Riccardo Cocciante

When Riccardo Cocciante crosses over into the Eighties, he's clearly an artist eager to change direction – stylistically speaking. The album that leads him to explore new territory is without doubt "Cervo a primavera" (1980). After years of intense, intimate expressionism, with his particular way of externalizing emotion in his output of the Seventies, one can sense in him a new way of writing and framing his music.

There are essentially two reasons for this: the first has to do with the artist's need to explore new genres and engage more openly with modern rock and its contaminations. The second concerns the break with lyricist Marco Luberti and the start of his new collaboration with Mogol. The latter's lyrics give Cocciante the chance to expand the sonic space of his compositions, making them airier, more malleable, and therefore harder to pin down aesthetically.

The work that begins from that point on unfolds as a crescendo of pop experimentation carried through the following albums ("Cocciante", "Sincerità" and "Il mare dei papaveri"), aided also by the support of arrangers like Paul Buckmaster and James Newton Howard, who, working alongside the maestro, help him carve out an extremely refined sound with an international scope. When 1987 arrives, it's time for another major collaboration: this time with Geoff Westley. The Englishman immediately grasps Cocciante's intentions, putting at his service an innate ability to handle both new electronic instrumentation and acoustic ones. He brings along a team of session players with refined sensibility and convincing versatility (such as Phil Palmer and Stuart Elliot) and decides that his own piano will also play an important role on the album that would be titled "La grande avventura". It's an album that stands as Cocciante's most cosmic and eco-spiritual work, one that expands and contracts at the speed of light, taking unexpected paths, where the songs stretch out, flow into one another and echo each other. An album that gives the impression the maestro has reached a point of dissolution of the self: the man becomes sonic matter, transcending and merging with the nature that permeates the narrative of this great adventure. And every single song perfectly embodies this renewal and this need for abstraction and momentum toward an enveloping, liberating sonic flow.

First up on the tracklist is “Il mio nome è Riccardo”: it opens hazily, cloaked in a dose of mystery thanks to synths and electric piano advancing through a minor-key progression. When it opens up into something crystalline, the doubt seems to dissolve: a mellow guitar, set against another that's electric and distorted, clears the final path toward a resolution that somehow brings peace. Indeed, within the uncertainty of “Oggi ho te, domani chissà, è quasi una lama d'acciaio che va, che va nel cuore”, one certainty remains all the same: I am, I exist, “Il mio nome è Riccardo”, even if I can't say more than that.

The second track, "Un desiderio di vita indicibile", is probably one of the most stylish songs in Cocciante's entire career. His trademark vocal flourishes and melodic ups and downs are set up and then armored by Westley's electronic, minimalist arrangements. The unspeakable desire for life then bursts out brilliantly with Jamie Talbot's saxophone, underpinned by electric piano and Fairlight programming. The thoroughly existentialist dimension crystallizes perfectly in Mogol's lyrics: "Che grande confusione, dentro questa vita mia, la logica per tanti suona come una follia, ma io mi sono scritto un nuovo detto: ci credo, e quindi sia". This great track then flows, in a continuous stream, into the following song, "La canzone di Francesco", which seeks to reconnect with Cocciante's stylistic past. It's a fluid, romantic, sensual ballad, building a naturalistic pathos that immerses the maestro's voice in a dimension both idyllic and metaphysical. Andy Pask's bass plays no small part in the finishing touches here: the construction of that suspended, swaying Pastorius-style groove is entirely down to him.

"Cuori di Gesù", on the other hand, has lyrics by Lucio Dalla, and it shows. Cocciante seems to try to slightly reshape his own expressiveness, adapting it to the pointed tone of Dalla's words. It works, and Westley strives to give maximum breadth to the chorus, which collides with the verses - more syncopated and clearly arranged to give the song the necessary momentum.

