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Rating: Berlin, 1982. In a world on the brink of nuclear war, divided into blocks, and most importantly, divided by the Wall, something is about to happen that, for better or worse, will forever change the balance of Italian and European "alternative" music. Actually, let's drop the "alternative" here, it's simply a change of music. Period. Yes, because from the chance encounter (sometimes coincidences are everything) between a former psychiatric nurse and a punk from Emilia "on leave" in East Berlin, a "thing" will be born that will simply write the History (with a capital H) of late 20th-century music. Exaggerated? Maybe. But the historical importance of that "strange animal", just to quote "The Best" Togliatti, which will take the name of CCCP Fedeli alla Linea, is undeniable. Not so much from a strictly musical point of view, but from a conceptual one, the German-Emilian trio/quintet managed not only to break away from the classic Anglo-American formulas but to create a true parallel universe, made of images, sensations, references, and above all, an enormous dose of irony, not always understood by everyone and which will be at the base of more than one misunderstanding.
After setting aside the idea of playing with a drummer, the three "hire" the most "eighties" of musicians: the drum machine. Broken rhythms, devoid of any melody, with a pulsing bass and a sharp guitar then serve as the foundation for the declamatory, hallucinated, and hallucinating verses of Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, an authentic "Johnny Rotten of the Po Valley". The acclaimed firm Ferretti-Zamboni-Negri, the latter over the years a victim of a sort of damnatio memoriae against him, sets off for a tour of concerts in "red" Germany, but something is wrong. The proposal is so particular, or perhaps too "advanced", that the audience simply does not react. Everyone is still. Immobile. What to do? And here comes the stroke of genius: staging "situations", disorienting and absolutely "peculiar". Ladies and Gentlemen, here is Danilo Fatur, Artist of the People, and Annarella Giudici, Meritorious Showgirl. The history of CCCP Fedeli alla Linea can begin.
Let's get things straight right away: there is little to no English pseudo-anarchism or "London calls" here, if not perhaps musically. The world of Zamboni & Co. is another one and is divided between two extremes (or extremisms?): the "red" Emilia on one side, with the PCI garnering Bulgarian-like consensus, and the myth-fable of the USSR on the other. That the PCI would soon enter into crisis and that the USSR was on the verge of dismantling matters little, the conceptual universe of Ours is so rich and complex that no political crisis can question it, not yet at least. And here's where wild shards in which Soviet heads of state, "alternative" Berlin neighborhoods, and Islamic punks peek through. Yes, because religion also has and will have a fundamental importance in Ferretti's formation, who in recent years has sometimes talked about it even too much. If the USSR is a dreamed, imagined world, Emilia is instead a concrete reality, often depicted as mediocre and provincial, especially in the face of a world, the Arab-Islamic one, often shown as an alternative to the Western one, dreamed and imagined just as much as the Soviet one. As can be easily deduced from the title, the album in question is nothing more than a collection of two EPs from the group, Ortodossia II, reprint of Ortodossia, and Compagni, cittadini, fratelli, partigiani, both released between 1984 and 1985. Between the calls to "Eastern European comrades" of Live in Punkow and the "harassing coitus" of Mi ami?, a love song very much sui generis, between the "tribute of an Italian punk group to the entire Islamic world" of Punk Islam and Emilia paranoica, a true evergreen of the five, images unravel of that world that indelibly marked Italian and European rock of the Eighties and Nineties. "Death is unbearable for those who should not live": Morire, with its "ode to Mishima and Mayakovsky" perhaps remains the most beautiful track in the collection, with an instrumental introduction that even after over twenty-five years still gives more than one shiver. The world of CCCP is this: an Emilia that seems to come out of a novel by Guareschi and Arab Sufis, Alexanderplatz and the highway starting from Carpi, all stuffed with a corollary of images in which, deliberately, it's unclear how much they are or are putting on an act.
The definitive leap would take place in 1985 with "1964-1985 Affinità-divergenze fra il compagno Togliatti e noi del conseguimento della maggiore età", a work that, accompanied by a "wertumullerian" title, would grant Our group the rightful place they deserved in the history of Italian music.
CCCP-Fedeli alla Linea
Giovanni Lindo Ferretti: voice
Massimo Zamboni: guitars
Umberto Negri: bass
Danilo Fatur: Artist of the People
Annarella Giudici: Meritorious Showgirl
Live in Punkow
Do you love me?
Shoot Jurij
Punk Islam
Militanz
I am as you want me
To die
Paranoid Emilia
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