Squallor - The poets of foul language

Come home, Pierpaolo!

I – Village Festivals

The sounds of a village festival in southern Italy: people talking loudly in the street, the inevitable firecrackers going off from early morning, car radios and the constant revving of cars stuck in traffic, and street vendors selling audio cassettes. You can tell we're in the '80s, when people would fob off on you the so-called "Moroccan cassettes" – those terrible pirated recordings where the songs would fade out after three-quarters of their actual length – and everyone had some wayward uncle with a couple of Squallor albums in this format in his car, which, of course, he was very careful never to play when our mother was around too. What stuck with you most at that tender age was, no denying it, the constant foul language in songs like "Berta" or "'O Tiempo se ne va" – and in all your naivety at the time, you were amazed that such an annihilating stream of swear words could find a home outside of the schoolyard break, let alone actually be recorded onto a cassette.

Then you grow up and, for a while, you stop thinking about Squallor altogether: you file them away as a joke, good enough for the previous generation, on a par with Arbore's saccharine double entendres. Until, by chance, some friend with a background similar to yours suddenly pulls out a quote like "là dove finisce il fiume, inizia il film" or "gioco l'asso e tu il tre, piglia 'o cazzo e scutulè!" and the smell of those car seats and the hiss of those cassette tapes comes rushing back to you. Driven by curiosity and nostalgia, you hunt down one of the many Squallor compilations and discover that you've finally become mature enough to grasp the genius hidden behind the triviality and the nonsense of those tracks. Not to mention realizing that you're now almost the age your uncle was back then...

II – Biting the hand that feeds you

Unspeakable in the most literal sense of the word, Squallor are an underground cult object that cuts across fans of pop/rock music and plain old good-time Charlies alike. The former investigate the reasons why these 14 albums by a group that was barely more than a ghost (no concerts or interviews, and vanishingly few radio plays) still enjoy the unconditional love of so many people to this day; the latter simply laugh and leave it at that. Part of the enigma lies in the group's singular lineup: Daniele Pace was a composer and singer from Milan, author of songs like "Nessuno mi può giudicare", "La pioggia", "Io, tu e le rose", as well as "Alla fine della strada", which became a hit in its English version ("Love Me Tonight") thanks to Tom Jones. Alfredo Cerruti, a Neapolitan, was a successful record executive, as well as artistic director at CBS, CGD and Ricordi, the labels that would go on to release the group's albums. Giancarlo Bigazzi, perhaps the best known of the bunch, was from Florence, and an astonishing number of Italian pop hits from the Sixties through to the last decade bear his signature ("Luglio", "Lisa dagli occhi blu", "Erba di casa mia", "Montagne verdi", "Gloria", "Gente di mare", "Gli uomini non cambiano", "Cirano"... but the list goes on forever). Totò Savio was a guitarist and singer from Naples, himself a songwriter of real merit. Finally, on the first record, it's worth noting the participation of record executive Elio Gariboldi.

These were five friends in real life, all roughly forty years old by the time the first LP, Troia, came out, and already respected professionals in the world of Italian pop music, well versed in all its tricks and dirty little secrets. And this is one of the group's defining features, and basically the reason for the total indifference shown by music critics of the time (and still by much of the critical establishment today): Squallor were born within, and never strayed from, mainstream Italian pop ("musica nazional-popolare"). In their songs there isn't, say, even as a parody, a single reference to psychedelia, to prog, to electronic music (at least until the Eighties, when techno-pop became a mainstream phenomenon) and very few to the singer-songwriter tradition of social commitment. Even punk, which would have offered plenty of comic material, was completely ignored. In short, the sole target of their parody was always pop music itself, whose formal conventions they, at least musically, respected to the letter. If, at the time, the intelligentsia looked at Battisti with suspicion, I dread to imagine what they thought of these guys!

