Loredana Bertè

The pop imagination, as we know, couldn't survive without its icons. Without symbols, internal connections, the threads that link past to future. It needs its own specific personalities, figures capable of expressing the anxieties and desires of an entire society, translating them into their art. Even a country like Italy, which perhaps never quite knew how or wanted to express that imagination as it could have, couldn't help but rely on such figures, on subjectivities capable of pushing expressive limits and possibilities forward, even at the risk of crashing down like latter-day Icaruses. Figures like Loredana Bertè, for instance: those incapable of hiding, in constant conflict with a fierce censorship (especially when it came to female sexuality), hurricanes ready to unleash themselves on the surrounding hypocrisy and moral conformism. Figures who can, however, also put on their best evening gown and slip on velvet gloves, if the punch to be thrown can land harder that way.

As the Eighties dawned, the singer from Bagnara Calabra (though essentially raised in Rome from adolescence onward) could certainly not be considered a novice: she had already weathered plenty of hardships and experiences that had shaped her path since the start of the previous decade, when her ambitions were geared toward acting rather than music. There were also plenty of acquaintances - some who would convince her to change her outlook and turn to song, others who would support her new course step by step, recognizing the singularity of a voice and talent utterly unlike anything else in circulation at the time. Mario Lavezzi of Il Volo first and foremost, with whom she'd carry on a fruitful personal and artistic relationship (lasting a full five albums), Ivano Fossati, Alberto Radius, Pino Daniele: these are some of the names who saw in Bertè's distinctive timbre, pained and rasping, the ideal vehicle for their songs, performed with ever-growing conviction and versatility.

From the bawdy, no-holds-barred concept album "Streaking", which gave the censors cold sweats for its explicit themes, the singer transforms from record to record, a tireless chameleon who taps into some of the era's biggest hits while also helping to redefine the stylistic course of Italian pop music, landing on the first Italian-language reggae hit ("E la luna bussò") and shaking up audiences with punchy synth-funk numbers (the famous "In alto mare"). By the time she reaches her seventh album, Bertè, the "rebel girl" of Italian music, has in her own way become an institution, elusive by nature to easy definitions, yet no less magnetic for it, in all her explosive irreverence. Having also won over a critical establishment not always generous toward her, by the close of 1981 the time comes for another turning point in her career, a changing of the guard that would formally hand her a place among the elite voices of our country. With her romantic partnership with Lavezzi over, the need for a change in collaborators becomes clear, a chance to play with a new dimension, a mirror of the expressive maturity she'd achieved. In this sense, it would be a rediscovered family circle that would provide the right opportunity.

"Traslocando" arrives in September 1982, following a triumphant summer for the singer (more on that later), and the change of course couldn't be more significant. A full-blown move, and not just in reference to the title track that opens side B, which contains a quote from Fossati's "...E di nuovo cambio casa". It's precisely thanks to the latter's contribution - handling production and realization of this album and the next two ("Jazz" and "Savoir faire") - that Loredana Bertè reaches her full artistic maturity, finding the perfect balance that expresses itself through the fullest, most polished pop, perfectly attuned to the international scene. Recorded in New York in the spring of that same year, just like the previous "Made in Italy", the record doesn't betray the singer's past (so much so that the Platinum Hook, the funk band she'd already worked with the year before, are called back in), but refines every aspect of it, doubling down on attention to arrangements, bringing things into a context that years later would be tellingly dubbed sophisti-pop. But the story gets even more compelling than that.

There she is, Loredana, dressed as a nun, her gaze hidden beneath the brim of an exaggeratedly widened headpiece, that fiery red touch on her lips simulating a drag-style overturning of the nun's habit. As if to reaffirm that her taste for mockery never went away, but was simply waiting for the right occasion, on the cover of "Traslocando" the performer indulges in a sardonic, yet supremely elegant masquerade, and in doing so lays herself bare, presenting herself as more real than real. In a sense, the photographic presentation anticipates the album's content, which, per Ivano Fossati's intentions, was meant to be tailored as closely as possible to Bertè, bending to her temperament.

No sooner said than done: in an operation that initially saw Mia Martini, then romantically involved with the Genoese songwriter, convince him to write for her sister again (his was the pen behind the singer's first real hit, the stirring folk march "Dedicato"), the album takes shape as a sort of extended family gathering, friends and relatives revolving around Bertè's voice and temperament like skilled tailors, polishing or ruffling wherever needed, in search of the perfect synthesis. In the chosen language, there's no room for any detail left to chance.

