Stormy Six

Belonging from the very first hour to the Rock In Opposition movement – alongside the founders Henry Cow, the Swedish Samla Mammas Manna, the Belgian Univers Zero and the French Etron Fou Leloublan – the Milanese band Stormy Six represented Italian music and culture within the movement with real authority. Their career is a long journey, split into a variety of extremely diverse and prolific phases full of ideas and insight: starting out in the second half of the Sixties as a band close to beat music, they then veered towards early proto-psychedelic leanings before arriving at the more complex, intricate albums of the Seventies, which range from political folk song to increasingly convoluted and evolved sounds.

The official shift to Rock In Opposition can be dated to 1978, the year that saw the publication of the movement's manifesto, written by Chris Cutler of Henry Cow: “The music industry doesn't create anything, it can only exploit the abilities of its victims (the musicians); the music industry wants to keep its customers' desires as low as possible, because easy formulas are simpler to reproduce. Musicians with integrity are harder to control; the music industry makes all its decisions on the basis of profit, they only have ears for the rustle of money”. Rock In Opposition sought to push political messages of protest forcefully, not so much through lyrics as through a tough, hostile stance towards record labels, deemed to be interested exclusively in profit and accused of caring neither about the quality of the music on offer nor about the artistic freedom of the musicians. The Rock In Opposition bands saw this as an unacceptable limitation of their own freedom and an improper interference of “capital” in their creative-artistic process.

Stormy Six immediately joined this musical and artistic movement, thanks to an invitation from the British founders Henry Cow. The year is 1978: just twelve months earlier they had released “L'apprendista” (1977), a pivotal album marking a distinctly Italian reinvention of classic progressive rock, still partly tied to political song but now oriented towards new and more complex sounds. This album, together with “Macchina maccheronica” (1980) and “Al volo” (1982), kicks off what can be described as Stormy Six's progressive trilogy, in which the final arrival at the Rock In Opposition sound takes concrete shape precisely with “Macchina maccheronica”.

One might ask why choose this album as the milestone and not the other two. The truth is that all three could be considered crucial to the history of Italian rock, but it's with “Macchina maccheronica” that the band's unconditional embrace of all the tenets of Rock In Opposition truly manifests itself, to the point that the band's usual members – Umberto Fiori (vocals), Franco Fabbri (guitar), Carlo De Martini (violin), Tommaso Leddi (violin, mandolin, guitar), Renato Rivolta (saxophone), Pino Martini (bass), Salvatore Garau (drums), Leonardo Schiavone (clarinet) – are joined by Henry Cow's cellist, Georgie Born.

Having set aside political lyrics, with “Macchina maccheronica” Stormy Six turn out a jewel of enormous complexity, one that goes beyond the very idea of a rock band to venture into territory bordering on the most radical jazz, folk music and the avant-garde. We are now light years away from youthful rock, even in terms of instrumentation as well as outlook: wind instruments, improvisations, rhythmic experiments pushed to the edge of comprehensibility, folk quotations reworked in a learned yet ironic setting, all clearly show just how much new thinking was running through the musicians' minds. And all of this comes with a refusal to take itself too seriously, despite the erudite nods to free-jazz improvisation and the avant-garde of Charles Ives, Luciano Berio and Stravinsky, or to the “circus” music of Nino Rota from the films of Federico Fellini. Folk music, certainly, as shown by the various interludes of “Madonina”, but enriched with academic references, odd time signatures and extreme technicality that make it unrecognisable both to listeners unused to the avant-garde and to those more accustomed to unconventional sounds.

Among these experiments, “Lucciole” stands out, an apotheosis of complexity that outdoes much of the Italian progressive rock of the time in sheer audacity – so much so that the album would go on to be far more appreciated in the rest of Europe than in Italy, where the band was known in territory more familiar to beat music or the singer-songwriter tradition. Setting aside the four brief interludes of “Madonina”, what we're left with is nine long chamber-music compositions that represent a genuinely unprecedented challenge for an Italian band. From the playful chaos of “Megafono”, overflowing with noise and improvisation, to the irony of “Verbale” or the circus-like rhythms of the title track, everything contributes to making “Macchina maccheronica” a bold album, determined to cross every musical convention and venture into entirely new worlds.

Confirmation of this comes with the thoroughly disjointed rock of “Pianeta”, which picks up the political themes of previous years, but within a musical syntax so deconstructed that the lyrics end up taking a back seat. “Banca” opens with a female voice reassuring us that the mood is about to lighten, but ironically leads into sounds of pure avant-garde, before ending with the words of a poor working-class man, marginalised by society and abandoned even by the woman he loves.

The album was especially well received in Germany, where it won the record critics' award for best rock album of 1980, even beating “Zenyatta Mondatta” by Police. A different world, a different era destined for its swan song, much like Stormy Six's own career, which would come to an end two years later, in September 1982.

To close, here is the reasoning that led the jury of the 1980 German critics' award to grant first place to Stormy Six: “The Milanese group “Stormy Six”, mostly devoted since 1976 to emulating English pop music, has created with “Macchina Maccheronica” an album that brings together the most disparate musical styles – folk music, jazz, rock elements, practices typical of the avant-garde. The imaginative musical discourse thrives on the contradictions of its varied stylistic levels and offers the listener the chance, rare within the rock genre, to embark on an adventure that is both sensual and intellectual at once”. 

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14/06/2020