Giorgio Canali - Poetry and the hammer

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The fact that Giorgio Canali was born in Predappio, the town in Romagna famous for being the birthplace of Benito Mussolini, is a biographical detail that fits surprisingly well with the biting irony and fierce anti-fascism that define this guitarist, singer-songwriter, producer and sound engineer. A central figure on the Italian rock scene between the Eighties and Nineties, first as a sound technician and then as a musician, it was only with his solo career, launched in 1998, that he found an effective outlet for his vision of the world and of music, blending self-deprecation and rage, the political and the poetic, the noisy and the melodic, blasphemy and laughter.

Initially shaped by a long period spent living in France, his songwriting - first as a solo artist and then with Rossofuoco - eventually settled into Italian, and increasingly focused on message, including social and political commentary, somewhat at the expense of the more introspective and reflective side, which nonetheless still surfaces in his more recent releases. Not least, live Giorgio Canali pursues an indie-rock work ethic worthy of Stakhanov, racking up countless shows over a quarter of a century, played at thunderous volumes, where intensity and sweat point back to a way of relating to the stage and the audience that, in the 2020s, has become something of a rarity: looking each other in the eye, sharing emotions, feeling the blood pulse hard through your veins.

Outwardly prickly but essentially approachable, even for interviews and chats by the side of the stage, Giorgio Canali will probably thoroughly hate the fact that we're writing this in-depth profile about him - necessary as it may be: a retrospective on a veteran who calls himself a “useless old bastard” and who has never fallen in line with trends; independent and contrarian, with a “fuck you all” in his pocket for the entire world.

From punk beginnings to France: 1958-1997

Born in 1958 and already active in the Seventies within the local punk scene with Potemkin, in the Eighties he also became interested in electronics and Midi samplers, playing with Roberto Zoli and as Politrio. These experiences led him, in the second half of the Eighties, to work as a sound technician for one of the greatest Italian rock bands of all time, Litfiba; this is how he met Gianni Maroccolo, with whom he would go on to collaborate for a long time. Together, Maroccolo and Canali produced music for Beau Geste, Timoria and Cccp, a band they also joined as musicians for the closing album “Epica Etica Etnica Pathos” (1990).

At this point his life splits in two: on one side are his years with Csi as a guitarist, which continue until the project comes to an end, and on the other his work in France with Noir Désir, as a sound technician. He rediscovers the raw sound of guitar-driven rock and starts writing a debut solo album, while also working as a producer and sound engineer for other artists.

Fuck You All: from “Whatever happened to Lazlotòz” to “Rojo”

For his debut solo album, Giorgio Canali chose an eccentric and sardonic title, Che fine ha fatto Lazlotòz (1998), referencing László Tóth, the Hungarian-born naturalized Australian who took a hammer to Michelangelo's "Pietà", shouting (in Italian) "Christ is risen! I am Christ!". The album, half in French and half in Italian, features a large cast of musician friends, including Cristiano Godano (of Marlene Kuntz), Umberto Palazzo (Massimo Volume), Gianni Maroccolo (Litfiba, Cccp, Csi, etc.), Marco Parente, and friends Noir Desir. The steady lineup would later take the name Rossofuoco, initially made up of Claude Saut (bass), Marco Greco (guitars) and Luca Martelli (drums; also occasionally active with Litfiba and Piero Pelù).

A rock-boned album, jagged and bitter, it's made up of a dozen songs that only reveal a pained, pessimistic sensibility when they stretch out and breathe. Emerging from a cloud of distortion, "Nanana nanana" puts Canali's angry, tormented voice front and center, in the first of many crescendos throughout his career: the ideal format for ratcheting up the tension, right through to the explosive, high-volume finale. The tension gripping "Coule la vie" - which would be reprised in a more violent form on the third album, Tutti contro tutti, sung in Italian, as "Alè alè" - is another element that would recur often throughout his songbook, just like the notion of a murky, pessimistic ballad, which finds an early prototype in "Au Bout" and "Nessun presente":

E quando si predicava nessun futuro nessun futuro

ti ho visto incrociare le dita dietro la schiena

E il risultato è qua davanti ai tuoi occhi meravigliati,

spalancati su questo presente inesistente

Along these same lines, also worth remembering is "Nuvole & Blériot", a Neil Young-esque piece on a par with "Zuma", telling the story of aviation pioneer Louis Blériot in a way that becomes a message of freedom and dreams, but also of despair (“E queste strade che mi attraversano il cuore/ come Norbert Dentressangle/ con più rumore/ attraversa il continente”).

