Lucio Battisti

Too often, when talking about Lucio Battisti, particular emphasis is placed on his myth, on the gossip surrounding him (the urban legends that in a handful of cases still today attribute to him an ideological allegiance to the far right verge on the ridiculous), on the staggering success he managed to achieve, which soundtracked an economically booming and optimistic Italy — all of which ends up doing little justice to the true core of his professional activity: a deep musical research and experimentation, marked by the working approach and anti-academic aesthetic of pop music. While during his lifetime people did grasp his distance from academia, which he perceived as precious and mannered, his equally firm rejection of the national-popular idiom was not always as well understood. It reaches the point of paradox where his work with Pasquale Panella is often regarded as a sort of foreign body, a whim entirely disconnected from the rest of his career, when in fact it represents a continuation — admittedly a radical one — of a vision that had already found solid foundations at least since the early Seventies. By the middle of the decade, Battisti had already gone through several artistic phases, the last and boldest of which led him, between 1973 and 1974, to make "Il nostro caro angelo" and "Anima latina", records straddling progressive rock, MPB and baroque pop.

Not content with what he had already achieved, and fresh off a long trip to the United States where he tuned in to the latest developments in funk and the emerging sound of disco, he returned to Italy and in 1975 put together a new band, with whom he retreated to the studio to shape the ideas for his next album.

The band heard on "Lucio Battisti, la batteria, il contrabbasso, eccetera", as numerous accounts confirm, played a fundamental role in achieving that hybrid of funk and Italian singer-songwriter pop that runs through the record's grooves. On drums and bass are, respectively, Walter Calloni and Hugh Bullen: both very young in 1976 (Calloni born in 1956, Bullen in 1951) but already regarded as rising stars on their instruments, they had worked with Eugenio Finardi and were session players for the Cramps label (Bullen, in particular, had also played with Area). On keyboards is Claudio Maioli, who also appears on numerous other Italian music classics, and on guitars an Ivan Graziani finally on the verge of breaking through after many years paying his dues. The latter two would go on to collaborate on the Abruzzo-born singer-songwriter's classics "I lupi", "Pigro" and "Agnese dolce Agnese". Also taking part in the recording sessions, though not officially credited, were Tony Esposito on percussion and Massimo Salerno, on keyboards for "Ancora tu" (source: luciobattisti.info).

Only on one song, "Io ti venderei", is the lineup different, featuring Il Volo's longtime friends: Alberto Radius on guitars, Bob Callero on bass, Gianni Dall'Aglio on drums and Gabriele Lorenzi on keyboards; the result, however, is entirely in keeping with the rest of the album.

Mogol is, as always, the author of all the lyrics as well as production supervisor, while Battisti handles all the arrangements, the production, and plays a multitude of instruments, as we'll explore further below.

"Ancora tu" is already a manifesto of the new direction: the intro is a kaleidoscope of syncopations and rhythmic interlocking between drums and electric guitars, engineered in a way that would make even the most celebrated American funk outfits like Ohio Players or Isley Brothers envious. The very first seconds are mathematical and primordial at once, a combination typical of funk music. Mathematical, because the two electric guitars resolve like an equation. The one mixed in the left channel plays chords with standard accompaniment fingering, as in a guitar-and-voice performance, on mid-high notes, and finishes its riff at the end of the second quarter of the bar. The one on the right channel, meanwhile, plays high notes and completes its riff, with ninth or sixth harmonic tensions or semitone passages, in the final two quarters. The two guitars seem, metaphorically, like relay runners passing the baton. Primordial, because the kick drum has a compressed, powerful sound, yet its rhythmic writing is refined, and the very opening of the track is so electrifying it almost seems unfinished, as if cut and edited from a jam session. The disco hi-hats, usually used as rhythmic accompaniment, act as the load-bearing beam, the foundation of the song's first twenty seconds.

