Lucio Corsi - The white arrow of Italian glam

Between David Bowie and Marc Bolan, who do you prefer?

Renato Zero

That was Lucio Corsi's answer, right around the release of Cosa faremo da grandi?. It was January 19, 2020, the world was about to change forever not long after, and the Tuscan songwriter was far from imagining he would one day become a Sanremo superstar, on everyone's lips and, to top it off, at the top of the Italian charts. Lucio Corsi, a campesino from the Maremma countryside around Grosseto, has always loved being surprised and surprising others, or changing his life in the span of a pregnancy, give or take.

From the Tuscan hills he slides down to the banks of the Naviglio in the "Grán Milán" to make it as an artist: yes, of course, an artist. First at the academy, which proves too confining, then out on the street playing and playing, with a guitar, maybe a harmonica, in tight clothes that would be too big even for the young Bowie, who, however much of a die-hard Zero fan he may claim to be, still remains one of his key reference points.

Lucio Corsi doesn't have a rebellious streak. And that was clear to see at Sanremo, when he shed his fears and offered them to the world with the delicacy of a successful loser who doesn't fear judgment and accepts himself as he is, just as he's always been. Even back when he was barely in his twenties, Lucio was supposedly meant to climb the walls, leap over ditches, fish in murky waters. Or maybe not. Because Corsi, deep down, represents a new generation, a bit indifferent and sometimes self-interested, made up of feelings that last mere seconds and uncertainties that seem to drag on for years.

And from his very beginnings he's been churning out songs non-stop, starting from the exact moment when, touring with the backing of Zaganelli, who sensed something and believed in him, he was spotted by Dragogna (Ministri) for Picicca Dischi, with whom, in just a few weeks, he wrote and recorded Altalena Boy, a 5-track EP, to which we should add the earlier extended play Vetulonia Dakar, also made up of 5 tracks. The experiment put forward by this skinny, "quixotic" lad from Vetulonia is a battle against windmills, broadly speaking a fight with fake weapons in which, on one side, stands the new Lucio, and on the other, the old Corsi. In the new one you can hear the "Principe", as if he were singing "Atlantide" while taking a death-defying ride on a swing ("Altalena Boy"), Brunori Sas ("Alieni") hitchhiking with aliens bound for Santiago, or, in the lovely "L'astronave", Jovanotti, who always manages to sneak in in the end.

But it's with "Godzilla" that Corsi really comes into his own and introduces us to the one man band of the earlier Vetulonia Dakar, where we hear the young man's rural, genuine nature: "Cocomero" and "Søren" above all, with his Errea tracksuit and dinosaur-chickens resting on guitar grounds laid down by the early Bennato, with a Gaetano-like attitude.

Guardare di notte dall'alto un temporale significa inevitabilmente

capire che piove solamente dai lampioni in giù

("Le api")

The impact is strong. Even if success is still light-years away. The first significant shift in his musical journey comes shortly after, when Lucio ventures onto the slippery ground of "meta-morphic", instinctive singer-songwriting, of a conscious return to childhood (perhaps one never truly left behind), of using fable to represent his own experiences. It's a tricky vein to mine, having been both handled by true greats and, more recently, trampled on by lesser talents, and inherently risky, because revisiting childhood often exposes the presence of ideas that distort it, along with one's own adult carelessness.

Despite its short gestation (at least in terms of recording), which took place at the family's country house in the Maremma, Bestiario musicale was released in 2017 and is striking for the depth of its design, with arrangements worthy of a cowboy Sufjan Stevens ("L'upupa", the single "La lepre") and a lyrical skill befitting a true animal tamer. There's a touch of the romantic, nostalgic, shaggy restlessness of Lucio Dalla (also present in Abiku, here in the excellent "La volpe"), a touch of Bruno Lauzi's wordplay juggling, and, underneath it all, an aspiration to converse with the generation of poet-songwriters ("La lepre", "L'istrice", "L'upupa"): Bestiario musicale is in fact skilled at making that tradition its own, projecting it into its own small world of a children's tent, lit up with stylized figures and oblivious to the outside world.