And what a language. Italy had of course already successfully absorbed, when not deliberately reworked, the wave ideas arriving from across the Channel (see Battiato with his various muses, but also fellow travelers Matia Bazar with "Berlino, Parigi, Londra"), and Bertè's own records hadn't remained immune to the allure of synthesizers either. But Fossati's touch goes further. In step with the evolutions of bleached-out funk, which through figures like Green Gartside and Joe Jackson was already flowing into wave territory, soon to be handed down to the generation of Paul Buchanan and Paddy McAloon, the sound of "Traslocando" becomes a plastic, composite substance, as steeped in jazz as it is adept at handling the reggae of "Bandabertè", elegant in its South American languor and at the same time tempered like steel. A thousand and more facets, as many as Bertè's voice can express, caught red-handed at the peak of its blazing expressiveness. Loredana the lover, Loredana the wounded, Loredana the storyteller, and who knows how many other Loredanas give way to one another with deep respect, and above all with total self-awareness, every word pronounced with the precision it deserves. From here, imagining a future classic is a shorter step than one might expect.

Released as the second single, "Per i tuoi occhi" is the one that opens the dance. A tasteful piano figure, drums straight and decisive, nothing more: it could be the intro to a Prefab Sprout song, but Bertè quickly dispels any doubt, launching her cries of love with no intention of being tamed. It's a vivid contrast: the lyrics turn aggressive and heartbreaking at once ("Per i tuoi occhi ancora, girare come imbambolata al luna park, un amo nella gola, ma innamorata come ai tempi nella scuola"), the orchestral element backing the synthetic climax of the chorus in an impetuous vocal surge. Calling a track like this soul would certainly be a mistake, yet it would be hard to find such visceral intensity even in "Made In Italy": here the singer throws herself into the material with unprecedented commitment, wearing the tailor-made dress with no trace of embarrassment. The voice as blood and life, a punch and a caress: "Stare fuori" knows this well, a slow synth-driven cadence that tries in vain to find even the faintest consolation for exclusion, for the withering of chances and desires that never came true.

"Stella di carta", a fascinating reflection on a sick relationship nearing its end (“Stella di carta se vuoi vattene via, ti mando un bacio per posta o sarebbe un’altra bugia, siamo di pasta diversa, io seguo un altro destino, se vado incontro alla notte, se ho le costole rotte è per vedere il mattino”), sends up another cry to the sky, its verses' ballad tone shattering into new, impetuous vocal surges, as if the decision itself brought unbearable pain.

This visceral quality, the credibility of performances that can bend toward the most immediate nostalgia (the buoyant reggae of the title track, played on a sweetness that can do nothing to hold back the flood of memories) or toward a vivid portrait of marginal situations (the quick nocturnal glimpses of "I ragazzi di qui", a sparkling synth-rock number capable of opening up into soft, soulful effusions), is the keystone of the whole operation, the game that was worth every inch of the candle. And it's the glue that manages to hold together even very distant contributions. It's hard not to recognize the hand of Renato Zero, a lifelong friend, behind the irreverent funk of the closing "Una", a hall-of-mirrors game that sets the public Bertè against the private one. And it's her sister's signature behind "Notte che verrà" (unconsciously very close to the city-pop of their Japanese counterparts), with guitar solos and brass in fine form for the grooviest track of the set. And yet everything leads back to her, the proud, solitary firebrand, incapable of disguising her own feelings, wounds worn like a banner. And there's a very clear reason for this identification. But it's worth turning the clock back a few months.

È un volo a planare

Per essere inchiodati qui

Crocifissi al muro

Ma come ricordarlo ora

Non sono una signora

Una con tutte stelle nella vita

Non sono una signora

But one for whom the war never ended

Oh no, oh no

It's hard not to recognize the chorus of one of the greatest classics of Italian pop, lyrics and a song so deeply etched into the country's historical memory as to be one and the same with the woman who sang them, a mirror in which to revel. Released in the summer of that same year, the song quickly became a hit, won the Festivalbar and, in its own way, fixed the image of Loredana Bertè as a combative icon, a spirited woman, far from willing to give up her character to accommodate some presumed notion of respectability. For better or worse, the whole imagery that would shape the singer's subsequent career stems from here, helped along by the wedding dress she flaunted with reckless daring in the famous video (before the uproar caused by a certain "Like A Virgin"), in the strength of a performance that, even forty years on, still drips with raw blood.

Propelled by the extraordinary success of the single, "Traslocando" itself also racked up major numbers for the artist, achieving platinum status for the first time and ushering in an extraordinarily fruitful period, one that would be matched again with the following "Jazz" (and the famous "Il mare d'inverno").

New scandals would follow, along with family troubles, ruinous falls and slow, hard-won comebacks. All of this, perhaps prophetically, is already hinted at within the world of this "move", within the impetuous temperament of an album that established Bertè among the great voices of Italian song. With no filter whatsoever, an icon simply rises here.

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27/11/2022