Diana Est – The Goddess of Aesthetic Nights

A synthetic goddess, an angelic depiction of 80s ephemerality in tunic, sandals and kitchen gloves. Or maybe just the blinding hallucination of someone who'd spun their mind in too many circles. Diana Est remains one of the great mysteries of Italian pop. Had she been merely a passing phenomenon, ridden on the fads of the time — as was claimed back then — she would never have become an intergenerational mask, worthy of scholarly analysis and even the inspiration for stories and books (two above all: "Magnifica ossessione" by Matteo B. Bianchi and "Diana Est was here – Forse è già mattino e non lo so" by Enrico Panzi). Because beyond the value — for this writer, far from negligible — of the two hits she left behind, the character managed to earn an aura of immortality that is precisely the exact negation of her own premises. A plastic, fleeting icon, yet, in her own way, a lasting one. Who knows what today's Cristina Barbieri — mother of two and now an antiques dealer, long since at a safe distance from that "civilization of banality" she always identified with the music business — thinks of it all. While we wait — perhaps forever — to find out, let's attempt a reconstruction.

The weather around you is changing. And where has the old music gone? Musicians, session men have already worked out the refrain.

(Enrico Ruggeri, "Nuovo Swing")

An Empire of Plastic

When she signs a five-year contract with Dischi Ricordi in 1982, Cristina Barbieri is just "Mario Lavezzi's niece", a well-bred Milanese girl hidden behind a bulky fringe, whose only TV appearance so far has been as a backing singer for Ivan Cattaneo on the cult Rai show "Mister Fantasy" hosted by Carlo Massarini. She has the raw material, but she's still green, in need of shaping. Perhaps in the studio, the way they would do a couple of years later with the unknown Monica Stucchi, turned into her majesty Valerie Dore, medieval queen of Italo-disco, sung by someone else's voice (Dora Carofiglio of Novecento) on her first singles. But maybe there's no need to go that far: you can simply try to stretch those teenage vocal cords toward ambitious electropop goals. Not least because in the control room is a certain Enrico Ruggeri, who with his plastic-framed glasses and new-romantic charme had already caused a stir, first with Decibel and then on his solo debut with the underrated "Champagne Molotov". But while the Milanese singer-songwriter would mostly take care of the musical production, the aesthetic side would be handled by the artistic producer, Nicola Ticozzi, determined to forge a new female figure in the wake of the new yè-yè girls like Lio, Nathalie or Nena, but in a more postmodern key. Thus Cristina's metamorphosis into Diana is complete: goddess of the Hunt, blending mythological sacredness with a provocative, glamorous futurist taste, in a jumbled mix of classicism and kitsch science fiction. "A lolita from deep space, a handmaiden of the Roman Empire filtered through late-20th-century Mitteleuropa, switched on/off by a subtle androgyny bordering on angelic impalpability", is how Christian Zingales describes her in the book "Italiani bravi gente" (drawn from the Blow-Up column of the same name).

Here then come fuchsia tunics, yellow gloves and PVC earrings, along with that surreal fringe worthy of a masquerade party at the Blitz, which Diana shakes with sharp jerks of the head. Her first performances show her a bit stiff, yet already haughty and brazen, in her slender silhouette of a neoclassical sylph. She boldly faces the audience and the ever-lurking risk of unintentional comedy. What helps her is her ladylike bearing, a little less so the woodenness of her movements — though she manages to disguise it as a kind of robotic tanz à la Camerini, even sensual in its naivety: she waves her arms like mechanical blades, yet flaunts an unnatural grace, along with a thigh-high slit that can rival the divine Rettore. And she has a detached, alien gaze. She bursts off the screen, and a few hearts along with it.

Val la pena vivere solo dalle undici

("Tenax")

Maybe it's already morning and I don't know it

But it's not just image. Because in her very appearance — right from the name — Diana unites it with being, and in the singular present tense: est, as in the Latin verb. The medium is music, condensed into two killer 45s and another destined to remain just a collector's curio.

