarnation of Blak Vomit frontman Gianluca Favero) opened the 1999 "Monza Rock Festival", sharing the bill with Aerosmith and Litfiba.

Another contribution to the birth of the flower-punk scene came again from Rome, from a band stubbornly rooted in the militant world of factory strikes, squats and antifascist activism. Starting from these premises, Banda Bassotti might seem out of place, more at home with the contemporary audiences of Modena City Ramblers, Gang or 99 Posse, were it not for the momentum the band gave to the entire genre as far back as 1991. Even while remaining consciously "outside" it, faithful to their redskin attitude and ideals, there's no doubt that this Roman collective introduced into the social-centre scene at least two elements that would prove crucial to its future evolution: sarcastic invective, found in several of their signature songs (above all "Cararo sindaco" from 1992), and the injection of ska-punk into the sound, with a more direct approach than, for instance, their contemporaries Persiana Jones, forerunners of this specific strand later carried on by bands like Matrioska, Vallanzaska and Meganoidi.

Before 1994, these were the few pioneers stirring up the scene, laying the groundwork for what would evolve into flower-punk. Then "Dookie" came out.

1994: the explosion

Gli Impossibili erano tre: Coil Man, Multi Man e Fluid Man. Noi siamo tutti e tre Fluid Man.

(Interview agli Impossibili)

Like so many other movements, flower punk too was born as a "reaction", exploding in opposition to a certain kind of musical intellectualism that characterized not only its older stepbrother — hardcore — but also a good deal of the independent music that was thriving in Italy during those same years.

Just as in the English-speaking world during the garage-rock era, or later during the first wave of punk, here too we see a return to a homemade, naive, anti-professional dimension, and to that provocative, disrespectful attitude rooted in the basic idea that young people should reclaim an art form (rock) that, not coincidentally, was born by and for the young in the first place.

The conviction, once again, is that "anyone can do it", and it doesn't matter if technical skill is rudimentary, if the lyrics aren't "poetic" or, in general, if there's no particular artistic ambition at play — if anything, the dirtier, rawer and coarser the sound, the closer the result gets to the desired effect. Basements and garages once again become rehearsal rooms, small fanzines spring up to spread information, bands play to street crowds, in the shabbiest and most improbable venues, relying on modest independent labels (often born within the very same scene the musicians come from) or self-releasing albums entirely on their own. The shared goal is to entertain, get people moving, whip up the crowd and infect it with anthems akin to football chants or drinking songs to be bellowed together after one too many rounds. Gone are the denunciations and furious invectives against the state, the government and politicians; shelved are recurring buzzwords like hypocrisy, despair, discomfort, alienation. Now the themes revolve around how much easier it is to fall in love when you're drunk, the desire to get better at fishing so you can be as good as Sampei, managing to score a date with a girl wearing a Ramones t-shirt, making friends with a Martian, or stopping your dog from stealing your bike (!).

This creative season fuels the scene and stokes enthusiasm, and so, among the first to arrive and crystallize its definitive forms, along come Fichissimi, from Pinerolo (Turin). It only takes them about a dozen songs between 1993 and 1996, recorded terribly to boot, to leave an indelible mark on the history of the genre and lay down its guidelines: "Mi sono innamorato di una tipa di una casa occupata" is the line that will forever stick in the heads of every future member of the scene.

From Vicenza burst forth Derozer, the band most beloved by fans of homegrown flower-punk. Direct yet always with an ear tuned toward melody, furious yet tempered by hefty doses of irony to soften the outbursts, Derozer had already been active for a few years when, in 1993, they released their first self-produced tape. It was above all with the songs "Nitroglicerina" (1994), "Bomba" (1994) and their first real album, "Bar" (1995) — which went on to sell over a thousand copies — that the band made a name for itself and earned a front-row seat in the pantheon of Italian flower-punk. In Varese, meanwhile, were Porno Riviste, with their brash, vulgar and over-the-top punk-rock that, more often than not, still came across as likeable precisely because of its approach — so cocky and clownish that it swings all the way around to become acceptable and familiar, helped along by an innate knack for killer choruses.

Among the scene's key founders, finally, mention must be made of Impossibili, from Milan, the softies of the group. In this writer's opinion, the band led by Efrem Mezzanini, aka "Araya", represents the highest peak of the entire flower-punk movement, its archetype: two-minute songs propped up by elementary chord progressions and out-of-the-ordinary energy, inspired chants that weave and chase one another, lightning-fast choruses, lyrics somewhere between comic and moronic, deliberately aimed at the borderline teenagers of every Italian city who, having grown up under that toxic cloud feeding Cold War nightmares and Chernobyl fears, found themselves living through economic growth and the dawn of the information age, but also the drama of the suburbs, the draining away of political substance and ideology, Tangentopoli and the mafia massacres. All of it, needless to say, still under the sign of the Ramones.

