CCCP - CSI

The CCCP can reasonably lay claim to the title of greatest Italian rock band of all time. The debate will go on forever about the relationship between our scene and the international one, about the "local" specificity of the Italian reality and the (supposed) impossibility of comparing it to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but one thing is certain: this Emilian band managed to capture the spirit of that thing everyone calls "rock", and did so with a language that, while shaped by its context of origin – Europe, Italy, Emilia (paranoid and otherwise) – can be considered fully "universal". In this blend of Italian provincialism and international avant-garde, pushed so far as to often seem surreal, lies the band's greatness, whose punk fervour is also embodied physically by the shaman-frontman Giovanni Lindo Ferretti: bony, neurotic, hallucinated, almost a sort of Po Valley John Lydon.

CCCP were born in 1982 in a Berlin nightclub, from the meeting of Ferretti with guitarist Massimo Zamboni. The two of them got hold of a drum machine and played around Germany. Their return to Italy brought the revelation: the popular culture of Emilia-Romagna, communist traditions included, could be filtered through punk ethics and aesthetics. The band's sonic coordinates draw mainly on the German electro-industrial scene, from Kraftwerk to Einsturzende Neubauten, American punk and proto-punk (Mc5, Stooges, Ramones), Italian singer-songwriter tradition (Franco Battiato above all) and British dark-wave (from PIL to Bauhaus). But CCCP are not just another copy of a foreign band: they are a provincial Italian band who defaced everything that could be considered traditionally Italian, from the pop song to ballroom dance music, and put it through a punk blender at supersonic speed.

After a couple of EPs, whose tracks were later collected on "Compagni, cittadini, fratelli, partigiani" (1984), in 1986 CCCP released their true debut album, with the sprawling, emblematic title "Affinità e divergenze fra il compagno Togliatti e noi. Del conseguimento della maggiore età". It was a crucial period for Italian rock: two years earlier, Diaframma had released "Siberia", and the year before that Litfiba had put out "Desaparecido", two key records for the nascent "new wave" scene. But compared to Litfiba and Diaframma, CCCP were even more radical and subversive. No one before them had dared to fill Italian songs with such doses of violence, despair and paranoia.

Their sarcastic provocations – which live were accompanied by the surreal circus of Danilo Fatur (People's Artist) and Annarella Giudici (Honorary Showgirl) – come through even in the album's packaging. The cover is mockingly branded in "real socialism" style, with the effigy of "comrade Togliatti" in the background. The original was pressed on red vinyl, credited to "Attack Punk Records", with a portrait of a punk on one side and the words "Pro-Soviet punk/ Emilian melodic music" on the other. Dropping the needle on it (or, more prosaically, popping the CD reissued by Virgin into the player) is like undergoing a prolonged bout of electroshock therapy.

Right out of the gate: the scream-manifesto of "CCCP" hits immediately, with rasping guitars and a chorus that makes the band's political (un)certainties clear from the off: "Fedeli alla linea e la linea non c'è" ("Faithful to the line, and there is no line"). A swarm of feedback, a languid bass and an electronic drum pulse that never lets up are the band's trademark, and they come straight back with one of their anthems: "Curami" ("Cure me"). CCCP sing the psychoses of a generation of zombies, drifting sideways through the 80s, feeling perpetually out of place. That's why, more than love or good intentions, what they invoke is a cure, a medicine to free the mind from the paranoid nightmares haunting it: "Prendimi in cura da te, curami, curami" ("Take me into your care, cure me, cure me"), Ferretti pleads in his rasping, strangled voice, between the punk guitar riff and the disorienting tinkling of a xylophone; the song then seems almost to fall into a trance through the obsessive repetition (another CCCP trademark) of the phrase "Solo una terapia, solo una terapia!" ("Just one therapy, just one therapy!"). In the end, all that's left is the mechanical beat of the electronic drums and the xylophone's last spasms. We're not far from PIL's nervous breakdowns here.