The debut is a bomb that goes off in the (aesthetic) nights of italodisco. With a hammering beat, triumphant horns, slapped bass and seriously dark synth lines, framing a killer chorus that mixes Italian and Latin, paraphrasing Seneca (or Terence, nobody's ever been sure): “Forse è già mattino e non lo so/ un mondo latino inventerò/ Tenax… / Sed modo senectus morbus est/ Carmen vitae immoderatae hic est”. Essentially an anthem to the night and to nightclubbing, to borrow a phrase from Iggy Pop ("it's only worth living from eleven on"), who knows if it was inspired by the wave fever of Florence's Tenax, which had opened a year earlier, or simply by the name of the brilliantine brand of the same name. It leaves behind a sense of empty excitement mixed with anguish, like diving into the void ("I can only laugh in the darkness"). Written by Ruggeri together with dance producer Stefano Previsti, "Tenax" (1982) quickly becomes a radio and dancefloor staple, selling over a hundred thousand copies despite never breaking through on the charts (peaking at no. 23). But, more than anything else, it leaves its mark. Even physically, on the wall of one of the temples of the Riviera nightlife scene, Riccione's Cocoricò, where its slogan-like line "Forse è già mattino e non lo so" would be inscribed for posterity. A year later Electra would record an English-language cover titled "Are You Automatic?".

Also worth noting is the B-side, "Notte senza pietà", which lowers the bpm for a more subdued reflection on nightlife, couched in the most classic Ruggeri-esque vocabulary, wrapped in a luxurious synth-pop shell: “Notte senza pietà, poca lucidità, quante cose farò/ una notte plastic, con un’anima chic, non mi nasconderò… Notte senza pietà che mi provocherà con un’altra boutade. Se l’amore non c’è io mi porto con me il marchese De Sade. Bene che si sposa al male”.

The Amazon Diana rides with reckless nonchalance across the stages of every music show of the era: Festivalbar, Discoring, Popcorn, Azzurro. Her extremely high-pitched vocals always travel dangerously close to going off-key, yet in their own way they seduce, while the angularity of her gestures has definitively turned into elegance, albeit one that's still eccentric and unsettling. Record executives rub their hands together, picturing stacks of bestsellers. They will never come.

The task of the postmodernists is to reclaim the past

(Diana Est)

Whoever stands out will win

Written in the stars of Diana Est, in fact, is the fate of a shooting star: just one more hit. It will be even more luminous and memorable, but it will also be the last of a career condemned to close after just 20 minutes of music in total. Because whoever stands out will win. And who could stand out more than a popstar determined to sink into oblivion at the very peak of success? A success that wasn't only Italian, that of "Le Louvre", the track that catapults Diana Est's melodramatic bob haircut onto dancefloors across half of Europe. The hook, this time, is a stunning synthetic riff — at once triumphant and romantic, pompous and inexorable — that stands out right from the start, introducing the new postmodern disco novelty. Diana is now the priestess of a futurist cultural revolution, prophesying the end of every artistic convention: “Fuori dai musei/ nuovi amici miei/ si distruggerà/ la civiltà delle banalità/ su seguitemi/ esibitemi/ alta moda là/ vincerà chi si distinguerà”. In a daring flight of imagination, paintings and works of art come to life and step out of their display cases to bring culture into a desolate consumer society: “Per molti secoli/ quei nobili/ sono rimasti nascosti sempre immobili/ con una voglia intensa/ di entrare nei bistrot… Computer dimmi se, di nuovo liberi/ con la Gioconda corrono nei vicoli”. A new anthem, even more gripping and poignant, with a miraculous melodic hook and enveloping synths that seem borrowed from Ultravox's "Visions In Blue" and Visage's "Fade To Grey". Naturally Ruggeri's stamp is there once again, fresh off the feat of "Polvere" and now at the peak of his decadent spleen, alongside his trusty collaborator Previsti.

Diana plays along and philosophizes in interviews: "Le Louvre expresses a way of living and thinking. In short, the task of the postmodernists is to reclaim the past". Some took her seriously, like Tommaso Labranca, who would conclude: "With her libertarian manifesto, Est announced the breaking down of barriers between art and everyday life, awaiting the collapse of museum walls where one must stay silent and the ultimate blending of statues and human beings. Deep down, the hope contained in that lyric was just one: the lowering of the artwork from artistic to everyday status, the erasure of the value that arose almost exclusively from museum display".

Once again, more than the chart placement (only no. 43), what will count are the copies sold (a hundred thousand) and the mark left on the collective imagination, helped along by a string of TV appearances, including Festivalbar (where it finished second in the Discoverde section, the one for young acts, behind Scialpi).

And once again the B-side shouldn't be overlooked, where alongside a brief instrumental version of "Le Louvre" comes the ineffable "Marmo di città", one of those electric ravings about urban alienation that were all the rage at the time (from Loredana Berté's "Folle città" to the evergreen "Fantasia" by Matia Bazar). Behind a wall of synthetic pulses, Diana rattles off her new, disconcerting litany: “Marmo di città/ non ti sveglierò/ e la verità/ non ti chiederò… Quante storie ha vissuto/ noi non lo sapremo mai/ ed il mondo è cambiato/ coi suoi lunghi giorni bui/ Spettatore distratto/ muto sommergibile/ domicilio coatto/ amore un po’ impossibile”.