With Impossibili we witness the definitive slide toward slang and barroom chatter, a trait later found in many subsequent bands. The final demolition of all lyrical refinement shows up, for instance, in the loss of the subjunctive:

Penso che lei è una ragazza ok

Cosa vuoi che me ne importa se ha il cervello in tilt questa notte lei mi porta a vedere i Queers

And her sister thinks she's completely crazy

She slams and locks the door of the room.

Under the guidance of the aforementioned pioneers and riding the wave of punk-rock's worldwide success, in the second half of the 90s we witness a massive invasion of bands popping up out of nowhere, very often made up of inept, illiterate players with no real ambition, torturing their guitars in search of that deep meaning, within those famous three chords, that every teenager would love to find in their own existence: hundreds of similar little bands, all furious and proudly incompetent, emerge from basements and flood the venues, many of which open their doors precisely in that period to make room for these localized scenes, these emerging city bands with their following of rowdy party-goers, each carrying its own load of energy, cheekiness and, in some cases, undeniable originality as well.

Among the most inspired we should mention: Monelli, from Turin, with their catchy melodies and the classic Queers/Screeching Weasel-style sound that will earn them, among fans, the reputation of the genre's most orthodox representatives. Gambe di Burro, from Monza, focus on the imagery of the hapless teenage loser, with all the little mishaps revolving around school life and first experiences with girls. They fire off their unforgettable rounds through an intense adventure that burns out in under 4 years, two albums and a string of shows that will take the band across the whole Brianza area, all the way to the furthest, most remote corners of… Lombardy!

Melt, from Vicenza, carry forward with dedication the path laid out a few years earlier by Fichissimi. Bom Prò, as vulgar and repulsive on one hand as they are genuine and fun on the other, manage to leave their mark by blending the cartoonish imagery of Ramones with the provincial, boisterous spirit of a quirky seaside town like Rosignano Solvay, where they come from.

Latte Più, from Empoli, representatives of the genre's more aggressive wing, deliver flower-punk anthem-tracks such as the immortal “Guerriglia urbana”, which seems tailor-made to be chanted in chorus by gangs of young hooligans during their weekends of revelry. But above all there are Ignoranti, from Genoa, authors of the album “Vent'anni di sconfitte” – which is also the title of this article – who, besides a number of fine songs recorded between 1998 and 2001, left to posterity “Non piangi mai”, a moving (and flawless) flower-punk rendition of “It's Cold Outside” by Choir (the legendary 60s garage band), which stands not only as their masterpiece but also as one of the most significant peaks of the entire scene.

It's curious to note how most of these bands come from northern Italy, exactly as happened a decade earlier with hardcore. Both phenomena (with the inevitable exceptions) found little fertile ground in the regions south of the capital. One feature that, on the other hand, sharply distinguishes 90s Italian punk from the punk of the previous decade is the sense of belonging to a scene: whereas in the 80s the “scene” was something almost sacred, a second family, an important space for finding one's identity and growing up (an approach evident in the many interviews, documentaries or novels mentioned earlier), this is not the case with the new protagonists. Where before there was cohesion among bands, cooperation, solidarity, in the 90s the approach changes:

Honestly I don't know the scene you're talking about, and I don't even know any other bands that could be called punk.

(Porno Riviste)

With the other bands from the area, our relations are of deep and eternal indifference.

(Blak Vomit)

We've never been part of any scene.

(Senzabenza).

How do I see the Italian punk and ska scene? In my opinion, there is no scene.

(Punkreas)

We don't believe in any scene

(Gerson)

Scene? What scene? What there was could barely be called a scene at all. Sure, there were plenty of people playing, but often behind the put-on smiles there was a lot, too much, hypocrisy. Petty jealousy, gratuitous nastiness – there were bands with whom real friendships were forged, but not many.

(Persiana Jones)

I can't really answer that, I never got involved with the so-called scene, or rather, I never wanted to identify with it. The story of the punk scene in Italy is a bit like the story of the Yeti: everyone talks about it, but nobody's ever actually seen it.

(Porno Riviste again)

As already mentioned, the impression is that what matters now isn't the movement as a whole, or not so much, but rather standing apart, isolation, the tribe – in other words, the exact opposite: ’not’ identifying with any scene, except the one made up of a tight circle of the chosen few.

