Vinicio Capossela and Pierpaolo Capovilla team up on the track "Tutti Bodyguard": watch the video

Thirty years after the release of "Il ballo di San Vito", Vinicio Capossela returns to one of the tracks from that album, "Body Guard", to transform it into "Tutti Bodyguard", a new version made together with Pierpaolo Capovilla. The track, released on August 21st, features artistic production by FiloQ and arrangements by the Milanese brass band Fan Fath Al, and marks the first true recorded collaboration between the two artists.
This reinterpretation came about for the tribute to Don Andrea Gallo held in Genoa on the tenth anniversary of his death, and brings back into the present a song that already had a strong stage presence back in the Nineties. Capossela himself recalls: "During the tour for 'Il Ballo di San Vito', the performance of 'Body guard' often featured, on stage next to the zebra-striped Fender Rhodes piano, Renato Striglia in dark glasses, jacket and tie, arms crossed, physically embodying the bodyguard of the lyrics. Thirty years later, the Genoese producer FiloQ, together with the explosive Milanese brass band Fan Fath Al, have produced a new version which, in my personal opinion, brings together two great musical moments of the Nineties: dub and the Balkans. The opportunity to revisit the lyrics and re-record the track came with the tribute to Don Gallo on the tenth anniversary of his death, held in Genoa this past May 30th. The bodyguard that back then accompanied the seedy streets now comes in handy to armor one's conscience, to keep the world away from the sofa, to stand guard over privilege and sanctity in a world where the alibi of security shields every twinge of humanitarian conscience. Pierpaolo Capovilla lent his voice, his face and his civic poetry ('someone explain to the cops that batons are useless against hearts in love', verses worthy of Mayakovsky), joining us on this track with 'tormenting' ambitions in the heat of late summer."
Watch the video for "Tutti Bodyguard" below.

Compared to the original, then, "Tutti Bodyguard" sharpens the political and civic dimension of the lyrics. The bodyguard evoked thirty years ago now becomes a metaphor for closure, fear and the obsession with security: a form of protection behind which privilege and conscience are shielded, keeping the world at arm's length. Musically, the new version blends dub with the Balkan sounds of Fan Fath Al, while Capovilla's voice further reinforces its militant tone.
For Capovilla, though, the track is also the starting point of a human and artistic relationship born almost by chance: ⟦Q2⟧

"Tutti Bodyguard" is in fact only the first chapter of a wider collaboration. Capossela and Capovilla will reunite for "And Death Shall Have No Dominion", the Ballad Opera inspired by the world of Dylan Thomas and in particular by the radio drama "Under Milk Wood", which will premiere on 3 and 4 October at Rome's Teatro Olimpico as part of the Romaeuropa Festival.
The project revolves around Llareggub, the imaginary seaside village created by the Welsh writer and populated by outcasts, dreamers, eccentrics and "beautiful losers": a small world in which innocence, freedom and difference become forms of resistance to the logic of order and power. Around this universe, Capossela has built a choral narrative made up of fifteen new songs, along with characters and ghosts drawn from Thomas's work.
Further linking "Tutti Bodyguard" to the Ballad Opera is the figure of Renato Striglia, the veteran radio DJ who died in 2020, who had long worked on an Italian version of "Under Milk Wood" without ever managing to complete it. According to Capossela, it is precisely from that loss that the entire project took shape: "This story, the radio drama, the songs, the Ballad Opera we present here, it all stems from a death". Out of that grief comes a work that weaves together memory, friendship, poetry and song, seeking to turn loss into new creative material. It is no coincidence that Capossela also brought in Capovilla to share a set of values he considers increasingly out of step with the times: "rock'n'roll, the epic of failure, the love for bad teachers, mutiny, sabotage, rebellion, thunderous solitude and anarchism".

In the Ballad Opera, Capovilla will take centre stage playing Striglia, Dylan Thomas and Captain Cat, the blind sailor at the heart of "Under Milk Wood", laid out in a tub "as in Noah's ark" and visited by the presences that populate the story.
Ahead of its theatrical debut, "Tutti Bodyguard" will be performed live on 28 and 29 August at the fourteenth edition of the Sponz Fest, in Alta Irpinia. "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" will instead open in Rome on 3 and 4 October, before continuing through Italian theatres with dates in Parma, Ancona, Naples, Catanzaro, Cagliari, Milan, Genoa, Como, Turin, Bologna, Assisi, Rimini, Livorno and Florence.
Thirty years on from "Body Guard", Capossela is thus not simply reviving a song from his past: he updates its meaning, turns it into an allegory of the present, and uses it as the starting point for a new artistic partnership. "Tutti Bodyguard" thus becomes at once a reinterpretation, a civic song and a prelude to a wider project, in which the poetry of Dylan Thomas, the memory of Renato Striglia and the meeting with Pierpaolo Capovilla ultimately converge into a single idea of poetic and musical resistance.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google