The genre of catastrophe in music, another of his specialties, is introduced by "100.000", one of the most accomplished tracks on this debut, thanks in part to its disorienting, vividly imaginative lyrics:

E udiamo il sinistro fragore

di 100.000 canzoni d’amore

muovere inesorabili

come carri armati

su di noi

Akosh Szelevenyi's miasmic sax on "Va tutto bene" accompanies a hallucinated, depressive delirium somewhere between post-rock whispers and high-octane rock flare-ups, with the drums pounding hard and the guitars drowning in distortion.

Non ho più vuoti di memoria

since I no longer have any memories

I no longer have time to think

since I think I'm dead

More than the raging noise-rock of “Lazlotòz”, an irreverent portrait of the divine, the most politicized track deserves a mention: “1.2.3.1000 Vietnam”, which looks to the past, from Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, to imagine an anti-imperialist Apocalypse, where even Hemingway gets struck down by God while crossing the street.

A debut album that still feels like a snapshot of an artist exploring his own style, Whatever happened to Lazlotòz fits squarely within the Italian indie rock scene of the late Nineties, devoted to the song form but also drawn to noisy detours and, why not, singer-songwriter leanings.

The second studio album, Rossofuoco (2002), credited to Giorgio Canali & Rossofuoco but still often regarded as a solo work by the Romagna-born singer, builds on and refines the ideas of the debut, pacing the energy more carefully and letting Canali's pessimistic poetry emerge in a more measured, gradual way within the songs. The now more seasoned band delivers a tidier sound, without losing the live-in-studio intensity of Whatever happened to Lazlotòz. The use of French is also reduced, and some of his songwriting models are effectively distilled into tracks that would go on to become live staples, such as his own take on “The End” reworked into “Questa è la fine”, where electric ballad and apocalyptic omen, delivered with a sardonic sneer, come together effectively in a dramatic crescendo:

Togli l’audio, amore

Non c’è niente da sentire qui

Nei postriboli del post-rock

Anemici piagnucolano dentro i riverberi

Although, even more than on the debut, not every track maintains the same level of inspiration, the impact of the agitated noise-post-rock of “La Démarche Des Crabes” keeps relying on some of the strongest elements of Giorgio Canali's career, namely the intensity of his delivery behind the mic and the dramatic unfolding of his lyrics and songs, always aiming for maximum emotional impact. There's also room for a noise-rock track that forgoes post-rock ups and downs and detours, “Rossocome”, which has become a classic thanks in part to a chorus that's especially effective in capturing Canali's angry, tormented aesthetic, as he imagines a bloody act of revenge carried out at a red light against consumerist, bourgeois society (“Fatevi fottere/ voi e le vostre berline in leasing”), while inside he lives an existential torment (“A me resta qualche sigaretta/ a voi qualche speranza”; “la tempesta/ nella mia testa”). The song easily becomes a manifesto for Giorgio Canali, both wrathful and resigned, and the closing, increasingly furious repetition of the scream “Fatevi fottere!” effectively sums up the raw energy his live shows convey. It's no coincidence that when he published an autobiography in 2011, he chose precisely “Fatevi fottere” as its title.

The third album, marked by a downward arrow on its cover and usually known as Giorgio Canali & Rossofuoco (2004), continues a process of refinement that benefits above all from a greater consistency of inspiration. It opens with the suicidal fantasy “Precipito” (which the arrow on the cover alludes to…), a bittersweet fantasy of death built around “Where Is My Mind” by the Pixies, which serves as a springboard for other lines of searing, potent pessimism, such as:

Guarda che precisione

La mia rotta di collisione

Con il mondo

This time the ten-track running order manages to keep interest high right up to a final dip, even with the electric half-ballad "Guantanamo," a nostalgic vision of the past turning into reflections on a bleak present, accompanied - in a splendid counterpoint - by mournfully festive horns:

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The muscular Fumo di Londra and the bitterly ironic resistance anthem No Pasaran pave the way for one of his most powerful blasts of noisy rock, Mostri sotto il letto, with more memorable lines ("Sarà che se canti la vie en rose/ Io ci vedo la mort en noir"). Social commentary seeps into many of the tracks, but Fuoco amico is the most openly political song, while Savonarola (La fine del mondo a Ferrara) delivers its social commentary through allegory.