The elements of the intro form the song's skeleton and are never abandoned (only a few harmonic tensions in the guitar phrases will change), and yet from the twenty-first second onward, the atmosphere feels completely different. As sharp, spare and raw as the incipit is, just as velvety and sweet is the bed that accompanies the entrance of the lyrics. The drums are enriched with an additional hi-hat, overdubbed and played on the upbeat of every beat to emphasize it, and with the snare marking the second and fourth beats of the bar. These are classic rhythmic elements of disco music. However, without the proverbial four-on-the-floor kick, the final result sounds decidedly more elaborate than the genre's average, without sacrificing any solidity. Bullen's bass is the bridge between Richard Finch of KC & The Sunshine Band and Bernard Edwards of Chic. The crucial elements of the shift in register, though, are the keyboards: the electric piano, the more prominent one, refines the drum-and-bass groove with quick chord passages, the finest of which are the alternations between F-sharp minor seventh, G major seventh and back to F-sharp minor seventh in the second chord cycle of the "verse". Such alternations are essential in keeping the song's drive from dissipating, since it's precisely at those moments that a chord, the F-sharp minor seventh, lasts two bars, contrasting with the one-chord-per-bar pacing maintained throughout the rest of the song.

The other keyboards, though less pervasive, play an equally important role in the arrangement: one can hear numerous melodic phrases played on a high-register keyboard, inserts that often serve to double Battisti's voice, as well as a constant synth string that, while remaining fairly recessed in the mix, is decisive in setting the song's mood, with its octave rises and falls.

The more attentive reader will have noticed the use of quotation marks earlier when referring to the "verse". It's actually difficult to define the structure of "Ancora tu", since there is essentially one single, extended repetition of four chord sequences: G major seventh, D, F-sharp minor seventh, B minor for the first; G major seventh, F-sharp minor repeated twice, B minor for the second; B minor, A major, G major seventh, A major for the last two. One could therefore identify in the song either a single extended chorus or a single extended verse, with two "A" and "B" cycles alternating with each other. There is, in any case, a clear "special" section that drastically breaks the momentum at the 3:13 mark: whereas up to that point one was in the harmonic territory of D major or B minor, depending on how one wishes to read it, the entrance of a B major chord coinciding with the line "Disperazione e gioia mia/ Sarò ancora tuo, sperando che non sia follia" is unexpected and paves the way for the upward key modulation that characterizes the ending and the coda. Here, the "verses" one had grown familiar with just seconds earlier repeat, shifted up a tone. This is a device often overused in a trivial way in pop music, so much so that it has earned a mocking label, "Truck Driver's Gear Shift", but in this case, thanks to the preceding setup — as instinctive as it is sophisticated — it takes on a cathartic, liberating quality, further emphasized by Battisti's celestial high notes.

It's hard to believe that such a classic, known and sung for decades across the country, could require so many words to be described exhaustively; Battisti at his best managed, perhaps better than anyone else, to combine considerable complexity with tremendous melodic immediacy. The brief reprise for acoustic guitar and voice placed at the end of the tracklist, likely an excerpt from a demo version, further demonstrates just how crucial it is to surround oneself with the right team when it comes to finalizing an artistic idea.

The lesson of "Ancora tu" — a fusion of American funk influence, unprecedented in Italy at the time, and a Mediterranean, singer-songwriter melodic sensibility more accessible to the Italian public — is echoed throughout almost the entire album, with a couple of exceptions.

"Un uomo che ti ama" has a dramatic intro, played between the chord of B suspended second and B minor. After a few seconds the backing track settles and the same ingredients already familiar from the opening track return: syncopated drums and bass, palm-muted electric guitar, flourishes of Wurlitzer. From a strictly harmonic standpoint, however, one senses a more "pale" atmosphere, in some ways reminiscent of Battisti's more progressive-pop phase. Worth noting in particular is a barely crunchy electric guitar solo courtesy of an inspired Graziani.

