Faust'o

HAS ANYONE SEEN FAUSTO WITH THE YELLOW SHOES? Fausto, 23 years old, formerly residing in Cesano Maderno on Via Giordano Bruno, where he ran the Moncalvese butcher's shop, left the home of his stepmother Maria on February 25th: he was dressed in light colors, with short trousers, a reddish cap, a pink sports shirt, high yellow shoes. Anyone with news of the missing man is kindly asked to keep it to themselves, so as to allow us to keep announcing his... disappearance.

The legend of Faust'o – the alias of Fausto Rossi – begins on a printed sheet of paper. An ad in the weekly magazine "Ciao 2001", accompanied by a photo echoing the album's cover image, kicks off the promotional campaign for his debut album, provocatively titled "Suicidio". It was the spring of 1978, and only a few months earlier the term "new wave" had timidly begun to circulate in Italy thanks to Chrisma, while the Italian peninsula was still caught between the never-ending prog craze and the classic singer-songwriter tradition of Battisti and De André. While "MONOtono" by Skiantos wouldn't declare open war on decency until November, the real provocateur of those months was Giorgio Gaber with "Polli d'allevamento", even though his musical theatre certainly lacked the allure of seductive foreign performers. Alberto Fortis would later try his hand at it too, with his invective against Romans ("A voi romani") and against record executive Vincenzo Micocci ("Milano e Vincenzo"), though he comfortably stayed within the bounds of political correctness.

In short, nothing untoward had happened just yet. It took the twenty-three-year-old Fausto Rossi, born in Pordenone into a middle-class family but raised in Milan, where he had slowly fallen in love with the Anglo-American music scene, to set off an earthquake in Italian popular music. From the very cover of "Suicidio" the reference to David Bowie's posing during the Berlin trilogy is unmistakable, with the black-and-white photography throwing every angle of his face into relief. Faust'o's eyes stare straight into the camera, challenging the listener and breaking a well-known taboo of classic narrative cinema. Yet Faust'o's provocative gaze doesn't stop at the two-dimensionality of the cover art: to demonstrate his contempt for the tradition of Italian singer-songwriters, Rossi decides to embrace the paradox of singing in Italian. He does so, moreover, within a concept album, the expressive vehicle par excellence of progressive rock.

Starting with its visual packaging, Fausto Rossi's debut has all the makings of an attack carried out from the inside, like the most refined of revolutions: the record was in fact released by a major label (Cgd) and made at the Ricordi studios with the help of the talented Alberto Radius (Formula 3). To carry out his "Suicidio", young Fausto inserts a grammatically out-of-place apostrophe into his name, creating a decadent stage persona for himself (only in the second part of his career will he begin recording as Fausto Rossi). He also chooses to compose music free of filters and stylistic barriers, a genuine cry against rampant conformism. The arrangements thus move effortlessly from moments of full-blown, unpredictable and violent art-rock to more reflective, chamber-like passages, over which sit the prog-style keyboards that Faust'o would later disown, accusing the production of undue interference. But above all, what drives the record is his incredible voice: a truly chameleonic timbre, able to shift with ease from falsetto to darker tones, from delivering sweet-sounding words to hurling accusations and insults within the space of a few seconds.

The album opens with a ringing telephone and the desperate cries of a newborn baby, interrupted by a man's sadistic laughter, as if mocking the sufferings the newborn creature has in store. This musique-concrète opening is followed by an instrumental prog digression, which finally leads into the title track. Despite its title, "Suicidio" is not, as one might naturally assume, about the drama of that extreme act, but is instead a hymn to pure misanthropy ("Let people die/ I don't care about them anymore/ I just want to rest/ don't throw me out on the street, never!"). There is none of Mauro Pelosi's abulia in Faust'o's suicide — Pelosi wrote a song of the same name in 1972, on his eloquently titled album "La stagione per morire"; in the Friulian artist there is only a pathological aversion to the human race, which leaves no room for any emotion beyond a chronic irritation ("I don't feel like hearing what they have to say"). Even natural disasters — including the one that struck his "own" native Friuli, hit by a devastating earthquake in those very years — are experienced as just another nuisance ("even the earthquake now just bothers me, bothers me, bothers me"). Having to deal with people, whether in joy or in sorrow, is the real "Suicidio" for Fausto Rossi. Weaving this claustrophobic feeling together are Stefano Cerri's ever-present bass and Mauro Spina's drums (later behind Kano's italo-disco sound), a rhythm section whose dynamism is perfectly suited to unleashing the vehement piano surges of Franco Graniero and the guitar solos played by Alberto Radius himself.