Diana Est was just a cosmic ambassador, an icy signal flare for an exciting free fall.

(Christian Zingales)

A diamond is not forever

It seems like the perfect prelude to the long-promised LP, but instead something goes wrong. First of all, in the relationship between Diana Est and Ruggeri. Their magical partnership comes to an abrupt end, partly due to the numerous solo commitments of the former Decibel frontman. So for the new single, the Milanese singer is entrusted musically to Oscar Avogadro (Radius, Bertè, Faust'O, Oxa, Alice, etc.), with lyrics by Giampiero Ameli and Matteo Fasolino. The result is a drastic shift - both vocal and musical - titled "Diamanti", which openly eyes the contemporary Matia Bazar, sliding into an electro-tango (or rather a Libertango, given its affinities with the Grace Jones hit), sensual in flavor but a bit flimsy. This time not even the B-side is spared: "Pekino" is a gummy mass of midi keyboards and cheap orientalism, next to which the Aneka of "Japanese Boy" looks like Kate Bush.

It will be a flop, redeemed only in part by the collector's value the 7-inch will acquire in later years, thanks in part to the peculiarity of certain copies in which the "i" on the cover was made with a plastic diamond.

At this point Diana Est, literally, disappears. Ricordi buries her five-year contract in a drawer, and the music business erases her name from its marquee.

Years go by, and the new decade is certainly no ideal ally. Throughout the '90s, synth-pop and italodisco fans find themselves at a crossroads: renounce everything, or hole up in the basement like carbonari of that unspeakable plastic era.

It's with the dawn of the new millennium, however, that the miracle happens. Because along with the rediscovery of (new) new wave, that glorious synthetic underground blacklisted in the previous decade also resurfaces. It turns out that italodisco, once a skeleton in the closet, can even turn into a point of national export pride. And in this unexpected wave of reappraisal, Diana Est's new metamorphosis also takes shape: from disgraced and unmentionable kitsch meteor to cult queen of the ever-spreading '80s parties.

This sets off a media-driven Chi l'ha visto? hunt, unexpectedly won by Radio Popolare. It's the historic left-wing station that pulls off the coup in 2004, capturing the voice of Cristina Barbieri, who from her unspecified hideaway confesses she retired out of disgust for the music scene of the time, hinting that she didn't even remain on good terms with her mentor Ruggeri. Credited rumors, meanwhile, reveal that Diana scornfully refused to reappear on any kind of wistful TV revival show - from La Notte Vola to Meteore to Amanda Lear's Cocktail d'Amore (the only one that might actually have deserved her).

Finding each other and saying goodbye

In short, if it's true - as Zingales suggests - that "it was an entire generation that plunged into an oceanic void, the one that aimed from the '80s toward the 2000s, and that Diana Est was merely a cosmic ambassador, an icy harbinger of that thrilling free fall", the axiom still holds that you don't get out of the '80s alive, not even in the new millennium. Hence an unexpected flood of covers and tributes: in 2004 Prezioso feat. Marvin brings "Le Louvre" back to the dancefloor with a thoroughly cheesy, beat-saturated dance remix; in 2012 her friend Ivan Cattaneo pays homage with a bombastic "Tenax" on his covers album "80 e basta!", while Ruggeri reclaims it together with Serpenti in an intoxicating remake. That same year, Unison Detune release a "Le Louvre" in a porno-groove style à la Immanuel Casto, followed four years later by one from the German electronic project Bionda e Lupo, complete with a breathy Teutonic vocal to round it off.

But the real news is that Diana Est herself reappears on stage thirty years after retiring, with a handful of rare live (or near-live) performances in 2013, 2014 and 2016. The chosen venues are hardly arenas - from a club in Mareno di Piave (Treviso) to the Chiringuito Parco Forlanini in Milan, to the 80 Festival in Palmanova (Udine), plus a few dates abroad (for instance, at the Doka in Amsterdam) - but the fans' welcome is enthusiastic and spills over online. "A lot of people told me: 'I'm moved to see you.' But me?! Damn, thirty years have gone by and you're half the age of half my age", she jokes modestly on stage. She looks identical: same bob haircut, same tunic, same naive exuberance, only slightly softened by experience. But it's just a one-off reappearance, which does nothing to dispel the aura of mystery built up over the years. Ethereal and elusive, Diana Est has by now definitively vanished from pop's radar. Like a lunar mirage, dissolved into space-time.

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