"No dottore" is another distinctive hybrid of funk and progressive pop in which one can appreciate the interpretive skills of a Battisti who, in 1976, is reaching full maturity and confidence as a vocalist. On "No dottore", the singer-songwriter from Poggio Bustone shows off his versatility: the opening lines, more spoken than sung, are dramatic and theatrical. This is not, in itself, a novelty in the musician's career up to that point — quite the opposite: the pursuit of strong emotional tension had characterized many of his greatest hits between the late Sixties and early Seventies. Nevertheless, we witness a further evolution, and the pursuit of leanness that had already distinguished his songs even when he had to carve out space among the "screamers" of the Sixties reaches full realization. The pleas to the doctor in the lyrics work indeed through subtraction, with a spoken delivery that dissolves into a faint, falsetto emission, exploiting every nuance of his voice. In this sense, Battisti's passion for soul, rhythm'n'blues and funk leads him not to chase after the vocal power of singers such as his early mentor Wilson Pickett or James Brown, both more powerful than his own, but to find his own path, discovering a unique expressiveness through his thin voice. In the song's climaxes, for instance, one can hear him singing simultaneously (with the help of overdubs, of course) the textured lead vocal, the falsetto backing vocals, and the low-register "per favore" responses.

On "Io ti venderei" too, one can appreciate a Battisti in vocally superb form: his ability to move quickly and naturally from his natural register to head-voice falsetto elevates what would otherwise be a minor track on a tracklist like that of "La batteria…".

As significant as they already are on their own, the examples just analyzed are only a couple, and certainly cannot exhaust everything that could be said about the vocal abilities of the singer from Rieti, quite possibly the most distinctive and characteristic voice in all of Italian songwriting.

"Dove arriva quel cespuglio" musically almost seems like a dress rehearsal for the "white albums", albeit with an overall more accessible result. The song indeed uses fairly standard chord progressions, but slightly modifies them with each repetition, and when the chord progression doesn't change, the vocal meter or the vocal entrances do, stripping the listener of any points of reference. Similar devices would become the norm during the Panelli era.

The arrangement is, in any case, the song's true crowning achievement: the by-now-unmistakable funk rhythm of drums, bass and (double) guitar, slow yet inexorable, serves as a bed for a plethora of keyboards, both lead and atmospheric, a dramatic piano played by Battisti himself, and grandiloquent synth strings that emphasize the instrumental pauses with an orchestral, almost baroque-pop tone. The variations in the guitar phrases (notably the entrance of the wah-wah pedal around the two-minute mark) and piano create further movement in a song that blends America and Mitteleuropean cabaret decadence in a formula that seems to move in the same direction as Bowie's Thin White Duke period. "Station To Station" and "La batteria…" are, however, almost exact contemporaries (both were recorded in 1975 and released just weeks apart), so it would be incorrect to think of a direct influence of Bowie on Battisti: it is rather a case of "spiritual" convergence between two artists of the utmost significance and creative independence.

To lend a bit of variety to an otherwise monolithic album, the tracklist includes a couple of songs quite far removed from the funk and disco moods that otherwise dominate the record. The first of these, "La compagnia", is a cover, a piece written by Mogol and Carlo Donida Labati for Marisa Sannia, a singer who was quite fashionable in the Sixties. Compared to the original, the time signature shifts from four-four to six-eight, the length is considerably stretched out, and the yéyé arrangement gives way to a kind of doo-wop streaked with glam rock.

The second, "Respirando", shows profound differences from the other tracks starting right from its working method. Here Lucio Battisti not only records all the vocal parts himself, as had always been his habit, but also plays every single instrument alone. The musical mood sits between folk and Mediterranean sounds, starting with the great array of string instruments used, such as acoustic guitars, resonator guitars, mandolins. The singer-songwriter even tries his hand at bass and percussion: his multi-instrumentalist nature had already surfaced in the famous clip from the 1971 Rai TV show "Tutti insieme", in which he held his own in a drums-only improvisation alongside masters of the instrument such as Franz Di Cioccio, Sergio Poggi and Tony Cicco of Formula 3, and Sergio Panno of Dik Dik. Once again, one can appreciate the ingenuity of the arrangement, also entirely Battisti's own work, evident in the variety of melodic phrases, brief interjections, and strategic pauses that can be heard drifting back and forth across the two stereo channels. The rigorous sonic fidelity to a Mediterranean imagery almost seems to foreshadow the experiments Mauro Pagani would go on to pursue between the late Seventies and early Eighties.