Another key role on the record is played by producer and lyricist Oscar Avogadro, whose pen is behind the Freudian perversion of "Godi", which from the title alone reveals itself to be an irreverent invitation to break every bigoted, sanctimonious taboo ("enjoy yourself, but in secret/ in the toilet, in the woods/ in the last place where God will see you"). It's a searing indictment, devoid of both modesty and self-censorship, especially when the finger is pointed at the Catholic Church ("but never let yourself be seen behind the pews of a church/ while you merrily masturbate"). While the sheer nerve of the lyrics would in some way be echoed a few months later by Andrea Tich with "Masturbati" and by Andrea Liberovici on his self-titled album, musically there is no doubt that a track like this paved the way for Decibel's "Contessa", which bears clear similarities.

On an album marked by a certain stylistic discontinuity between tracks, "Bastardi" stands out as one to highlight. This time the rhythm section changes, with Louis Viviers (bass) and Lorenzo Pergolato (drums) stepping in for Cerri and Spina: a shift that results in a more Dadaist, sinister atmosphere, very much in the style of Chrome and Tuxedomoon. But just when you think you've grasped Fausto Rossi's true nature, he flips the table once again right at the end of side one: on "Piccolo Lord" he lays himself bare, in a track with strongly autobiographical overtones. Rossi's alter ego is embodied by Harry, a piano enfant prodige constantly put on display by his mother while she takes tea with her friends. Yet the looks from this unusual audience aren't ones of admiration, but rather those of "a hundred vultures watching for a mistake". At a certain point, however, the boy decides to rebel, acting crazy at the piano and smashing "the sweet little biscuits to pieces". Rather than getting angry at his rebellion, the mother chooses the mask of hypocrisy and carries on with her performance as if nothing were happening, urging her son to play some more Chopin. The story unfolds as a theatrical, surreal suite in several movements, with Radius's guitar and Cerri's bass sharing the spotlight, complete with a female choir that recalls certain atmospheres of Lucio Battisti, caustically reimagined in a vaudeville key.

Side two opens with "Eccolo qua", an odd synthesis of Rino Gaetano and Sparks, pop and glam rock, while on "Il mio sesso" the direct reference is to Ultravox, whose lyrics to "My Sex" are practically translated word for word, bordering on plagiarism. The sexual allusions continue with "C'è un posto caldo", the story of the anguished encounter between a now-grown man and the man who had traumatized him at school, catching him in inappropriate behaviour. In the second part of the song, the protagonist's latent homosexuality is revealed, and it's worth noting how novel the subject was, tackled so explicitly perhaps only by Alfredo Cohen back in the Seventies.

No chorus interrupts the boy's inner turmoil, his thoughts entrusted to a falsetto capable of carving out a bitter contrast with the delicate subject matter of the lyrics. After all, Faust'o himself lived on contrasts: too elegant and sophisticated for the world of punk with its ambiguous, hermetic poses, well ahead even of the new romantic movement; too disdainful and daring to be absorbed and digested by the world of mainstream singer-songwriters.

The characters he brings to his musical theatre are like him: not flat, one-dimensional actors, but flesh-and-blood men who look you in the face, skilled at staging all their inner conflicts and contradictions. Men who carry within them their own "drugged angels" to be shaken awake, to borrow the title of the song Massimo Volume dedicated to good old Fausto. This is also the case with "Innocenza", a track that, despite its title and the classical instrumentation used (mellotron, piano, violin), conceals a violent love story between two depressed people incapable of communicating.

Closing the record, the almost proto-dark single "Benvenuti tra i rifiuti" rises up as a universal anthem for everyone who felt marginalized at the time, a sort of protest song brought into the present. The instrumental coda — a triumph of analogue keyboards à la Roxy Music — lays out, in this respect, the stylistic coordinates for Faust'o, who would continue his Bowie-esque trilogy with "Poco zucchero" (1979) and "J'accuse... amore mio" (1980). But the flowers of evil had already blossomed with "Suicidio": the boy in yellow shoes had blazed a trail with an album that was at times disjointed, yet able to fuse new wave and singer-songwriter music like no one had before.

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18/11/2018