On the threshold of the 2000s: the crisis

Ma finirà, come un temporale

Come un acido che ha preso male

Like a film whose ending I already know

So che finirà

Between the late Nineties and the early 2000s, the bug spreads like wildfire, and countless bands with the most improbable names pop up everywhere. It feels like the days of the British Invasion all over again, when all across Italy hordes of beat bands, big and small, sprang up emulating the British and American originals. Just like then, there isn't a single town without its own punk band, and there's no one born between the early Seventies and the early Eighties who doesn't have at least one friend playing in some small punk band at a social centre or a local pub.

The press and radio stations start taking notice too (Radio Lupo Solitario, Radio Onda d’Urto, Radio Popolare, Radio Sherwood, Radio Black Out, Controradio, Radio Onda Rossa…).

Collaborations flourish, split releases come back into fashion, and dense ranks of impetuous, irreverent bands emerge from the basements, introduced by joke-like nicknames and ready to play in every corner of the country: Supereroi, Guerrieri, Wedra, Messymale, Semprefreski, Bombardini, Ramoni, Stoopids, Torquemada, Peter Punk, Vigliacchi, Mele Marce, 16 Valvole, Skruigners, Razzi Totali, Lazy Bones, Durango 95, Pensione Libano, Gozzilla & le tre bambine coi baffi… And, last but not least, impossible not to mention – if only for the ironic yet telling choice of name – Nel 77 avevo 3 anni.

Some of the old guard even switched to the other side of the barricade: for instance, Rappresaglia (a leading name of the '80s hardcore scene) released an album in 1999 made up of battle slogans and stadium chants over a musical backing far catchier than their old standards.

But for many, it was also an early sign of crisis. It was the first step towards fashion and homogenization. The whole game seemed to have broken down. Within just a few years, the wave rippled outward until it became a huge wall, only to then scatter into a thousand streams, losing force and edge, and it was above all the leading bands that seemed to lose their way, leaving their many followers in the dark, searching for guidance.

Porno Riviste hardened their sound and shifted their lyrics towards more socially engaged territory, as if searching for another path that, in their eyes, was perhaps more dignified.

Derozer evolved as well, also choosing the path of social commitment, going through periods of reflection, line-up changes, mishaps along the way, side projects, right up to the split that led Mendez, one of the founders, to leave the band with the idea of returning to the dirty, raw sound of their origins. The split was most likely due to "cultural" differences so significant that they even spilled over into the lyrics of the songs by Dogs, Mendez's new band:

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Punkreas, among the few to achieve a certain level of fame, increasingly pandered to the mainstream and settled into a more mainstream rock sound, remaining stuck, lyrically, on positions that were perhaps predictable and somewhat repetitive.

The original spirit had been lost; the days when the rule of lightness prevailed, when, in order to stay "pure," many bands were almost afraid of becoming too well known, had been violated.

Fichissimi realized this years earlier, on the occasion of their breakup, and released a scathing statement to their fans that, in my view, is also a moving manifesto for the entire movement:

"We, Fichissimi, will not play today and will not play again. If all you care about in punk is the music, you can watch Mtv, buy records from Rock & Folk or Zapping, and fork out thirty thousand lire for the punk band playing live. You don't need us, in fact we don't want you. Fichissimi were not here to spread their message to as many people as possible. We weren't here to entertain anyone, we are neither prophets nor musicians.

[…] Fichissimi no longer want to prepare products to be peddled to scumbags and alternative music magazines. Too many of you bought our record like any other product, without understanding that it was not meant to be, and should not have been, a product.

[…] Tonight you did not have fun, you did not spend the few moments of freedom you had the way you wanted, you wasted your free time. And tomorrow we will all go back to our shitty lives.

How sad, isn't it?".

One of the members of Fichissimi is Andrea Pomini who, after the band broke up, founded the independent label Love Boat Records & Buttons, later played in Disco Drive, and is today a well-regarded music journalist. The singer, Mr. Occhio, still performs, but solo, as a one man band.

2001: A Cyberspace Odyssey

And that dreamer, a bit clownish, visionary, that strange fellow who came from afar, with his ancient secret of masks and tricks, of games and laughter, of dreams and songs. He arrived one hot day with the sun in the West, at a house where so many people were dancing…

Once upon a time there was a brilliant singer-songwriter.