Toward the end he takes aim once again at love songs ("Questa è una canzone d'amore"), only to close with an electric love ballad ("Questa no"; the title should be read together with the previous one).

Giorgio Canali's rock resistance, armed with distortion and rage, is by now fully defined with Giorgio Canali & Rossofuoco, a third album that brings to maturity the ideas - sometimes a little raw and uneven - of the first two. Granted, his blend of noisy rock, somewhere between noise-rock and post-rock, but also post-grunge, is hardly going to overturn the rules of music or upend the listener, so much so that each album is worth hearing mainly for the handful of standout tracks it contains - new anthems for a worldview that fuses tears of rage and pain with unstoppable energy and a longing to surrender to sadness.

This balance of forces, this restlessness driving the music of Giorgio Canali and Rossofuoco, shifts formula on the fourth album, Tutti contro tutti (2007), dedicated to Federico Aldrovandi, killed by police officers on 25 September 2005.

Fiercely opposed to both new and old forms of fascism, the album is shot through with a grieving rage, and Giorgio Canali himself introduced it with these words:

[…] Tutti contro tutti is a snapshot of a precise historical situation, today's, in which every form of belonging — to an ethnicity, a social class, a civilization, a creed, a passion, an organization, a category, you name it — becomes grounds for conflict, often bloody, sometimes epoch-making… [...] Tutti contro tutti opens with truth and ends with a cough, opens with rage and ends with the same rage: over time we've been taught that recycling is a moral duty

The long "Verità, la verità" is a manifesto of this inner pain, of this restlessness and unease, but the pain turns into fury in the new version of "Coule La Vie", retitled "Alè alè", where he rereads Giorgio Gaber ("Accade che la libertà/ È partecipazione agli utili") to depict cross-cutting racism and a hypocritical, crassly dumbed-down society:

The freedom of the future

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But also to sing at the top of his lungs the pain for the death of Aldrovandi, pointing the finger at those guilty of an infamous crime:

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The outburst of this unease generates a bitterly ironic anthem of rage like "Canzone della tolleranza e dell'amore universale", where the rattling off of racist, discriminatory clichés alternates with breakneck flare-ups howling of a fight with no rules. Musically, the whining, screeching distorted guitars alternate with tighter, high-volume rock sections, following a by-now well-established style.

The tracklist placement of the Italian-language version of a song by Noir Desir, "Settembre, aspettando" ("Septembre, en attendant"), suggests a kind of emotional surrender, a collapse that could be the prelude to a renewed death wish, already explored by Canali in other songs and made especially effective here by the anxiety-inducing repetition of the quintessentially melancholy line, "Ci penso ancora".

The last two tracks are thus less effective than one might expect, even though they ideally close out the album's overarching discourse of rage, especially the closing "Il ballo della tosse". Strongly charged on an emotional level, Tutti contro tutti struggles here and there to find a musical identity, leaving Canali's rage to prop up the whole thing and, as a result, often weakening the overall experience. On the one more emotional, subdued track, where he commits to a more intimate, vibrant vocal style — namely "Non dormi" — one can appreciate how the political, furious, deafening Canali needs the more restrained one in order to be properly appreciated in his particular idea of rock songwriting.

Canali remains above all a chronicler of shattered dreams and squandered lives, a man with fire in his guts and the chaos of despair in his head: his best music captures the same ennui that also surfaced in the work of Cccp.