"Moving to the big city made me feel even more attached to the Maremma. That much is certain, I realized I really do love living there. Maybe even the melancholy of no longer having all those animals, all those olive trees around me made me want to talk about it", the then very young Corsi told us in an early interview. As in true children's literature, the songs on Bestiario can be read one way or another, or every way at once; resting on the simple observation that children aren't beings fundamentally different from adults, to whom simplified content must be doled out, more or less blindly (that notion exists only in the mind of the "simple" or lazy adult).

Although the tracks often lack a true melodic identity (to the point of becoming a mere Renaissance-style accompaniment divertissement for Lucio's amusing spoken word on "La lucertola"), it's the arrangements that are the real heart of the record, crafted in the spirit of a shifting, minimalist DIY aesthetic, lit up with glam flourishes on "Il lupo", with a bedroom-sized grandeur on "Il cinghiale", as if in a theatrical show where it's the set design doing the talking, not the actors.

Even within such an extremely elegant style (the nocturnal elegy of “La civetta”) and the volcanic, proudly “contrarian” character of Lucio, the Bestiario musicale is a light-hearted work, miyazaki-esque in spirit (and finally, substantively, Italian without any regrets), almost shy in putting forward its own view of the world, aware of the weight of having, for once, the means to draw the world as one would wish it to be. In doing so, it reveals the immense power of a mind capable of imagining possibility - something that adults so often lack.

Both the cover of 'Musical Bestiary' and those of the previous EPs are paintings by Nicoletta Rabiti, my mother. This matters a lot to me, and I'll keep using her drawings for future records too. Before I started playing music I used to draw a lot - as a kid I wanted to be a car designer! I should say that my parents never forced me to make music or anything else, they always let me be free. That's a great thing

After opening for his friends Baustelle and Brunori Sas, Corsi spends 2017 playing more or less everywhere across Italy, welcomed by hundreds of fans enchanted by the charm of this minstrel who seems to come partly from outer space and partly from some half-abandoned beach on the Tuscan coast.

2019, on the other hand, is the year that marks the beginning of the turning point. Corsi signs with Caselli's Sugar label. A few months later comes Cosa faremo da grandi?. Third try, third bullseye. The Tuscan singer-songwriter returns to the stage with his overflowing palette of colours, amid phantasmagoric visions and metaphorical allusions.

This time around, Corsi aims straight for a singer-songwriter formula with a glamorous edge and aesthetic, without giving up his trademark leaning towards a childlike, lively, fairy-tale-like, poetic and playful imagination. It's a compendium of orchestral sounds and riffs worthy of the most glam Bowie (“Freccia bianca” above all), unfolding smoothly from one verse to the next, between an embrace and the memory of a dream never realised. Everything is emphasised with class by the masterful support of an array of top-notch musicians, starting with the trusty Bianconi (mellotron, prophet, moog, backing vocals, acme siren). A veritable little orchestra that backs the Tuscan musician at every turn, sealing his old-fashioned jester's verve in the more “choral” episodes (“Trieste”, “La ragazza trasparente”) and stepping back when he turns into the engaged - but not overly so - minstrel (“Senza titolo”).

Cosa faremo da grandi? gathers nine small great gems, lifted from the sand like the shells mentioned in the title track, wisely placed as the opener. It's one of those songs that the beloved Renato Zero would have written had he been born in the Nineties. A refrain that spins like an old-fashioned carousel on words that speak to the perpetual, inescapable unease of a generation sinking along with the boat built by fathers who were too greedy and wasteful.

There's a mystery in every day that begins

After a night that ends

I never understood

Who coloured the shells

And how they manage to travel

Across these great distances

If I go to the harbour I ask the boats

That bask in the sun but stay white

The sea with its winds and waves (“like bicycle wheels”), the fish and seagulls, the beach and the salt are much more than a mere imaginary backdrop. It's the setting in which the entire narrative of the record unfolds, one that, for the occasion, also becomes a sort of serialised short film, directed by Tommaso Ottomano. Just listening to the soft, lulling “Onde” is enough to get a full sense of it. Just as some references to the golden epic of early-Seventies glam come through clearly, with its load of acoustic phrasing and festive strings (“Amico vola via”).

