Death in June
Bologna 8/4/85

“What can be born here in the fog of the world?”, good question, brothers. And if it's not fog, it's a room fringed by a kind of reddish light, probably the devil.

Or maybe it's just a blurred image where you can see, shadow of the shadow, three extremely pale individuals. They are young, bitter, impatient, and as such aspire to become adepts of the form of art that hurts the most.

They are not beautiful souls and perhaps they even have something despicable about them. But this is entirely normal, in certain places only the bad guys go. It's up to them to do the dirty work.

The first has a big face that should be funny and instead is too serious, the second looks like a seventies fascist, but, be careful, he is the man with a purpose. The third is a huge dark young man, one who, when he beats the drums, the world comes down.

Well, the dark young man has a new piece to propose. “What is it about?”, the others ask, “oh just the usual death and gloom”, he replies. “Just the usual death and gloom”

However, the words do not come out well from his mouth and what happens is that the too serious guy and the man with a purpose understand something else. And so “Death and gloom” becomes Death in June. A fabulous misunderstanding, a kind of gift from heaven.

...

Death and gloom? Oh yes, it certainly is. After all, the cauldron is that dark wave or post-punk, if you will. Imagine a fabulous overload of trumpets and drums, the martial step, and the funeral sound of when the dead are counted.

The humus is a very Joy Division affair, except, well, forget about the depression. Or rather imagine a slightly different one. Something more obsessive and perhaps even more desperate.

In the end, it is always the same story: the world is just a sordid senseless representation. Only here there is no lack of ideas and values to oppose the void.

One feels surrounded, doomed to defeat, yes, but also in some way bearers of a sort of lost greatness. “My solitude is a closed affair, but I slip into the dreams of other lives in greater times”

It all resembles dangerously a delirium, because excuse me, what greatness is ever being babbled about? But it can't be otherwise, when depression meets epic, what you get is always mania.

But it's okay, because, in a nutshell, it's still about loss, that little thing that generally produces great art. “Every dream has jaws to crush us again and again”. There, precisely...

In the track “Death of the west”, the opener of the second album, the dark young man's drums are accompanied by an acoustic guitar. Then post-punk transforms into a strange kind of folk, in a revised and corrected version of soul-stealing music.

Then comes “Nada”, the first masterpiece...

Everything takes a breath, everything decants. You work by subtraction, some drifts are smoothed. A kind of warm cold purifies the sound.

Flashes of dark electronics and four or five ballads that take your breath away...

Ah yes, the ballads... very dark thoughts reflected on a clear source, “pearls of bliss in beastly abysses”.

And, while epic and melancholy pass into each other, a Morricone wind blows through the drums in the distance. And it's as if “Love will tear us apart” was even sadder.

What is a shiver? The gap between two worlds? An open window in the night? The day clear but full of shadow?

Ah, a certain David Tibet collaborates...

…

Bologna April 8, 1985...

Death in June concert.

They're only two, the guy with the big face that should be funny and instead is too serious has left before “Nada”. It seems he joined the National Front, yet another proof that being too serious doesn't pay off...

The stage is tiny. The dark young man and the man with a purpose are crushed against the wall by their own instruments. And, a small but not negligible detail, they are wearing Nazi uniforms.

A huge black net separates them from the audience. But there would be no need, they are elsewhere and the separation is mainly psychological.

They look like two insects captured by a spider. They struggle in the dark. But all this is just an image and lasts only a moment. And I, thinking well, am not even there anymore...

And I find myself wandering away from the stage in the grip of who knows what. I adore them but can't wait for it to end, after all, I'm only twenty years old...

“I hope your mothers hate you for this”, yells a girl because of the uniforms, but I'm not aware of it. Maybe because to me, the rest hurt more.

Anyway, the dark young man, struck by the girl's reaction, decides to leave the group. Some say immediately, others a few months later...

The man with a purpose has never clearly explained his flirting with Nazi symbolism and certainly, he's not a Nazi, maybe he is a right-wing anarchist inclined to esotericism and aesthetic delirium.

Perhaps the use of certain symbols is due to his dark pessimism, perhaps it's just a matter of epater le bourgeois, but I guess that wandering in trance through the land of shadows ends up not only representing horror but also touching it a bit too closely. If it weren't so, the music of Death in June would not have that power and would not be so tragic.

In short, you may want to stir the black heart of man. Spending the night at Hotel Europa in the company of Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling implies at least that the night is filled with nightmares.

Then yes, we too enter the dark forest and let's do it, we who are not “bad”, with all our lifebelts and all our counterweights.

But with the awareness that few, like Death in June, have recounted the tragedy of life and that, in the end, the best lifebelt or counterweight lies precisely within their work and is, obviously, that incredible beauty that gives shivers.

...

But, going back to that concert, well, thirty-five years have passed and I remember more than the music, the nightmare atmosphere. Dark necromancers chanting protected by a net of black ropes, soldiers in the trenches of horror. Something so unreal that sometimes I doubt I ever really saw it.

In any case, it was the swan song of phase one of Death in June, the last time that the firepower of dark wave was accompanied by end-of-the-world folk...

If you want to get an idea of it, you can find the performance from a few days earlier in Venice online. The setlist, I imagine, should be more or less the same: many tracks from “Nada”, some previous classics, and a small anticipation of the future. Give it a listen, it's an absolute wonder.

Oh, highly recommended are also the four subsequent masterpieces: “The world that summer”, “Brown book”, “The wall of sacrifice” “But what ends when the symbols shatter”...

Works where, with almost the entire dark wave component gone, the ballads reach, a decantation of a decantation, an otherworldly beauty. And accompanying them are unbreathable noise symphonies.

Take and enjoy them all...