The squaring of the circle is finally achieved across two different, complementary albums, where message and form both come sharply into focus. Giorgio Canali draws fully on his peculiar habit of quoting and twisting other people's lyrics and music, turning a game into a working method, while pairing his angry, shouted vocals more decisively with a more confidential, emotional and intimate style, giving more room to the lower register of his voice. At last, the arrangements shift a little away from bare-bones, thunderous rock to explore a more elaborate weave of post-rock and post-grunge, geared towards creating atmospheres and soundscapes well suited to Canali's bitter, provocative lyrics, delivered with irony and a flair for excess.

Nostra Signora della dinamite (2009) is his most intimate and moving album, in its own way. It opens with another hymn to his own disappearance, like "Precipito", but aimed at a more philosophical self-destruction, programmatic and chosen as an ideal way of life: "Quello della foto" is a crescendo of wailing, whistling guitars, launched at top speed towards a will to vanish that easily shades into suicide, a spectacular self-destruction. Once again, certain lines stand out ("Io sono il disertore ignoto") along with the fervour of the delivery, continuing a tradition of Giorgio Canali's solo work.

The real discovery lies on the side of the post-rock love ballads, like "Lezioni di poesia" (a self-mocking title) and "Tutti gli uomini" (quoting his beloved Joy Division), or in the tormented pop-rock of "Nuvole senza Messico" (which quotes Modugno, one of his fixations, but also Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Douglas Adams, Enzo Jannacci and Bob Dylan, among others). Giorgio Canali's bitter disillusion dominates the title track, a prayer from the abyss played as a twilit blues-rock number:

Nelle nostre danze elettriche, negli sconforti autunnali

Fra le lenzuola sudicie a leccarci le ferite

Proteggi i nostri impeti, nostra Signora della dinamite

This is a Canali who keeps commenting on society even as he talks about himself, even when he speeds up for "MP nella BG" (Marco Pantani at the "giant marble", the monument celebrating him in Imola), resigned in his weary rage. But the true strength of Nostra Signora della dinamite lies in the atmospheric, emotionally charged closer "Mme et Mr Curie", a long post-rock ballad that explodes with the devastating image of the title couple's love:

Et voilà nel dagherrotipo madame e monsieur Curie

Con il loro sorriso radioattivo

The counterpart to Nostra Signora della dinamite, the most pensive and inward-looking of the two albums, is the incendiary, visceral Rojo (2011), raging against everything and everyone, with full-blown anthems of rebellion like "Regola #1" (which is "to smash everything"), jittery pop-rock tracks ("Ci sarà"; "Morire di noja"; "Sai dove") and a few new electric ballads ("Controvento"; "Treno di mezzanotte").

The partially reshuffled lineup, with Steve DalCol of Frigidaire Tango taking over on guitar and Nanni Fanelli on bass, accompanies Giorgio Canali at the end of a creative cycle: the somewhat raw ideas of his early days finally found their fulfilment across two albums that are at once similar and different.

As with his previous records, on Rojo too a handful of songs stand out from the rest, and here they sit, quite deliberately, at opposite ends of his expressive range: the aching, semi-acoustic "Orfani dei cieli" and, above all, the revolutionary blast of "Carmagnola #3", a desperate partisan anthem sung in three languages (Italian, French and Spanish) that reworks a song from the French Revolution:

C'era una volta un re, seduto alla scrivania

C'era una volta una canzoncina: Partigiano, portami via

C'era una volta una fiaba sonora

Which ended with a song

Let's dance this Carmagnola

and long live the sound

long live the sound

of the cannon!

Even if Giorgio Canali — with or without Rossofuoco — may never have written one definitive work of Italian rock, he's carved out his own poetics of malaise and sardonic smiles, biting social and political criticism paired with twisted quotations.

In 1999 he wrote the soundtrack for Davide Ferrario's film “Guardami”, loosely inspired by the life of Moana Pozzi. From 2001 he also took part in the Per Grazia Ricevuta project, a world-music and electronic evolution of Csi. In 2010 he was supposed to take part in the album “Materiali resistenti” alongside other artists, paying tribute to the “Materiale resistente” compilation curated by Csi in 1995, but his “Lettera del compagno Lazlo al colonnello Valerio”, another anti-fascist invective burning with rage, was rejected because of the blasphemies in the lyrics; Canali performed it live instead and included it on the CD accompanying the first edition of his biographical book-interview “Fatevi fottere”, in 2012.