In the second half of the '70s, while still very young and after playing as a session guitarist for already established artists, he began astonishing the country with songs of extraordinary originality and undeniable inspiration, so much so that his debut album won the award for best new work. He released two more albums, always maintaining exceptional songwriting standards, before the metamorphosis took place: the singer-songwriter became infatuated with electronics, turned into Arlecchino, and began building a fantastical, mysterious and vividly colourful world, populated by TV personalities, extra-terrestrials, comic-book superheroes, hallucinogenic substances, food, sweets and masks from the Commedia dell'Arte.

From this point on, success swept him up and, at first, he rode the wave like the shrewdest surfer in California, reaching unimaginable heights. Then something broke. Fortune turned its back on him, and Arlecchino, too proud and too far outside the lines, could no longer get back in the saddle. He flopped at the Festivalbar in 1983, flopped at Sanremo in 1984, before disappearing from the scene along with his ghosts and obsessions. When he returned, he was a mature man, even more cultured and musically accomplished, full of ideas and enthusiasm, but by the end of the '80s the times had changed, and in the '90s, left alone and misunderstood, he ended up losing his ideas and enthusiasm too. He could no longer speak naturally to young people, nor could he look to the future as he had always done and as the superheroes he had sung about did. And in the present, unfortunately, young people were drawn to Jovanotti or 883 who, come to think of it, were simply reworking his own insights, the comic-book imagery, the metropolitan and adolescent saga, the masks and the digital chimera, but without his poetry.

During this period of confusion and disappointment, Arlecchino found refuge among the outcasts and the defeated who hung around the centri sociali, just as he had done at the start of his career, and it's likely there that he ran into the varied underground scene of hardcore punks who populated those circles and who, moreover, admired and respected him as a "father", if only because in Italy he was among the first to write fully-fledged punk songs like "Divo Divo" or "Poliziotto per favore".

So a light bulb went on for our singer-songwriter and, with his face painted white, an enormous mohawk on his head and tangled up in LED lights and coloured electrical cables, he set up his final transformation: after the Arlecchino Metropolitano of his early days, and after the Arlecchino Elettronico of his great success, the time had come to turn into Arlecchino Cyberclown.

He identified with the working class, with the unemployed, with the lost and the losers, and traced, in the mask of Arlecchino, a genuine punk spirit: after all, the servant too was born into a lowly, popular, underground social context (the chthonic demonic deities from which the mask may derive), he is essentially an immigrant, always hungry, poor and antagonistic towards the master.

But above all, the music: listening back to the songs that make up his albums, from the first, "Cenerentola e il pane quotidiano", all the way to "Rockmantico" in 1982, it's remarkably easy to find many of the elements that would later form the basis of flower-punk, such as the youth-oriented setting, the chord progressions echoing doo-wop and bubblegum, the sugary, seductive choruses, the overt self-irony, the comics, the robots, the science fiction, the television, the advertising... It's all already there. And besides, who better than the Arlecchino Elettronico made use of à la Beach Boys choruses, the oh-oh-ohs, the yeh-yehs, the wow-wows, so typical of flower-punk?

Using electric instrumentation, speeding up the tempo and distorting everything possible, Alberto Camerini's songs were already flower-punk songs, twenty years ahead of their time!

Nor was he the only one to notice: in 1998, in fact, Manges presented a punk-rock version of Camerini's song "Fanatico di rock'n'roll"; Impossibili, a little later, would include the immortal "Rock'n'Roll Robot", reworked in their own style, on the album "Contro tutti"; and, in 2001, Semprefreski would do the same with "Non devi piangere".

The ground was fertile, and it took the Cyberclown little more than five years to reinvigorate the whole movement, authoritatively grabbing the helm of a ship that had lately been steered by uncertain, confused hands. He's like Ulysses returning to Ithaca to reclaim his kingdom, he too coming back after twenty years of triumphs and troubles, he too disguised as an outcast, he too ready for anything.

In 1998 he returned to television, taking part in a show – "Meteore" – an operation that for anyone else would reek of the pathetic and the tearful, but his performance has nothing pathetic or tearful about it; if anything, it seems to serve him as a sounding board to shout to everyone just how alive Arlecchino still is. Mad and dangerous.

Over the following two years he appeared as a guest on the shows "Roxy Bar" and "Help". Meanwhile, he was working on his album, recruiting musicians from the punk-rock scene of the centri sociali. His first performance was at the Leoncavallo in 1999, and it was there that the definitive metamorphosis took place, one that would lead him, in 2001, to record the album "Cyberclown" with Skidsoplastix, a band made up of musicians from Punkreas and Porno Riviste.

