CCCP - Fedeli alla linea
Live In Punkow

THE REVIEW

Undoubtedly, it is anachronistic to talk about an album released more than ten years ago today. Just as anachronistic would be the name of the Italian band in question, the album title, and its artwork today. It is precisely because of this striking anachronism that I find it irresistible not to talk about this album. CCCP is the Cyrillic acronym for SSSR, which stands for the USSR, meaning the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, officially deceased between 1991, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 1993-1994 (the year the band disbanded), with the division of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

CCCP is also the name of Fedeli Alla Linea, a band founded by Giovanni Lindo Ferretti and Zamboni in Berlin in 1982. But some of you might already know this, Live In Punkow is the title of a famous song by the band and also the title of this CD. Pankow, a district occupying Soviet East Berlin.

Let's move on to the tracks, Live In Punkow opens the CD, Ferretti seems to respond to J.F.Kennedy's famous "Live In Berlin," if the American president desired a free Berlin like all of Europe and the world and as a symbol of democracy against every dictatorship, the CCCP want a Europe with the five-year plan, protected by the Warsaw Pact as stable as the Socialist Republics seemed.
A brief Spot introduces us to CCCP, the band's manifesto track, amid the Pravda and the KGB Ferretti describes the band as a localized skin disease faithful to the line, even when it is not there. Militanz, bellicose and coup-inspired dreams by People’s Cambodia, Socialist Poland, the rebellious Paris, but also the desire to escape the clichés of socialism and sell out to a mercantile present. The song is introduced by what seems like a small litany without music, followed by a short spoken piece by Ferretti. Sono Come Tu Mi Vuoi, Ferretti is how we want him to be, and he is not how we want him to be. Manifest song of the band's basic intent: to confuse ideas.
It continues with the brilliant Profezia della Sibila, the splendid Curami, the interlude of an interview on Radio Popolare, the unmissable BBB, a truly must-have track, the legendary Spara Jurij, and then other greats like Trafitto, Stati di Agitazione, U.N., the danceable Io Sto Bene, the group's revisited version of Manifesto, Tien A Men, to the notes of Hon Kong (also by CCCP), the recited La Madonna Appare, followed by Annarella, and then the unique and wonderful Maciste All'Inferno that closes the CD.

Why the anachronistic CD of an anachronistic band, today. Live In Punkow gathers much of the politicized soul of the group which was among the forefathers of Italian and European Punk and a brilliant precursor of Soviet-style punk, a group that was able to combine punk with melodic-popular Emilian music.
So this CD is today more than ever a manifesto of those who would like once again someone who can confuse ideas with intelligence, who knows how to transgress without excess, who spreads adversarial culture that is unclear but enlightening, who can move people of every political inspiration by touching their soul, as only CCCP knew how to do. The CCCP, who sang A Ja Lubiju SSSR, which in Russian means I Love the USSR, and at concerts, they would get jeered because they also sang Il Testamento Del Capitano, an alpine song from the fascist era. In short, an enlightened, romantic, and nihilistic group, communist and fascist, that in the era of complete political-cultural confusion managed to carve out a piece of chaos and nurture it in their own way, which in the middle of the fall of the USSR, tangentopoli, and the death of the First Republic, created a masterpiece somewhere between the popular and the religious like Epica Etica Etnica Pathos.
A group that mixed the sacred with the profane, that from Soviet-style mocked real socialism (Appunti Di Un Viaggiatore Nei Paesi Del Socialismo Reale, which simply recites "A-Uh, A-Uh"), that had the courage to change the motto Socialism Or Barbarism to Socialism And Barbarism and title the CD with it, with the strength to celebrate the Soviet Union and partly criticize it in Manifesto, with the skill to play the Maoists and then commemorate Tien A Men. A group later instrumentalized and limited in the perspective of an antagonistic band.

The CCCP were a unique and unrepeatable parenthesis in Italian-European music. In the midst of Anglo-American punk and the boom of American commercialism, they invented a Eurocontinental, Soviet-style, popular, and inclusive punk.
The genius of Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, the musical perfection of Zamboni, and the collaboration of other talents like Annarella contributed to the legend. A legend often labeled left-wing and reduced to T-shirts for hip leftist alternative, pacifist, and bourgeois types.
Listening to them on CDs like this and capturing them as they were, listening to their soul and not the music, as Ferretti proclaims on Radio Popolare, is to give them the rightful historical tribute they deserve.
A brilliant band that will not be forgotten, because they have immortalized their mark on the history of our music.

- Great is the confusion, above and below the sky, dare the impossible, dare and lose; great is the impossible, dare the confusion, the sky is below and above, one can only get lost, one can only get lost -