Rossofuoco ease off a bit, and Canali commits to a series of concerts paying tribute to Ian Curtis, alongside Angela Baraldi, between 2011 and 2015. It's a long creative pause, useful for recharging and finding new inspiration.

Shitty Songs: from “Perle per porci” to “Yellow Peril”

Giorgio Canali & Rossofuoco return with Perle per porci, a covers collection from 2016. Songs that Canali has always felt were his own, with the aim of telling his own story through others but also of bringing to light a number of original tracks that were overlooked by the wider public or otherwise never received the success that (in his view) they deserved. Among them are Eugenio Finardi and his protégé Le Luci della Centrale Elettrica, among many other practically unknown names.

The return with new material comes with another of his titles, Undici canzoni di merda con la pioggia dentro (2018), which doesn't take itself too seriously. These are tracks that are generally more subdued than those on Rojo, a touch less inspired than those on Nostra Signora della dinamite, but still signs of a contemporary rock singer-songwriter craft, suffering (“Messaggi a nessuno”) and occasionally still lively (“Piove, finalmente piove”; “Undici”). Here and there the old explosive energy resurfaces (“Emilia parallela”), along with his skill at writing offbeat pop-rock (“Fuochi supplementari”), but the album, while a welcome return overall, is remembered above all for “Mandate Bostik”, the closing electric ballad, a new (and lesser) “Mme et Mr Curie”.

The album Venti (2020) was recorded remotely by the band's four members (Giorgio Canali, Luca Martelli, Marco Greco and Steve DalCol), due to the Covid-19 lockdown. The tracks number twenty as well, bringing together the various facets of Giorgio Canali's solo work, bitterly commenting on society and pining with love. “Eravamo noi” is a new manifesto of his angry nostalgia, a guitar arpeggio caught between post-rock murk and electronics, but there's a sharp bitterness running through a world wounded by the pandemic (“Nell'aria”) and ensnared by power (“Wounded Knee”), in which an increasingly difficult love must be told (“Acomepidì”; “Meteo in cinque parti”) and a resistance that's by now impossible (“Circondati”).

Even though every now and then the tracks proceed more out of craft than from a precise compositional and narrative idea, a nocturnal ballad like “Requiem per i gatti neri” is one of the high points of his decadent, disillusioned poetry, a deep wound that Canali's cavernous voice explores verse after verse.

His passion for Bob Dylan and his harmonica closes the long tracklist, and so “Rotolacampo” mixes Sixties-flavored memories, self-directed insults and apocalyptic visions.

Venti is a Covid album, and as such its results bear the marks of an unusual process of conception and development, with the band's members scattered across the planet. It's an overabundant record, at times almost a dress rehearsal by a seasoned lineup full of veteran musicians by now, capable of pulling a song (maybe not the song of the decade) out of a couple of ideas thrown together, a spark, a flash of inspiration.

The 2023 album, Yellow Peril, had a more traditional gestation. In fact, it starts right back from Covid-19 with the opening track “C'era ancora il sole,” which moves from the end of lockdown to new, catastrophic socio-political visions.

And maybe yes

Maybe the sun was out

What I know for sure is that we started breathing again

And people were dancing, yes

You could kiss

We were us, us again

With the freedom to speak, maybe

The Resistance is told once again, now with total bitterness (“Morti per niente”), while the new global emergencies are foreshadowed by the sarcastic “Yellow Peril.” Giorgio Canali seems ever more severe in commenting on what surrounds him, a world he portrays as harsh and foolish, unjust and incoherent (“Pulizie etiche”).

In terms of sound, the multiplicity of Venti, a composite and atypical album, gives way to guitar-driven rock, full of midtempos and traditional structures, not too far from that homegrown alternative scene from which Giorgio Canali the solo artist emerged a quarter of a century earlier. After all, the fact that the album closes with “La fine del mondo,” a two-speed rock track caught between anguished poetry and desperate dance, makes for an ideal coda to the second part of his career, the one following the post-Rojo hiatus. We're waiting, of course, for our Lazlo to pick up the hammer again, and tell us once more about his rage.

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