Biglietto per l Inferno

Tell me, brother, you have killed

Remember, in the fifth it was forbidden to you

I cannot save you from the eternal fire

You only have a ticket to hell

Listen to me, friar, and tell me if this

You call it a sin or a noble deed

I took money from a rich man

To feed a man who's dying

("Confessione")

A bizarre story, full of rather singular facets, that of Biglietto per l'Inferno, a band from Lecco and custodian of one of the objectively most accomplished and influential gems in the entire Italian progressive pop landscape, which turns exactly fifty this year and at the time received none of the support it deserved, partly due to a virtually non-existent promotional campaign.

Only in the 1990s, thanks to the wave that brought renewed interest in the prog movement and later thanks to the spread of the internet, did Biglietto per l'Inferno gain steady and growing recognition worldwide. Over the years, figures such as Steven Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth, among many others, have openly expressed their particular devotion to the band's work, even elevating it to the status of a guiding inspiration.

Formed in 1972 from the merger of two local bands (Gee and Mako Sharks), Biglietto settled into a sizeable line-up featuring frontman, flautist and flugelhorn player Claudio Canali, bassist Fausto Branchini, keyboardist Giuseppe Banfi, known as "Baffo", second keyboardist Giuseppe "Pilly" Cossa, drummer Mauro Gnecchi and guitarist Marco Mainetti.

After a couple of years split between misadventures and artistic consolidation, in 1974 the band arrived at the release of their self-titled album.

At the time, rehearsal spaces didn't exist, so bands made do however they could. For the writing process, the Lombard sextet would typically meet at the oratory in Pescarenico or in makeshift venues near Olate. Later on, they took over a farmhouse in Primaluna, in Valsassina, a building lost in the middle of nowhere, without even a direct electricity supply.

Claudio Canali already had a couple of lyrics in hand ("Confessione" and "Il nevare"), registered with the Italian copyright agency SIAE under the names Osvaldo Trimboli and Giancarlo Cappellini (their manager) due to registration issues: too little to complete an actual full project.

The spark was lit during the Be-In Festival in Naples, an event organised on a go-kart track in the Vomero district in the summer of 1973 by fellow musicians Osanna, a gathering at which Biglietto performed a triptych made up of "Ansia", "Confessione" and "Il nevare". A performance that immediately struck audience, critics and industry insiders alike, who were left stunned by the group's originality and expressiveness, as well as by Claudio Canali's stage presence and vocal range. Among those watching the event was manager Maurizio Salvadori, a skilled agent who had, in those years, brought to Italy the tours of giants such as Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Traffic and Genesis, and who had recently launched his own label, Trident, for which the band went on to release their full-length debut in March 1974.

Recorded in about ten days on an eight-track Telefunken at Regson studios in Milan, taking advantage of leave granted during Claudio Canali's military service, the record shows the limits of the scant technology available at the time. Fortunately, this didn't undermine the album's rich instrumental dynamics, which shift with remarkable ease and surprising flair between melodic, classically-tinged, experimental passages and clearly hard rock moments, to the point of placing Biglietto's output alongside pioneers such as Atomic Rooster, High Tide, Rush and Uriah Heep.

Canali's powerful, lucid, irreverent and introspective lyrics carried a strong emotional impact, laid out over fairly straightforward metre, but what set them apart above all was that constant recourse to personal reflection, conflicting feelings and human pain, such as the frequent references to religion, often in sharp contrast between his private views and those prescribed by Church doctrine. Canali (who passed away in 2018) was an insecure man, who hid his own uncertainties and anxieties behind hard-hitting lyrics and explosive live performances. The paradox was just around the corner, and it would reveal itself many years later. The very man who seemed to reject the powerful influence of the Church ended up becoming a friar and hermit in 1990, retreating to a monastery in Tuscany. But that's another story.

Returning to the content that enriches this debut album, a specific mention must go to the cover artwork. A stylised figure of Canali in the act of snapping the microphone stand in two, which the well-known Piedmontese photographer and director Cesare Montalbetti, aka Caesar Monti, crafted into not just an album cover, but an icon of that era.

Biglietto per l'Inferno's musical approach touches on all the typical facets of 1970s progressive rock. The tendency to lock into powerful passages, where Mainetti's guitar takes over alongside the double keyboards driven by "Baffo" Banfi and "Pilly" Cossa, has always drawn the most attention, both for the compelling verve it generates, which found its ideal habitat on stage, and for the seamless harmony devised within these vigorous structures: interludes, rhythmic developments and solos form the driving force of Biglietto's modus operandi.