Cosa faremo da grandi? reveals itself as an enchanting treasure chest of epic melodies wrapped in sublime poetry. An album with the wind in its sails, sailing serenely and in full canvas through a vast sea of pop fascinations. Lucio Corsi is both captain and sailor of his own vessel, fleeing routine. A boat whose timeless charm caresses and uplifts, carrying the listener toward a forgotten atoll where the essence of a glam-rock spirit - far from buried - can be rediscovered once again, like a chest holding an incredible treasure with a mesmerizing glow.

From 21 October to 11 November 2020, Corsi experiences his first brush with popular television, even though he's still practically unknown to most, as a recurring guest - together with his band, made up of Antonio Cupertino, Marco Ronconi, Iacopo Nieri, Giulio Grillo, Filippo and Michelangelo Scandroglio - on the TV show "L'assedio", hosted by Daria Bignardi on Nove. It's his first real contact with a mainstream audience, and with a crowd far larger than the usual one or two thousand people. Between concerts, recording breaks and bursts of social media activity, on 21 April 2023 Corsi reappears in great shape with his third album, La gente che sogna, followed by a summer tour that kicked off on 17 June, opening for the Who at Firenze Rocks.

Spaceship and record player. Maybe that's all there is to it, in those two words, in their most outward-facing meanings, in the spinning motion that turns into sound, melody, step. From the very first notes of his fourth record, Lucio Corsi plays with words like a child daydreaming about the little world inside his own house. But he knows that, in the end, "you need a nightmare to wake up with relief" ("La gente che sogna"). And that "everyone wanted to get there, to the world without flaws, where humans were the only ones missing, where statues walked to keep up with the times" ("Astronave Giradisco"). And so it all comes together. Because La gente che sogna is, at the end of the day, a beautiful chimera. A castle in the air, "furnished" while fingers stroke the Bowie posters forever hung on a bedroom wall. And still, sad men "inside the house, with their hearts in pieces, in the darkness of a mine" ("Orme").

The Tuscan storyteller now knows what he wants to do when he grows up, and returns with a record that's all guts and soul, while on the cover there's a new ballerina, once again painted for him by his mother Nicoletta. The "Orme" (Footprints) that the minstrel from Vetulonia contemplates verse by verse are nothing more than a wound to blow on. A metaphor conceived by imagining Ivan Graziani as a dinner guest of Banco del Mutuo Soccorso. Corsi "puts gloss on his lips and polish on his nails". After all, "time only works in front of the mirror" ("Glam Party").

La gente che sogna escapes "the clutches of the evening", while still clinging to the night of a lost time. A very distant time. The time of Mick Ronson's riffs, a guru in every chord. "Hunky Dory" is indeed the mirage, the work to strive toward. Corsi lines up nine songs "inside the radio". In short, he crafts an album that doesn't upend anything compared to the immediate past, but which has the gift of a stubborn dream. The unrecognisable E.T. of "Astronave Giradisco" is precisely the image that stands out most clearly across this seemingly still pond. Musically we're in the territory of a Bowie out on day release among the Florentine hills. So "Lou Reed's satellite of love" flies lofty and loud, before "Magia nera" pays a few too many obvious dues chasing after "Suffragette City" without quite brushing up against it. The reference (?) to Count Dracula from Carletto il principe dei mostri, i.e. Fujiko Fujio, changes things, though, and rallies the lovers of manga from a bygone era. And that's enough.

Glam, revival, the man who fell to the Maremma: you can call it whatever you like. La gente che sogna remains, in any case, a brazen, mischievous, playful album. A Ferris wheel that's always nice to climb back onto.

Before reappearing and essentially breaking through everywhere, Lucio Corsi once again gets some "help" from a world that in theory should be very far removed from his own. This time it's Carlo Verdone acting as his guide, introducing him to the wider public on 13 November 2024, the day Corsi releases the single "Tu sei il mattino", included in the soundtrack of the third season of the series "Vita da Carlo", which tells the story of the everyday life and past of the great Roman director and actor, and in which the Tuscan singer-songwriter appears as a guest star, playing, among other things, himself.