Still, it would be unforgivably snobbish to reduce Squallor to a purely cultural phenomenon, relevant only for their lyrics, which nonetheless remain the dominant element. As mentioned, the members of the group were highly skilled songwriters and arrangers, and even for this larkish side project they crafted top-notch backing tracks, in some cases genuine potential hits sacrificed on the altar of irreverence. Like the depraved monks in De Sade's novel "Justine", by day Bigazzi and co. performed the canonical rites of the Italian singer-songwriter tradition, and by night they defiled its altars with bodily splatter of every kind.

Over these formally impeccable musical backdrops, in fact, they laid lyrics - often entirely improvised - that combined nonsense, vulgarity (plenty of it, but never gratuitous) and a caustic sense of humour far less crude than it might appear on first listen. In this writer's opinion, Squallor delivered the fiercest attacks on power (religious, political or economic) that Italian music has ever seen, not to mention the flashes of disarming realism that some of their lyrics open up onto the lives of men of their generation - and beyond, something else you come to notice as you get older. Their importance, however, remains more potential than actual: aside from a few groups clearly influenced by them (Skiantos, far less brilliant, borrowed both their name and their taste for improvisation, while Elio e le Storie Tese owe them pretty much everything, starting with the fusion of "high" music and cheap comic shots - though Rocco Tanica and his cohorts would always come across as less spontaneous and corrosive than Squallor, perhaps because the latter regarded the project as little more than a lark compared to their main careers), their discography remains a goldmine of ideas and inspiration still barely tapped, waiting for better times. And this is also why a critical reassessment of them is long overdue, if only to erase the offensive "trash" label (we're not talking about Leone di Lernia or Gem Boy here) or the equally inappropriate "demenziale" (zany/novelty) tag often slapped on their records. Squallor were, fundamentally, a pop group - and a top-tier one at that.

III – Where the river ends, the movie begins

"The group was born because singers are such massive pains in the ass", Cerruti would later remark drily, "all they know how to do is talk about songs, songs..." And so this league of songwriters and record executives, who dealt daily with insufferable, temperamental singers, decided to set about demolishing the fetish object known as "the song" with the 7-inch single "38 Luglio/Raccontala giusta", released in October 1971. In truth, the iconoclastic spirit is found exclusively on side A of the record, since "Raccontala giusta" is a jokey little tune, but an entirely conventional one both lyrically and musically, one that would fit right in on a ballroom dance floor. "38 Luglio" is cut from completely different cloth, and would serve as the template for much of their future output: paradoxical from the title onward, the track is built on a romantic, Procol Harum-style backing, complete with a prominently featured Hammond organ, and a lyric - wholly or partly improvised - in which Alfredo Cerruti's narration of the exploits of "an electrical engineer who invented the battery" causes linearity, logic and grammar to collapse, in that order. What emerges from the lyrics is a certain fascination with the Western film genre (which would remain one of the group's fixed reference points), underscored by the mock-epic tone of the delivery, though looking for any kind of meaning behind the no-show of Indian Chief "Movengoanchio" is a waste of time. The track is such an alien object that no radio station would even dream of playing it. Only thanks to kindred spirits Gianni Boncompagni and Renzo Arbore did "38 Luglio" get a handful of plays on the radio show "Alto Gradimento", but the impression is that the "Squallor joke" was destined to end with that single.

And yet, two years later, the LP Troia hit record store shelves, complete with its legendary cover depicting a rocking horse engulfed in flames. The album enjoys a cult status today that is perhaps excessive relative to its actual merits: alongside irresistible tracks like "Ti ho conosciuta in un clubs", "Indiani a Worlock", "Morire in Porche" and the aforementioned "38 Luglio", there's also a fair amount of filler and uninteresting instrumental tracks. Compared to their later work, what's striking is the total absence of vulgarity, even though the expressive anarchy that would become the group's trademark is already in place. There's a near-systematic preference for spoken-word delivery (well ahead of CCCP/CSI, Massimo Volume or Offlaga Disco Pax - whom I find it hard to imagine weren't influenced by Squallor), handled mostly by Cerruti or, more rarely, Pace, while on the few "sung" tracks - tributes to and parodies of Neapolitan songs - the voice belongs to Totò Savio. The fact that these two were mostly the ones behind the mic, and that they didn't skimp on using their own dialect, is what created the misconception of Squallor as a "Neapolitan group".