For CCCP, drugs are never about excitement or expanding perception: they're antidepressants, tranquillisers, sleeping pills... they are "Valium Tavor Serenase": "Il valium mi rilassa/ il serenase mi stende/ il tavor mi riprende" ("Valium relaxes me/ Serenase knocks me flat/ Tavor picks me back up"). The track's rhythms, by contrast, are frenzied: an unhinged hardcore outburst of sheer violence that suddenly breaks off to make way for a ballroom-dance interlude ("Emilia mia, Emilia in fiore", in pure three-four dance-hall style!). Punk marrying Casadei: what an unheard-of outrage!

While the music always retains an explosive charge, the lyrics are steeped in a surreal desolation, from "Trafitto", which slackens the pace with its declaration of apathy ("Trafitto sono/ trapassato dal futuro/ cerco una persona/ Fragili desideri/ a volte indispensabili/ a volte no" – "I am pierced/ run through by the future/ I'm looking for a person/ Fragile desires/ sometimes indispensable/ sometimes not"), to "Noia" ("Boredom"), as dark and depressed as its title suggests.

The Emilia of CCCP retains its ironic verve, though soured by a streak of sarcasm, while shedding any trace of good-natured warmth or hedonism. Love too, as noted, has by now lost every sentimental connotation, reduced to a brutally mechanistic dimension: "Un'erezione, un'erezione triste per un coito molesto, per un coito modesto/ Spermi spermi indifferenti, per ingoi indigesti/ io attendo allucinato la situazione estrema" ("An erection, a sad erection for a bothersome coitus, for a modest coitus/ Indifferent sperm, sperm, for indigestible swallows/ I wait, hallucinating, for the extreme situation") (from "Mi ami"?).

"Morire" ("To Die") is another lethal lashing: Ferretti, ever more the visionary muezzin (forgive the overused term, but this is, after all, the man who wrote "Punk Islam"...), batters the listener with his languid delivery: "Produci, consuma, crepa/ Produci, consuma, crepa/ Cotonati i capelli, riempiti di borchie/ rompiti le palle/ rasati i capelli/ crepa/ crepa" ("Produce, consume, die/ Produce, consume, die/ Tease your hair, cover yourself in studs/ Bust your balls/ Shave your head/ Die/ Die"). "Io sto bene" delivers the final blow: over a danceable beat, Ferretti intones one of the decade's great anthems: "Non studio, non lavoro, non guardo la tv, non vado al cinema, non faccio sport" ("I don't study, I don't work, I don't watch TV, I don't go to the cinema, I don't do sport"). The 80s seen in reverse: hedonism gives way to depression, consumerism to apathy, ambition to insecurity: "Io sto bene io sto bene/ io sto male io sto male/ io non so io non so/ come stare dove stare" ("I'm fine, I'm fine/ I'm not fine, I'm not fine/ I don't know, I don't know/ how to be, where to be").

The dark mood of "Allarme" ("Alarm"), a restless tango punctuated by rock jolts ("Muore tutto, l'unica cosa che vive sei tu. Solo tu, solo tu" – "Everything dies, the only thing alive is you. Only you, only you"), is the prelude to the long final delirium of "Emilia Paranoica", the manifesto of the album and perhaps of the band's entire career. An oppressive stillness – slow-motion electronic drums, guitar chords in sync with Ferretti's clipped, monotone singsong vocal – suddenly picks up speed, with Zamboni's stinging guitars tearing open the horizon; then everything stops dead, and the dark slowness of the opening returns. The sunny, postcard Emilia gives way to a cold, foggy wasteland, a land of junkies and drifters, the final frontier of alienation. "Aspetto un'emozione sempre più indefinibile" ("I await an ever more indefinable emotion") stands as Ferretti's final "testament".

The album will launch CCCP into the firmament of Italian rock and beyond: the concerts in Pankow and Moscow will seal international recognition for the most international of our rock bands. Later, even Ferretti and his bandmates would have to move with the times and adopt a new name, ushering in the era of CSI. But that's another story.

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27/10/2006