These are the dress rehearsals for his arrival at the Ariston and the unexpected call-up to Eurovision 2025, which Corsi reaches having finished second at the 75th Sanremo Festival, thus stepping in for the Festival's winner, Olly, who unexpectedly decided to withdraw, declining to take part in the European event due to technical/production-related "dramas", leaving good old Lucio (who would have deserved to win the Festival hands down) at least the joy, and above all the showcase, of an event which, however blatantly kitsch, remains a considerable launching pad.

To engage calmly with Volevo essere un duro (2025), Corsi's fifth effort, one must however set aside his Sanremo ghost, the one who wins easily like the castaway in the scratch-card ad, given the absolute void surrounding him, including a Dario Brunori who showed up "ancient" at the Ariston to delight mums and dads with a cloying track that, incidentally, apes De Gregori - i.e. is a photocopy of him, it goes without saying. Because only by freeing oneself from cut-rate chatter and from the pre- and post-Sanremo populist judgments can one go back to evaluating the singer-songwriter from Grosseto freely, and with a certain peace of mind.

It should also be said that Volevo essere un duro opens with something close to a masterpiece, one that Verdone himself loved too, as the unofficial sponsor of Corsi - as we've seen - well before it was fashionable. The aforementioned "Tu sei il mattino" is one of those songs that, had it come out in the 1970s, would have won over the whole Italian universe, both for the quality of the writing and for its absolute melodic cohesion, also giving us an intimate variant of Cosa faremo da grandi?, ultimately confirming that the melodic trick Corsi has nailed, and which crops up almost instinctively at various points throughout his songbook, is still alive and aims to capture the hearts of those missing many pieces of their own past.

Luckily, Corsi pretty much does as he pleases, including when it comes to creative license, not caring about the potential objections of the purists who've been hanging around these parts for a while now. So let there be praise for cigarettes, in "Sigarette" indeed, the record's first nod to Ivan Graziani. And there it is, Graziani. He's Corsi's absolute reference point on an album that is the most human of his discography. The least fairy-tale-like, to put it briefly.

The thirty-one-year-old Lucio thus finally climbs down from the tree of stars, sets down Dodò, and finally sends Topo Gigio, Pinocchio, the cat, the fox and the poor little shells he's already eaten all packing, as the carpenter would say to the walrus. And that's a good and right thing to do. And it's truly a good and right thing to also come out with nine simple songs and no convenience feature. Skin to the air. Here too, Corsi makes a wise choice, out of step with the times and therefore a healthy one.

"Francis Delacroix" is instead the other gem of Volevo essere un duro and contains a flood of noble references that flit by like crazy pinballs, in a surreal dance, at times charmingly self-evident and bristling with impossible little scenes. From Genghis Khan to Don Quixote, Wojtyla and Columbus: almost no one is missing. Corsi thrives in a little tune that would have been right up Graziani's street (here we go again!) and perhaps even Carella's. And it attests to his state of grace, net of the filler tracks that duly arrive shortly after, chief among them the crowd-pleasing, hermetic and not very striking rock of "Let There Be Rocko", with which the singer-songwriter describes the quirks of a Lucignolo (presumably) from his adolescence.

This record is about childhood, friendship and love. It's a record of fantasy with its feet on the ground. On this album I tried to find the dream not by fleeing into the sky but by crawling along the pavements, slipping under dinner tables or hiding in wardrobes. It's a record of personal memories mixed with other people's stories. There are many characters in these songs, from Rocco, the middle-school bully, to the King of the rave, a romantic and ramshackle figure, right through to Francis Delacroix, my great friend, perhaps imaginary, but it doesn't matter

There's certainly rather too much John Lennon lurking behind the keys of "Situazione complicata", but that's fine. Having noted the splendid cover, once again drawn by Corsi's mother, Nicoletta Rabiti, Volevo essere un duro doesn't have the phantasmagoric power of Cosa faremo da grandi?, still clearly his most accomplished album to date, but it's a record that nonetheless makes itself very easy to love, with moments of great Italian singer-songwriter craft, the kind that's been missing for quite a while in this country of "top", "super", "bomb" buzzwords trotted out for yet another dreadful urban-something track churned out every single blessed day by the Milanese headquarters. Which is a very big deal indeed, today more than ever.

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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