There's no shortage, of course, of further points of considerable interest, such as the use of Canali's flute and tenor flugelhorn, always deployed to add extra colour to the powerful arrangements, as well as the bass/drums rhythm section, which, unlike what happens in many similar cases, backs up the rest of the ensemble with tremendous personality, at times rising to become the absolute protagonist.

The lyrics written by Canali, as mentioned, had a rather natural and autobiographical origin. They drew on his family's Christian roots, his years spent in seminary schools, and his fraught relationship with his father. All these personal circumstances were highly relevant at the time, chiming with the dynamics of an era in which the challenge to a society deemed rather hypocritical, along with consumerism and materialism, were burning issues of the day.

The opener "Ansia" kicks things off with a long keyboard-led instrumental section that shifts and builds gradually. Canali's vocal part arrives three minutes in, and the ties to existential troubles and the inescapable religious reference are immediately clear:

And my sad, infamous life

Spent killing and stealing

Returns every night with the terror

Of not finding anyone who can save me

The baton then passes straight to the album's standout track. "Confessione" is a programmatic manifesto on how a song fit for the pop-prog vein should be structured. A brilliant lyric, a first-person dialogue between a friar and a sinner who, during the sacrament, confesses his sins and seeks absolution. It doesn't come. The friar warns him that no salvation is in store for him, and eternal fire will be his final punishment. In truth, the underlying sense that emerges from those lines is almost an invitation - ironic, polemical - to visit the "hells" of this world, places where the sun doesn't shine, places that at the time (and not only then) could be represented by mines, prisons, or the lives of the marginalized.

The music, built on a rhythmic idea by Marco Mainetti, is tense and corrosive, and across the track's six and a half minutes it achieves a truly sumptuous payoff. Every component plays a crucial role in keeping the quality level high. Canali's flute glides supreme over Mainetti's guitars, which move from the right channel to the left and are constantly shadowed by shifting keyboard textures. One of the most gripping episodes in the entire Italian prog landscape.

The following "Una strana regina" is no less impressive, a passage that climbs to dark heights amid piano, mellotron and keyboards, within which Canali's voice seems to intone a secular prayer, urging listeners to fly, love, dream, freeing themselves from the hypocrisy gripping society:

On earth reigns a strange queen

She dwells in castles built from every street

She changes clothes every evening

And her name is hypocrisy

Here too, the sonic blend, after a dark and intriguing start, reaches its fullest expansion in the interplay between flute and guitar that leads into an unusual ending - rather bold and sunny, almost folk, certainly unexpected, but one that adds yet another ingredient to this gargantuan feast.

"Il nevare", together with the already mentioned "Confessione", stands as one of the absolute high points of Biglietto's output. A constant harmonic rise and fall, which in its gentler passages builds shrewd anticipation, dramatically shattered by sudden electric flourishes that seem to promise, in vain, some fleeting respite. Canali unravels this tension in his own way, through a kind of ecstatic contemplation of nature and its mysteries:

White clouds in the opaque blue sky

From above they watch the fields with the plough

It's no spite, no, this not watering the earth

But maybe even in heaven there's a small war

The album's closing track locks everything shut and carves out, as well as one could hope, an admirable work, complex and engaging at the same time.

“L’amico suicida” is yet another personal snapshot, one that Canali captures drawing on an episode that really happened to him during military service (a painful experience for him), when a fellow soldier from South Tyrol hanged himself in the officers' bathroom with an electric wire. The lyrics, however, also refer to the story of a girl he was seeing at the time, whose drug-addicted husband had tragically killed himself. She wrote a poem about it, and her words gave Claudio some spark of inspiration. A kind of parable on Good and Evil, a bold yet spontaneous lesson in theology:

Around your body there's an aura of death

I look at your gaunt face, you smile, you're strong

Your waxen face and your slow impulses

Your dark lips make my teeth grind

This track stands as a unicum in the Italian musical landscape of the time, for the rawness and the vivid image conjured by lyrics that are nothing short of glacial. The music, funereal at first, then increasingly incisive, as per protocol, ebbs and flows across its scant quarter of an hour, continually generating alternating moments of breathlessness, restraint, questioning, anguish, reflection and vigorous impetuousness.

“Biglietto per l’Inferno” fully deserves its place among the masterpieces of Italian prog-rock, perhaps (the qualifier is more than warranted) just a notch below some of the work turned out by Pfm, Area, Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Orme and Osanna, though that's a discussion that would deserve its own in-depth, dedicated debate. The emotion still holds up today listening to these five tracks, created by six friends (later artists of enviable stature) united by a visceral passion for music that always overcame every difficulty. The joy that filled them whenever they landed a gig, one that would let them set off and play somewhere with their rickety van, is a quality that still flows through the grooves of this true milestone of Italian music.

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12/05/2024