Giuni Russo

Evening. A recording studio. The demo of a new track is playing, and absolute silence is required. The tape starts, but less than a minute in, Giuni stops it: "What is this? Do you want me to start doing cheesy beach songs?" "Listen to it more carefully, I think you'll like it," Franco replies, while nearby Giusto Pio tunes his violin ahead of a probable re-editing of the track. "Per le strade mercenarie del sesso che procurano fantastiche illusioni" is a stunning opening line, no doubt about it, and the verses too - all in a minor key, cages of creeping tension - cut a fine figure. If anything, the problem is the chorus, almost a revision of those Italian beach-side twist and ye-ye numbers that, back in the "legendary Sixties", had given so much satisfaction to the jukeboxes of the various "Bagno Stella" scattered up and down the peninsula. But Franco has a good nose for these things, as well as an unconventional streak like few others. And it doesn't take long for the track to reveal its "alien" substance, exposing the compulsion of its forms (the Yma Sumac-style vocal technicalities, meant to embellish with atmospheric details a little on-the-beach postcard scorched by the summer sun) and, at the same time, sharpening the expressive contrast with the ordinary material it's built from.

A kitsch triumph shot through with surprisingly sinister flashes ("Nelle sere quando c'era freddo si bruciavano le gomme di automobili..."), "Un'estate al mare" debuts on 7 August 1982 at number ten on the charts, but within a month climbs all the way to the silver medal spot, staying in the Top Ten for a full fourteen consecutive weeks: a disproportionate success, considering the "cult" dimension in which the late, lamented Giuni Russo had dwelt - and still dwells today. It's surely on the back of that result, unthinkable until shortly before, that Cgd grants a reissue of the artist's second album - released the previous year and already noticed by the less short-sighted critics - complete with the new, radio-friendly single.

"'Energie' is perhaps still part of my future", the artist explained in one of her last interviews, lovingly collected by Battiato in the DVD "La sua figura". Splendid words, as well as revealing ones: "Energie" was, and is, indeed "the" future - even a future far from having fully "revealed" itself, one that, like every truest glimpse of what's to come, finds in the past its essential nourishment, its etymological root. One's thoughts turn to the visionary opulence of Sicilian Baroque, to the interiors of the Church of San Giorgio in Ragusa crammed with stuccoes and frescoes; to the wonder-filled joy of watching and listening to a dream, so characteristic of René Clair's "Entr'acte"; to the Verdi of the "popular trilogy"; to the sadistic, resigned irony of names like Pirandello, Perriera, Sciascia, Bonaviri: all suggestions - whether (im)mediate or transfigured by vision - that inhabit the grooves of this jewel, 100% "made in Italy".

"Energie" also as a collective effort, a communion of talents: those of Franco Battiato (also artistic producer) and violinist Giusto Pio, in charge of writing and arrangements; those of Giuni and her collaborator and partner Maria Antonietta Sisini, who help the team draft the lyrics for some of the tracks; of guitarist Alberto Radius (his hand is present on "Il sole di Austerlitz" too) and, let's not forget, of the other musicians involved in the project (worth mentioning at least Paolo Donnarumma's "free" and rounded bass, Walter Scebran's inventive drumming and Filippo Destrieri's keyboards). The result is a popular merry-go-round and, at the same time, a trembling experimental drift, an amalgam of the most varied and variable influences ("bel canto" as much as new wave, as much as nineteenth-century romance, as much as whatever devil you please...) capable of transcending its reference categories with disarming simplicity. Not only the crowning achievement of Russo's entire career, but also the most fully realized concretization of Battiato's meta-pop vision, even surpassing "L'era del cinghiale bianco" or "His Master's Voice" in terms of creative and "cognitive" audacity, even while sharing part of the same musical DNA with them.

In this new context, both Giusy Romeo from Sanremo and the unsettling "foreign-leaning" parenthesis under the name Junie Russo (see the 1975 LP "Love Is A Woman") are distant memories: in their place stands Giuni, heroine of a Dannunzian pulp novel filtered through post-punk, a Francesca Bertini stolen from silent-era popular cinema and galvanized by the jagged, uncertain traits of modernity. It's under this guise that the Palermo-born singer, more commanding than ever, waves her five-octave soprano range under everyone's ears, alternating "exotic" furies with bursts of fragrant romanticism, cyber ambiguity with operatic arias, clownish contortions with tearful tragedy. Finally, with an amused look, she raises her middle finger and sticks out her tongue at us, confused and (un)happily aware of having handed down to history the first and inimitable "new wave with a Sicilian citrus scent" (!) within living memory.

