Beppe Cantarelli
Confusione

Beppe Cantarelli - Confusione (1980)

Cantarelli is a great guitarist, singer, internationally renowned composer, and has written songs for Aretha Franklin, Joe Cocker, Mina, Laura Branigan, solo guitarist for Quincy Jones... In short, a career quite different from many of his more celebrated and plagiarist-fornaciari colleagues. After the debut 45 rpm "Come pane fresco", this first album written and sung by him had moderate success. Always in search of the lost record, good old Beppe reappeared to me this summer, inside that fish tank that is now my old color TV, a Blaupunkt, while joyfully singing Prendimi con te in an obliterated, faded musical program for the youth of those days, the disco-going Popcorn. And disco is the record and who wrote it, in fact, Italo-disco, which is as fresh as a summer earworm-drink shaken with funky-fanku and a dash of on the rock; and then so much, so much soul in the ballads. The arrangements are top-notch, the lyrics never banal, and they can easily be placed in the poetic trend of that long Petrarchan wave that has become an anthropological-cultural specificity of Italians: that is, here in the Belpaese they sing, dance, and play just about everybody, right? In short, even if there's a lot of craft, the songs on this debut by Cantarelli are radio-friendly without ever tiring. And it's full of beautiful musical snapshots: And I find myself inventing you where you are not, inventing you here inside, now now what time is it, who knows if you think of me ..Waking up in the morning without a hurry and the sun on the pillow was your basket of flowers for me and I enchanted you I wanted to understand life, to enjoy it drop by drop, now I'm here counting the shadows in the room..And you're not there to hold my trembling hand..but if my song is you, it's worth believing it again.

But what is the secret of Beppe Cantarelli's hair? That bouffant was a natural evolution-or involution- of the Hendrix-style perm in a disco-hair style- like Battisti, E.L.O. Santa Esmeralda to be clear-. I achieved it with a can of my cousin's cheap lemon shampoo, but it had a scent, a color... and almost the texture of a gel that just by smelling it made you want to eat it! And it managed to puff your hair out of proportion..I haven't found it since, only a recently produced oil-lemon one by Garnier resembles it. Anyway, it shouldn't be confused with the legendary green apple Campus shampoo... Yet now that I think about it, the Arcimboldi girl with the apples on her head from the bottle was identical to Monica F., from IIIa B, she definitely smelled of green apple in her hair, I'm sure, she used that shampoo and drove me crazy, like her skin that smelled of Fa the Lime of the Caribbean shower gel. In short, she wasn't just a pretty girl, she seemed to come out of a carousel. She had dark brown hair..I see her again climbing the school stairs with her half-unbuttoned blouse, the faux-virginal suggestive air, Festivalbar music from Radio Studio Emme in her brain, books in her arms, ponytail, jesus jeans, sandals, languid glances, her father coming to pick her up with the green Prinz... And that morning that I, she, well, we, locked ourselves inside the bathroom...and then the teacher. Okay, let's leave the tedium of these old Polaroid snapshots... All I know is that that story was too much like slices of moon, too much days yes/days no, like the wormy apples on her head; and it's all too far away now, lacking that youthful aura of sanctity; unfortunately, there are only rings of melancholy that orbit eternally around my head: Syd Barrett is dead, my hair still holds, and I don't have much to say anymore.

Take me with you and let me in like the morning sun, with my songs that you don't know.... Bella Fraté.