“Canzone indiana” and “Indocina” are linked by a single thread, like a two-part suite running over twelve minutes. Steeped in an unmistakably Eastern-tinged atmosphere, the first is the beginning of the journey, attempting to sketch the setting with Phil Palmer's electric sitar which, together with Howard J. Davidson's soprano sax, accompanies the waters it flows over. Mogol's words heighten the suggestiveness and amplify the spiritual element too: “Questa canzone indiana è un profumo da seguire per capir di più, una brezza che ci spinge su, con il naso nel cielo […] Un desiderio profondo che nasce, di entrare in altre dimensioni in cui il respiro sia umano, perché non è sano chiuderci in noi”. Cocciante, for his part, is at the height of vocal and interpretive transcendence, fully immersed in a performance he handles with exquisite eclecticism.

"Indocina" continues with the placid calm bequeathed by the previous track, then suddenly bursts into an agitated, tropical flash of lightning that appears out of nowhere thanks to a distorted electric guitar riff. Enrico Ruggeri's lyrics help Cocciante recall his Vietnamese past and the country's tortured history: "Vento caldo che porti via, tra gli eserciti della follia, tu raccontami di come sia l'Indocina, l'Indocina. Susy Lynn ho letto la tua storia, immagini lontane, foto sbiadite, tra le vene delle strade ferite d'Indocina, d'Indocina". From a broader aesthetic and sonic standpoint, the track manages to place its more evocative, folkloric side perfectly alongside its modern, futuristic one, once again thanks to a superb arrangement by Westley.

"Il vero amore" sets up a leaden mood that unfolds geometrically, turning the track into a cybernetic ballad. Talbot's sax and Guy Parker's trumpet converse with Westley's synthetic textures, in a descending-then-climbing progression that echoes the dispersing cloud imagery of Mogol's lyrics. "Scene di primavera con mia madre", by contrast, is pure bucolic intimism, classic Cocciante. Sounds of nature, liquid immersions, an expanding vocal delivery with unexpected modulations and intervals. Everything is serene until Palmer's electric guitar and Stewart Elliott's muffled, gritty drums come in. A track through which Cocciante connects with memory and the passing of time.

"Il funambolo" is a transitional piece, built for the grand finale, though with particularly inspired lyrics by Ruggeri. Grand images and grand metaphors, accompanied by Westley's brilliant piano. And finally, here it is, the closing chapter of this journey: "La grande avventura". A track of nearly seven and a half minutes that raises the union of the modern/futuristic and the naturalistic/bucolic-exotic elements to yet another power. The sounds are wrapped in a tangle of synthetic strings and hazy horns, where Westley's crystalline, cybernetic piano underscores the moments most charged with pathos. Cocciante plays out his serene drama until the drums enter, along with crossing electric guitar riffs and horns refreshed by a Vangelis-style cleanup. At that point the maestro's singing transforms and finds a vigor that carries it into a tight, extraordinarily intense techno-soul passage: "E nel saltar vorrei la tua mano perché avrei meno paura insieme a te". Total and complete liberation. The great adventure has begun, and Palmer's electric guitar will guide our protagonist to his destination. Cocciante's voice soars into the air and dissolves into a blinding wash of sound.

"La grande avventura" is, in short, an extraordinary record (probably the finest in Riccardo Cocciante's entire discography), one that gives us the clearest glimpse of the peak of his ability to renew himself and engage in dialogue with writers and collaborators who helped him stay in step with the times, while still allowing him to preserve his more classic and, in some ways, traditional approach (in the healthiest possible sense of that idea). Introduced by a cover illustrated by Milo Manara, the album achieved considerable success, reaching number 3 on the Tv Sorrisi e Canzoni chart, even though its songs have not endured in the collective memory today.

In a sense, it's a container for all the energy Cocciante poured out during the Eighties, an amplifier of purely pop-oriented research and experimentation that reveals the final push of a great songwriter. After this record, in fact, he would leave Europe to spend several years living in the United States: "La routine mi stava schiacciando: un disco, poi un altro, poi un altro ancora. A un certo punto mi sono sentito arido". This necessary pause would slowly lead him toward other artistic directions, but "La grande avventura" remains a monument, an image and a symbol of a wonderful, unrepeatable era.

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07/06/2026