The songs? Pretty much all masterpieces, starting with the opening triptych: the majestic pop-prog of "Lettera al Governatore della Libia" (a mockery of the era of Italian colonialism? A martial trance born of infatuation with "Domenica del Corriere" or "L'Illustrazione Italiana"?), poised between the baroque grace of Monteverdi and the marble-like bite of the synth; the absolute lyricism of "Il sole di Austerlitz", itself a martial ballad set in a historical-fantastical dimension, with dazzling solo showcases for guitar and violin; and finally "Crisi metropolitana", a furious "hi-nrg" hybrid of Yma Sumac and Ultravox, Giorgio Moroder and Yellow Magic Orchestra (almost impossible to conceive, and yet it exists!), elevating the paranoid fluorescence of Milan - where Russo had long since relocated - into the stigmata of an eternal Metropolis ("Vedere la società mi cambia spesso di umore/ Io mi dissocio da me…/ E folla sui marciapiedi/ Traffico che picchia in testa/ Con questa rabbia che ho…"). Three superlative songs, packed with spontaneous flourishes like the piercingly high note that closes "Il sole di Austerlitz" or the priceless, twisted quote of "O sole mio" at the tail end of "Crisi metropolitana" - proof of just how relaxed and playful the mood was during the recording sessions.

The rest of the album is no less impressive: "electro-romances" like "L'addio", the "Atmosfera" that sounds like an "Ave Maria" steeped in touching domestic liturgy ("Se ti svegli e fai il caffè accendi un po' la radio/ Cosa hai fatto ieri? Come va in Italy?/ Oggi che è domenica non mi va di uscire"), or "L'attesa" all manage to beautifully blend melodrama and irony, traditional themes (secret or merely dreamed-of love, the fear of giving oneself, escape toward an unknown future) with modernist deconstruction. The peak of its kitsch remains "Una vipera sarò", where she beats her friend Rettore at her own game: between nods to the Land of the Rising Sun, "Madama Butterfly" poses, the "trifonie dei Mongoli" (which are actually also in Japanese) and Battiato's bizarre spoken interludes, the song is an unbroken festival of quirky touches in which the true star remains, always, the snake with a body temperature of three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, aiming for the ankle (perhaps Caselli's?) and injecting it with venom flavored with sambuca.

It goes without saying, but with the 2005 reissue of "Energie", after years of being almost entirely unavailable, some measure of justice was finally done to a truly unrepeatable work, born of circumstances that would never occur again except sporadically (witness the two Battiato-Pio tracks on the following year's "Vox" in '83, and the Sicilian artist's hand still present, in some form, on every album through '87).

In truth, the only constants throughout Giuni Russo's entire career were restlessness, theatrical flair, and a stubborn will to break free from an increasingly "lightweight" image that no longer fit her - an image, it must be said, she had fallen into precisely with the runaway hit "Un'estate al mare", a song that, however refined, lent itself more than others to a strictly and narrowly popular reading. The story is well known: when the singer refused to record yet another summer hit, Caterina Caselli - the boss at Cgd - cut her loose, preventing her from recording even a single note for a full two years and forcing her into a long, costly legal battle. "At a certain point I found myself acting as a go-between for her and the record executives," Battiato recalls. "(Giuni) was a woman who accepted no compromises, with a staggering existential rigor. She was always afraid of being misunderstood."

All that was left to her was to deepen her love of opera ("A casa di Ida Rubinstein" in 1988) and settle into the role of a niche artist, often involved in refined projects (the world-music of "Amala", the cabaret-style singing on a text by Ettore Petrolini in "Fortunello" in '94) but with modest sales returns. The passion was always there - that never wavered. Then came her death in 2004, after a long illness, and the belated "rediscovery" by both audiences and critics, finally aware they were dealing with a rigorous creativity that was nonetheless fundamentally sunny, airy, free of constraints, and deeply playful: "'Energie' was a truly exceptional record. There are tracks that, even now, when I listen back to them, still make me laugh with pure enjoyment. In the end, I think it's the album that best represents me." Quite right. Praise to the record, to Franco, to Giuni, and to everyone who made this small, great miracle of Italian pop possible.

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15/02/2009