From this moment on, the real adventure begins, racking up gigs across Northern Italy (and beyond). He launches the independent label 316 Records, wins awards as best independent artist, gets the satisfaction of writing a new song for Viola Valentino and, finally, releases a second album, even rougher and punkier: "Kids Wanna Rock".

In September 2004, alongside Gerson and Kalashnikov Collective, he performs at the Centro Sociale Garibaldi, again in Milan, in support of the adjacent botanical garden that had been wiped out to make room for more concrete. The venue, barely bigger than twenty square metres, is completely packed, with dozens and dozens of people buzzing with anticipation. Just three days earlier, a certain John William Cummings – better known as Johnny Ramone – had died, so the new Alberto, in his Exploited-inspired guise, straps on his guitar, tears up the setlist, invites the singer of Senzabenza up on stage from the crowd, and kicks off, on an unforgettable night, a heartfelt tribute to one of the most important guitarists in history.

The circle has closed.

Today. The end?

The punk scene today is remarkably full of great bands: the problem is that absolutely nobody goes to gigs anymore. I'm talking about the North, which is the scene I know best. In the '90s, even a gig by a fairly unknown band never drew less than a hundred people. Today, a hundred people is a tough target for anyone...

(Interview with Senzabenza)

Between the late 2000s and the second decade of the new millennium, many of the historic bands withdrew from the scene, faded away, slipped from memory, broke up, split, and splintered into increasingly niche and sectarian outfits, giving the sense that this long cycle had come to an end.

In truth, it's fair to say that Italian-language punk-rock is no longer in full swing, but it's still far from over: alongside a certain repetitiveness – partly due to the nature of the formula itself, which, bound by its own conventions, seems to leave little room for major transgressions or significant updates – there's also a growing awareness and renewed determination among both survivors and newcomers, who now draw not only on the Ramones but also on the very first generation of Italian punk, the one that predated hardcore, once again breaking away from it.

After all, already between the late '90s and the early years of the following decade, Gianmaria Accusani's Prozac + were rising to prominence, direct descendants of that homegrown, quintessentially punk phenomenon known as Great Complotto, as were Davide Toffolo's Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti.

PAY, a band from Varese that emerged in the first wave of the '90s, reissued in 2015 a deluxe edition of the punk-rock opera "Federico III e il Destino Infausto", originally recorded in 2005. Among the guests of honour featured on the concept album are, once again, the usual gurus: Freak Antoni and Alberto Camerini.

In 2008, the album "200 Bullets & Friends" by 200 Bullets, a Milanese band formed in 2002, came out with a distinctive twist: a guest on every track. Among the many names, we find Dani of Porno Riviste, Araya of Impossibili, and once again Camerini, who reworks one of his great masterpieces – "Computer Capriccio" – in a punk-rock version.

Shandon too, who had already covered Windopen's "Sei in banana dura" back in 2002 (a Bologna band, also from the Cramps scene, active since 1976), took on another major tribute in 2016, covering none other than Skiantos' "Eptadone" (1978), which I personally consider the greatest punk song ever written in Italy.

In 2017, in Caiolo, near Sondrio, in front of an impressive crowd of over two hundred people (some witnesses even claim two hundred and forty!), the "Maledetta Primavera Beer Festival" was held.

After a refined dinner of polenta and sausages on a memorable night, several punk bands played, including the excellent Pessimi Elementi as "hosts", right before the grand finale, rightfully left to Efrem "Araya" Mezzanini's Impossibili.

For a few hours, rivers of beer flowed once again among the young and the not-so-young, moved by nostalgia, legs went back to bouncing amid friendly and less-than-friendly pits, the cops once again became the dreaded "blue dogs", and, amid the unforgettable riffs of "Sul sedile con te" and "Punk Girl", the irresistible refrain of the "Rock'n'Roll Robot" cover played at double speed, and an endless string of "One, two, three, four!", the young and hugely talented Bad Frog, from Codogno (Lodi), also took to the stage with blistering songs lasting no more than a minute and a half, one of which is dedicated to a girl.

I like to think, though, that the girl is just a metaphor, that time has passed but not the urge to raise hell, to have fun and to entertain, and that the real recipient of these words is, in fact, music itself. Punk. Italian flower-punk.

The middle school days are over

The days of NOFX are over

I've changed my hairstyle

but I still like you

The wave has broken, but maybe it's only us, those of us who were young in the 90s, who have grown up, who have lost our innocence and our stupid urge for craziness. Only us, though, because among the new generations the bug is still going around.

And flower-punk is still alive and kicking.

Ride the wave of great music

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