Sergio Caputo

It all began with Mister Fantasy, the pioneering TV format hosted by Carlo Massarini, which steered the imagination of young viewers towards musical multimedia. It's 1983, and Sergio Caputo - notwithstanding a false start two years earlier on those same screens with a pair of songs of a rather more conventional stamp ("Hey tu" and the admittedly swinging "Meglio così", offshoots of a four-track "Q Disc" released by Ricordi) - becomes a fixture of Italian late-night Tuesdays, carving out for himself over several episodes the role of house artist within Massarini's digital factory.

An advertising art director with a weakness for music, he served his apprenticeship in the Seventies almost as a pastime, even around the Folkstudio scene, before it turned into something more serious thanks in part to the attentions of Ernesto Bassignano - the caustic singer-songwriter (later producer, journalist and radio host) who was one of the leading lights of that historic Roman venue alongside Francesco De Gregori and Antonello Venditti - and of Vincenzo Micocci, the indispensable talent scout of the Roman singer-songwriter school.

At the dawn of 1983, the Italian music scene was caught between the explosion of italo-disco on one hand, and on the other a substantial contingent of Seventies veterans who, following in the footsteps of Franco Battiato and Krisma, had likewise turned their attention toward electronic sounds. Lucio Battisti had closed out the previous year with the synthetic "E già", Matia Bazar were about to unveil "Tango", while the robotic divertissements of Alberto Camerini ("Rockmantico", 1982) were all the rage, followed by Ivan Cattaneo's synth-pop revivalist take ("Bandiera Gialla", 1983) — and the list could go on.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sergio, no spring chicken by that point, made his major-label debut with something that would be an understatement to call contrarian. Electronica? No thanks, at least not in the common "futurist" sense of the term. No rock singer-songwriter fare either, despite its considerable following at the time (think of veterans like Edoardo Bennato and Alberto Radius with his various projects, but also rising stars who would go on to explode like Vasco Rossi, or others later forgotten, like Scialpi), nor any interest in the chart-topping pop of the likes of Venditti, Berté and Pooh.

At a moment when everyone was racing toward every conceivable vision of the future, Caputo's gaze settled instead on other seasons, on a time that had been suppressed or at least relegated to the black-and-white Italy of grandparents and parents, among the dusty 78s of Alberto Rabagliati and the Quartetto Cetra, and the swing licks of Fred Buscaglione. This despite the fact that he — not entirely without reason — always distanced himself from comparisons that might hold true for shared roots (swing) but not for the substance of what he was actually doing. His attention turned mainly elsewhere, toward the recent jump-blues itch of Joe Jackson, who in '81 had released "Jumpin' Jive", and toward the jazz-pop sophistication of Steely Dan: and to think that the British new cool movement was still to come, taking shape in the very year of our Italian Saturday, with the first singles by Style Council.

It would nonetheless be simplistic to reduce "Un sabato italiano" to a mere — however singular — exercise in nostalgia, or to a calligraphic rehash of foreign models, since Caputo brings a great deal of himself to it: first by crafting melodies that stand up on their own merits, then by clothing them in an enviable and in many ways unique interpretive physique du rôle, and finally by writing lyrics in which a lovingly refined vocabulary coexists with the contagious immediacy that has always defined pop's fortunes.

Within this framework, ten delightful and memorable vignettes take shape, in which exquisite irony serves as the veil concealing the thinly disguised melancholy of characters straight out of an Italian comedy, juggling memorable drinking bouts, offbeat acquaintances, loves never begun or badly ended, with a recurring leitmotif of loneliness exorcised by nightclub lights, amid orchestras, lamé outfits and platinum-blonde femmes fatales.

It's the "Sabato italiano" of the radio that "stabs with the flower festival", of adventures in "Fellini-esque Rome" lived as "tightrope walkers balanced on the weekend", where "latent melancholy" is softened by the "unfathomable depths" of friends' girlfriends; it's the falsely lighthearted mood stirred by a love gone cold, portrayed in the nighttime stroll of "Merci Bocù", glancing at shop windows where "there's a mannequin that looks like you" "sporting a little mustard-yellow suit", before ducking into a whisky bar with its "mint-green sign" to order "a Guinness for round one" and convince oneself that everything's already been left behind. Then there's "Week end", which sounds like a tribute to the Steely Dan of "Gaucho" (with "the Totip aces, and the boxing diehards", sealing an Italy of the streets that still existed back then), the phone calls to a beloved with "nerves a bit frayed" placed straight from the "Night" club where "the little orchestra amuses itself butchering a standard by sweet Bessie Smith", the delicious honky-tonk of "Io e Rino", the symbiosis of two loneliness, one a bit tender and one a bit shifty, or the slightly off-kilter ballad "Cimici e bromuro", a legacy of endless time spent in the neuro ward of a military hospital, fighting boredom and stifling heat with daydreams scented with the same aroma as the lyrical frescoes Roberto Roversi once gifted to Lucio Dalla.

Opening and closing the album are two more classics from Caputo's songbook (the other two on the record could be identified as the evergreen title track, and "Merci Bocù"): the full-swing "Citrosodina", which would become "Bimba se sapessi" due to possible legal issues with the drug's manufacturer (so the "granular citrosodina" of one of the finest opening lines ever would turn into the improbable "vegetable idrofobina", drunk "to forget the visceral seasickness this world gives me"), and the must-have for any self-respecting piano bar, "Spicchio di luna", which picks up with wistful lightness much of the record's narrative: the Saturday evening fading away, the city lights, the retro musician yearning for a love perhaps more imagined than actually lived.

The following year Sergio Caputo doubled down, releasing "Italiani Mambo", the ideal sequel that broadened and cemented his popularity, complete with an appearance at Sanremo. Though he went on to pursue an artistic path of ever more refined stylistic forms, eventually performing alongside jazz greats of the caliber of Dizzy Gillespie, "Un sabato italiano" remains the inspiration destined for the history books, one of the most original and unforgettable alchemies ever produced by Italian pop. And to mark its thirtieth anniversary, Caputo decided to release a remake, "Un sabato italiano 30" (Alcatraz Moon Italy, 2013), re-recording all the tracks with a jazz septet and adding two unreleased songs to the tracklist.

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08/12/2013