Much more successful is the follow-up, Balls (almost all their albums bear titles that lend themselves to double meanings). Opened and closed by an a cappella chorus, the record features exhilarating moments like "Marcia longa", a mock news report on a series of absurd events, in the vein of "Marcia K-2" from the previous album, with two overlapping voices creating an alienating effect, interspersed with fake ads like "mettetevi un dito in culo e la vita vi sorriderà!" ("stick a finger up your ass and life will smile on you!").

The point of these tracks is to mock, through the weapon of paradox, political and religious institutions, though this becomes more evident on their later records. "Sono una donna non sono una santa" is a faithful cover of Rossana Fratello's dreadful original, sung with real pathos by Daniele Pace (compare it to the similarly mechanism-driven comic covers of "In Te" or "Help Me" by Elio e le Storie Tese). "Angeli Negri" is an absurd dialogue between a "poor Black man" (Pace) and a painter (Cerruti) that parodies the song "Angelitos Negros". "Veramon" is a mangled take, complete with mock-French vocals, on the chansonnier tradition, while "Sant'Anna" and "Il Vangelo secondo Chinaglia" contain the usual paradoxical narratives that follow a thin narrative thread (in the first case, once again, the Western) before veering off into total chaos.

The release of Balls would be followed by three years of silence, broken in 1977 by two albums - arguably the group's masterpieces.

IV – Hit phenomenon and toilet-humor phenomenon

What would a Squallor concert have been like? On some of their records they make joking references to performances that never actually took place, whether because it was impossible to recreate their tracks live, built as they fundamentally were on improvisation, or because all four of them had other full-time jobs and saw the group as little more than a lark, or because they probably would have been bored out of their minds touring, or for whatever other reason you like... What's certain is that they had no need whatsoever for live shows to build a genuine cult following around themselves - what they did need was top-notch albums, and those arrived toward the end of the Seventies: Cow, Pump (both from 1977) and Chapels (1978) are the peak of their output, and feature their most quoted tracks to this day.

After a delirious intro, Cow opens with the title track, whose lyric, narrated by Gianni Boncompagni, is one of the finest examples of nonsense comedy Italian culture has ever produced: a fake news report on the concert of a mysterious band called "Cow", whose members, despite all being onstage, had previously committed suicide in the most implausible ways imaginable. "Abat-jour" features a series of absurd police radio communications (a sketch Cerruti would later revive on the TV show "Indietro Tutta"), while "Alluvione" deserves to be handed down to posterity as a model of institutional satire: a catastrophe like a flood, which even today our local administrators are often unable to handle decently, is described as a public happening attended by a cheering crowd.

“Gentleman” is a trivial joke if you like, but holding back laughter while listening to it is a practically impossible task. In “Piazza Sanretro” religion is targeted for the first time, with a homily extolling values that are not exactly spiritual. “Testamento specifico” is another delirious dialogue between a dying man (Pace) and a notary (Cerruti) that recalls “Il testamento del toro” by Quartetto Cetra, while the closing “Terrestri” mocks ecologist, post-’68 science fiction.

Slightly lower in quality but a bigger commercial success (helped along by the rise of free radio stations, incidentally mocked in the title track), Pump boasts gems like the incomparable “Berta” (a sketch in which an arrogant, swaggering Milanese is shot down and thoroughly ridiculed for his economic and sexual pretensions by a feisty Neapolitan woman - a track that, fifteen years ahead of its time, demolishes the pathetic posturing of the Lega Nord; and, not by chance, in the sequel found on “Cambia Mento”, it turns out the little Milanese protagonist is none other than Umberto Bossi) and, above all, “Unisex”, in which a tale told in a Spanish flavour (the group almost always uses an Iberian or French accent to underline the gayness of its characters) of a decidedly hardcore homosexual romp (“non si capiva più niente/ lo prendevo da tutte le parti/ nelle narici del naso… nel buco delle orecchie …e anche nel buco del culo”) turns anticlerical when one of the lovers introduces himself as “Cardinale Alfonso Fava”.

