Cindy Lee Berryhill
Naked Movie Star

Of certainties, in life, I really have very few.

One is that Cindy Lee Berryhill has never listened to «Nobody's Hero» by Stiff Little Fingers or has not grasped its meaning, particularly the exhortation «Get up, get out, be what you are». Because otherwise, this would have been one of the freshest and most entertaining albums of the Eighties.

Let's be clear: it's natural for any musician to carry a more or less cumbersome baggage of influences, but once you enter a recording studio and stand in front of a microphone, you should transform those same influences into something that belongs to you or, at the very least, resembles you.

Especially if, in this case, the influences answer to the names of Rickie Lee Jones and Patti Smith.

Let's start from here and an obvious consideration. Do you want to create music that brings to mind the sounds of your idols? What's required, it's just a matter of combining seven notes; if it was so difficult, there wouldn't be tens of thousands of cover bands crowding the timeless beer and sausage festivals and even porcini mushroom fairs every blessed summer.

Such operations can be done without great risks if you are a small fan of Vasco, Ligabue, the late Litfiba, and the like.

If you do it with artists of the caliber of Jones (not to mention the other), the risk exists, and how: because if you don't have an extraordinary talent and personality, you risk falling disastrously and really hurting yourself; and as long as you do it in the local festivals, well, while if you do it on an album labeled Rhino...

Metaphor aside, «Naked Movie Star» is the attempt to create something that blatantly traces «Chuck E's In Love» with inserts of «(Bird)Land» scattered here and there (the unbearable «Yipee» is illustrative in this regard).

How does the story end? It ends with Cindy Lee not having broad enough shoulders to bear the weight of two divas like Jones and Smith: so, if you've never listened to Rickie Lee's debut or the first two masterpieces of Patti, maybe «Naked Movie Star» you might even find it a nice album; but if by chance you have lent an ear to those epochal records, then in front of Cindy Lee you can only flash a polite smile, inviting her to come back in a few centuries.

One and a half stars album, therefore, or one if you're in a bad mood and judge Berryhill's attempt arrogant and boastful.

And then, you'll say, why did you give her three?

Simply put. Because, for a moment, Cindy Lee has a moment of clarity, sheds clothes that are evidently not hers, and presents herself to the listener with heart in hand, armed only with an acoustic guitar and an angelic voice, laid over an ever-so-discreet sound carpet but for that even more fascinating, and gifts us with «Indirectly Yours», one of the most beautiful ballads of the Eighties, nothing more than a thrill lasting three minutes and thirty-six seconds, but destined to be repeated with unchanged emotion and commotion whenever the needle of the record player approaches the fourth groove of the vinyl.

And then the disappointment grows even more, at the thought that Cindy Lee either doesn't know «Nobody's Hero» or hasn't fully understood it, because with a pinch of personality and courage, «Naked Movie Star» would have been one of the freshest and most entertaining albums of the Eighties.

«Get up, get out, be what you are»: the exhortation is still valid.