Claudio Rocchi
A fuoco

THE REVIEW

If in the landscape of Italian songwriting we had to think of an original author, unconventional, the first name that would come to mind would be Claudio Rocchi, an artist who passed away in 2013, leaving behind true pearls such as Viaggio, a small gem of minimalism that marked his solo debut in 1970, after his experience with Stormy Six, and especially the subsequent Volo Magico n°1, with a psychedelic-mystical flavor, which represented the manifesto of the musical and spiritual beliefs of the artist from Milan. In the following years, he continued to ride the wave of experimentation, producing albums difficult for the public to grasp, such as Essenza, Il miele dei pianeti, le isole e le api, Rocchi and Suoni di frontiera.

Thus becoming a reference point for Italian avant-garde music, the late Rocchi, in 1977, decided to embark on a more "classic" path and released the album, A fuoco, with which, as can already be inferred from the title, he aimed to capture the tensions, contradictions, and movements that characterized that historical period of our Republic, especially at a youthful level.

The work was, for Rocchi, the first published with the Cramps label, which included friends Eugenio Finardi and Alberto Camerini. The latter, already one of the creators of the Volo Magico sound, characterizes Ho girato ancora with his guitar, a rare example of musical sociology, on par with L'orizzonte a Milano, in which Rocchi describes his city as plagued "by crusaders of different flags," where "ghastly blood-written words on walls narrate insults to life." Other small snapshots of the author’s daily life and thoughts are Festa, Responsabilità, and Guardando, a song enriched by solos from violinist Lucio Fabbri. Una fotografia, delicate and philosophical, is a tribute to Gabriele Di Bartolo, who had already authored the cover of Viaggio. Non è stato diverso represents, thanks to its enveloping music and highly impactful lyrics emotionally, the highest point of an album which, musically speaking, has its only weak point in the oversized orchestral arrangements; an album that, at the time, unjustly went unnoticed, perhaps because it was imbued with an underlying gloom, and today is considered a minor episode in Claudio Rocchi's career: a work that should instead be listened to again and re-evaluated, looking at those years with today's eyes.