Neapolitan melodrama and politically engaged singer-songwriting are both targeted, respectively in “La Scarognata” and “Sfogo” - complete with a pretentious, lisping intellectual critic analyzing the song's lyrics. The closing “La Marcia dell'equo canone” is yet another fake live commentary (this time of a parade of houses!) in which the group has the nerve to even poke fun at the Agnelli family: “La casa più bella naturalmente è la casa degli Agnelli/ Con giardino e cameriere negro importato dalla Svizzera interna/ Da Zugg, un paese vicino Zogg/ Che ha, invece di due mani, quattro mani di cui una stereo/ E fa palleggiare forchetta, cucchiaio, bottiglia di Champagne e hashis insieme/ A scelta, si può introdurre nella mano del negro una piccola carica di marihuana”. If we consider that, more than ten years later, Italian distributors would avoid a literal translation of the title of “The Silence Of The Lambs” so as not to upset the powerful family, we can get a sense of just how bold Squallor were.

“Famiglia Cristiana” deserves separate treatment, as the first chapter of the “saga of Pierpaolo”, a character who would appear, in part, on almost every subsequent album. In each of these tracks the protagonist - a debauched young man from an apparently good family, endowed with an unbearable whiny voice and uncontainable vulgarity - calls his father from various corners of the world, making outrageous financial demands that the father (presumably a Christian Democrat politician or some similar wheeler-dealer) cannot refuse, blackmailed as he is by a son who knows his darkest secrets. Taking a sociological angle, Pierpaolo is the metastasis (or perhaps the ripe fruit) of Christian Democrat high society, whose meanness and duplicity he lays bare, and it wouldn't be far-fetched to imagine him as a future member of parliament for Berlusconi's Pdl (unfortunately Squallor's output came to an end just before Berlusconi's own “entry into politics”).

The wondrous trilogy closes with Chapels, which tears political correctness to shreds even before the concept had been codified. To give an example, today's gay rights activists would demand (and perhaps rightly so) their heads for a track like “Radio Chapels”, whose purpose, at the time, was to scandalize the prudish and, once again, poke fun at free radio stations. Even heavier is the closing “Crosta Center Hospital”, in which medical malpractice becomes the butt of a joke (and Cerruti as the surgeon is phenomenal). But the album's masterpiece, and perhaps of their entire output, is “Dannunziata”: an irresistible funk-dance backing track (I dare some DJ to play it on the dancefloor... it works for me!) with lyrics in which the protagonist instructs two girls, prostitutes or beggars of some other sort, on how to give him a blowjob. In the age of escorts and “bunga-bunga”, a track like this might be misunderstood, but in 1978 it was nothing short of revolutionary. And it's just as tear-inducingly funny today as it was then.

These three albums are, fundamentally, what define the group's style. The ones that followed, starting with the excellent Trumpet (worth noting is the irresistible sketch “Gennarino Primo”, about the election of a Neapolitan pope, and the creative tour de force of “Tutto il morto minuto per minuto”, which moves from the live commentary of a funeral attended, for some obscure reason, by the “crème” of Italian music, to that of catastrophic sporting events - complete with an orgy among footballers in the locker room, still taboo even today), while equally entertaining, stick to the coordinates already mapped out.

In all of their works, however, there are always two or three tracks worth handing down to posterity: on Changing it's above all the blasphemous “Pret-a porter”, while on Discouraging the irresistible ones are the dixieland-style “Raffreddore nero”, the melodic “Telefona”, “Il tempo delle rughe” recited in mock Latin, and “Revival”, which ridicules fascist rhetoric, amid inevitable filler.

V - Ciao, check out Arrapaho!