"Il Veliero", placed at the very end of the tracklist, pushes even harder on the accelerator of contemporaneity. Walter Calloni's drumming this time is a metronome: kick on every beat of a four-four bar, snare on the even beats, hi-hat on the upbeat - the rhythmic pattern is bare-bones, repetitive. More than disco, this feels like electronic music territory; it's no coincidence that this song is often cited as a sort of starting point for the Italo disco of years to come. On one hand, the reasoning is understandable, and some of it is undeniable - take, for instance, the long opening ostinato of bass and drums, almost a loop tailor-made for dancefloors. However, such a clear-cut and narrow reading of the track risks being a bit too simplistic, overlooking some rather unique quirks. Graziani's guitar is in fine form here: seemingly relegated to a supporting role, the Abruzzese musician once again plays "split" across the stereo channels with two different rhythm guitar parts. To be more precise, Graziani *ends up* playing two different parts; in the first twenty seconds, in fact, both of his guitars play the same two-note riff, doubled at the same pitch. Then the "left" guitar stops playing, while the right one repeats the same riff an octave lower. A few seconds pass and the guitar on the left comes up with another part, interlocking differently than before. Yet it sounds as though the idea had only just been born the moment it's played, since the guitarist doesn't come in perfectly on time and plays a couple of closely-spaced descending slides, a typical trick guitarists use when they don't have a clear idea of how to end a phrase. After a few seconds the guitar on the right also goes back to playing its riff at the octave it started with.

In essence, all these small details give off a sense of spontaneity worthy of a jam session, a mood far removed from the precise, martial repetitiveness of electronic music. The sound of drums, bass and guitar almost seems to anticipate a certain disco-flavored post-punk (Talking Heads, Gang of Four), yet the keyboards and treated piano transport the listener into the soundtrack of a 1970s Italian crime thriller. The blend of disco, funk and melodies fit for the soundtrack of genre films is revered today by the Italian alternative audience, whose leading figures include artists such as Nu Genea or Bassolino: almost fifty years earlier, the curly-haired singer-songwriter from Poggio Bustone had already conceived the very same imagery, with greater rigor and unyielding minimalism.

That's not all: "Il Veliero", as is well known, is not an instrumental piece built on a single chord, but a proper song, with tremendous compositional freedom in both structure and chord progression. Setting aside the long instrumental intro, the sung section is in fact made up of two large cycles of chord progressions that repeat identically... only on the surface. The first begins at 2'23" with the chords of E minor and G major, arranged in blocks of six bars or multiples of six: twelve bars of E minor, six of G major, then six more of E minor. It then returns to G major, but this time opens up into a series of chords moving in blocks of eight or four bars between G major (enriched on one occasion with a minor seventh) and C major, following a scansion more typical of pop music. The section closes with four bars of a dominant chord on B, a device frequently used and easily recognizable by ear for building tension to be resolved by returning to the tonic (in this case, E minor).

Even at this point we're dealing with a rather irregular march, yet the second repetition shuffles the deck even further. The opening E minor no longer lasts twelve bars, but eleven - quite unusual for a pop song - before giving way to an increasingly tight series of repetitions of G major and C major: first eight bars per chord, then four, then two, and just when you expect to hear that tension build again on the B major seventh, the song moves from G major straight back to E minor, with a twist so subtle it might go unnoticed, as if there were no trick at all.

The truth is that this last remark could be used to describe the entire track; one might think it were one single, instinctive improvisation, so irregular is its gait. Knowing Battisti's proverbial perfectionism, however, it's impossible not to think that this is instead the result of careful calculation, carried out if not while playing with the band, then at least during production and "editing". The lyrics capture some of the finest moments of Mogol at his best, the most imaginative and escapist:

Il veliero va

E mi porta via

Spumeggiando va

È giusto e sia

Prua al mare va non torna più

Lo smarrimento vince sempre lui

Mamma paura come sempre non lasci mai

I figli tuoi

"La batteria, il contrabbasso, eccetera" would go on to become the best-selling album in Italy in 1976, spending sixteen weeks at number 1 on the "Tv, Sorrisi e Canzoni" chart, buoyed also by the success of the single "Ancora tu/Dove arriva quel cespuglio" (thirteen weeks at number 1) — proof once again of the Rieti-born singer's knack for capturing the collective imagination, even in an era of revolutionary struggle and militancy like the 1976 of Parco Lambro and the Palalido.

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16/02/2025