It seems that Neapolitan director Ciro Ippolito, after watching “The Meaning of Life”, got it into his head to shoot something similar. The first problem he obviously ran into was how to replicate Monty Python's brand of comedy in Italy. And Squallor came to mind... It was the one stroke of genius in his otherwise unremarkable career: setting aside the inevitable differences in geographic and artistic context, the points of contact between the two groups are undeniable, starting with their use of nonsense and paradox and their lack of respect for institutions.

Needless to say, the four were thrilled with the idea (it seems the recording sessions for their albums already took place amid absurd bacchanals, so I dare not imagine what they got up to on a film set) and decided to make a film about Native Americans, as already mentioned one of their favourite subjects since “38 Luglio”.

“Arrapaho” (1983) cost a little over one hundred million lire (a figure that seems excessive even so, given that it appears to have been shot in someone's backyard) and grossed as much as five billion, helping to spread Squallor's popularity even further. Let's clear up any doubt: it is a cult film if you like, but a decidedly atrocious one, and not only because of the meagre means with which it was shot. For one thing, Ciro Ippolito is, to be generous, a mediocre journeyman, not even a distant relative of Terry Gilliam (if that was meant to be the model), but above all, the group's comedy doesn't translate well to the screen - indeed, the on-screen versions of the Pierpaolo or Berta sketches are nowhere near as funny as the original recorded versions. Morandini would go on to call it “the worst film in the history of Italian cinema”.

The following year, director and group would try again with “Birds of Italy”, which does away with even the pretence of a plot in favour of a series of standalone sketches, with identical artistic results but lesser commercial success.

Decidedly more successful, of course, are the soundtracks to the two films: Arrapaho is remembered among the group's fans for the monumental “Avida”, in which a husband keeps vigil over his wife's corpse hoping she's really dead, and for the rollicking “Piacere, Pesce”, whose theme, tied to Cold War spies, would go on to inspire Elio e le Storie Tese's “Pippero”. “'O Tiempo se ne va” is the by-now-customary homage/parody, formally impeccable, of Neapolitan song à-la Nino D'Angelo, in which Totò Savio, yet again, complains about some presumably young girl who is certainly reluctant to give in. In “El Toro” and “La Guerra del vino” Pace throws himself into mangled Spanish and French respectively (slightly chauvinistic, to be honest) in the usual dialogue with the decidedly foul-mouthed Cerruti.

Perhaps overall superior to the previous one, even if less well known, Birds of Italy boasts “A chi lo do stasera?”, a homosexual reworking of the Nadia Cassini song written by Daniele Pace himself, and, above all, the biblically incorrect “Al Traditore”, in which Judas, a dishonest restaurateur, has to reckon with a guy who, right outside his restaurant, multiplies loaves and fishes on his stall - but every track here is, at the very least, hilarious.

Shortly after the last take of “Birds of Italy” and the recording of its soundtrack, Daniele Pace decided to leave the group and move to Wyoming, to the reservation of the Andalús Native Americans, where he apparently married the chief's daughter, Squaw Zinna Ruspante, many years his junior. Bigazzi, Cerruti and Savio decided to carry on regardless, commenting: “Squallor are down to three, just like the Police”.

VI – Touch the Apricot and the Getaway

While Arrapaho was a hit mainly on the big screen, with Touch the Apricot the group finally tops the record charts, selling over a hundred thousand copies. Much of the credit goes to the single "Usa For Italy" - a brilliant parody of the hypocritical "We Are The World", in which Totò Savio invites Michael Jackson, after having thought of Africa, to also record a song for Naples and send the proceeds to Italy. Besides mocking the mawkish sanctimony of American stars, the track flaunts and pokes fun at the cliché of southern Italians as parasites - or shrewd opportunists, depending on your point of view. The song is not only free of vulgarity and religious or political references, but it's also melodic and singable... in short, finally a radio-friendly single that, indeed, earns plenty of airplay even on mainstream stations.

Too bad the rest of the album doesn't live up to it: its main flaw is the absence of that wonderful sense of anarchy and improvisation that had marked all the group's work up to that point. The sketches on Touch the Apricot, on the other hand, feel calculated and overly planned, and - no small detail - they lack any form of malice or irreverence.

Fortunately, it's just a brief dip: Steer brings the group back in great form, both in its caustic vein ("Demiculis", right from the title, tears apart socialist politician Gianni De Michelis, known in Venice as "l'onto") and in its tragically realistic one (on "Incubo", a soundtrack straight out of Italian horror films, Goblin-style, which underscores the nocturnal contortions of a guy who can't digest the chicken he ate).

A new element is introduced by "La Tramviata", a genuine piece of opera, made in collaboration with professional singers, featuring an impotent man, his unsatisfied wife, and the pharmacist who has to provide a remedy (by the way, go and listen to the track's intro, which, not by chance, is "Farmacista", also by Elio e le Storie Tese).

Even better is Cielo duro (1988), opening with "Attrazione anale" (a jab at Skiantos?) and featuring, on the track "Carceri d'oro", an uncanny prediction of the Mani Pulite scandal. "C'era un vento quella notte" revisits the western-movie atmospheres so dear to the group and boasts one of their finest backing tracks.

In the hearts of fans, however, the record will remain forever tied to "Mi ha rovinato il '68", a track that's equally funny, poignant and bitter, in which Totò Savio sketches out a personal and generational failure - one to be accepted, like everything else in life, with a smile on one's face.

And it will be precisely maestro Savio's precarious health conditions - he underwent vocal cord surgery in the meantime - that force fans to wait a full six years for Cambia Mento, to date the band's last album. The years don't seem to have passed at all, and the trio churns out heavyweight tracks like "Preservame Atù", Julio Iglesias-style, "Filumena", a tune inspired by pre-war Neapolitan songs featuring the immortal line “c’è sempre una morale/ in questo mondo pazzo/ ognuno ha un grande amore/ che gli cagato il cazzo”, and the already mentioned "Berta II", in which Umberto Bossi gets utterly demolished - at the time he was presenting himself as the champion of a supposed change (for the worse, as we've since seen), one that is not only rejected once again by the Neapolitan Berta, but which also sees her prefer a big black guy instead. Speaking of the Senatur, the album's original cover was supposed to feature a portrait of him with a scrotum instead of a chin - unfortunately the record label cowardly forced a different, anonymous one upon them. Obviously, poets of foul language like Squallor, who had also made Neapolitan identity their banner, could only be annoyed by the Lega's obtuse vulgarity.

I'm deliberately saving for last the sublime "Albachiava", a philologically accurate track in the style of Vasco Rossi, with host Gigi Sabani delivering a stunning impression of the rocker from Zocca, who even back then was little more than a wreck (artistically speaking). Once the song ends, the singer has no choice but to trudge wearily off to the dressing room, while a crooked manager (clearly Cerruti) pockets the takings.

VII – Anxious Wait

Squallor have never broken up, and that's a fact! So, fans have been hopefully waiting for a new record of theirs since 1994. It will certainly be difficult for the group to reunite now that, in 2004, Totò Savio, having fully recovered in the meantime, moved to the Fiji Islands, where, between one cocktail and another, he's been experimenting with crossovers between local music and Neapolitan music, apparently with excellent results - his latest records, among other things, are produced by Elio Gariboldi, who joined him there in 2010. Giancarlo Bigazzi, for his part, moved at the start of 2012 from the Maremma to inner Russia, to the region of Sorkomov, which, due to a phone line fault back in the late '80s, has remained the last socialist paradise on earth. Dispatches from there describe Bigazzi as a leading member of the Soviet governing committee and planner of the five-year plans. In any case, it seems the gorgeous women of Sorkomov go crazy for men with mustaches.

In short, Alfredo Cerruti, the only one still left in Italy, will have quite a job on his hands getting the other four back into the recording studio.

To while away the wait, we still have the fourteen albums released to date under the name Squallor, a document of truly free and creative music, as well as of a beautiful story of friendship in Italy, 20th century. That's all for now, over to Worlock!

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