Edoardo Bennato
Uffà! Uffà!

I was there!

I really watched the Variety program on television (it was the summer of 1980) and I confirm everything. Less than a month after the launch of the album "Uffa Uffa," the Neapolitan singer-songwriter appeared in the studio personally launching "his latest LP," but the disbelief was enormous when the notes began with the words "Ciuuurma...what is this silence?!", a virtually unreleased track since it was included in the LAST album JUST published days after "Uffà Uffà." It was an unprecedented media shock for the lazy Italian music scene, made of the usual rituals.
In practical terms, Bennato had released two beautiful and very different albums in less than a month (which together will sell more than 1 million copies!!).
Of "Sono solo canzonette" almost everything is already known, instead, a "mystery" remains the story and motivations behind this real "black sheep" of Bennato's long discography.
"Uffa Uffa" already stands out with its underground cover (designed by the author himself) with a style reminiscent of Robert Crumb or our own Andrea Pazienza. In black and white, we see a satanic, mocking Edoardo, complete with a tail between his legs, lightning bolts coming out of his mouth, a short circuit happening with the cables, a forked tongue, and a jukebox (which the youngest will barely remember) instead of legs, all this to preview the content of an unpredictable and "bizarre" album like few others!
An album not very long that contains 8 tracks each different from the other in terms of music and literary style.
It starts with the semi-ecclesiastical homily (!) for solo voice of "Li Belli Gladioli" complete with a final parish choir to the summer-catchy-song "Sei come un Juke-Box" now a classic. It continues with the soft ballroom blues of "Cosi' non va, Veronica" to the bittersweet rock-blues of "Allora, avete capito o no" which subtly anticipated the commercial operation of the two contemporary albums. Still with the offbeat funk in "Che Combinazione" up to the track that I consider a hidden masterpiece of ours: "Restituiscimi I Miei Sandali" where Bennato manages to scratch all his amusing irreverence in a surreal and masterful way, reminiscent in some ways of the Clash track "Should I Stay or Should I Go" for the sudden tempo change between verse and chorus.
The album concludes with the provocative beguine of "A Licola" and the real scream of anger and madness represented by "Uffa'! Uffa'!" a lacerating power-rock-song with a vaguely punk flavor (1977 had just ended), played together with the historic Gaz-Nevada.
A truly atypical record for the national production that seemed to want to make Edoardo say "don't label me, I can do other things and you can't constrain me in a genre or label" as if to emphasize a certain weariness in always responding in the same way to a market that wanted from him the same things as always.
A proof of courage and even prophetic foresight if we think that words like:

"Uffà! Uffà! what a bother!
this war I don't like, I don't want to do it!
I don't care about oil, I'll be a coward, an anomaly
but this time to the Crusades
I don't want, I don't want, I don't want to go!...

Uffà! Uffà! let them vent!
in the sand and the oil, let them wallow!
they make prices too high, they do what they want
but this time to the Crusades
I don't want, I don't want, I don't want to go!..."

...contained in the track that gives the album its title are shamefully current a quarter of a century later. Ahh... magnificent this vintage Bennato, autarchic, nonconformist, irreverent, and damnably out of line... light years away from this puppet with strings we see nowadays singing reluctantly at Festivalbar, like an out-of-context stand-in for a Britti also increasingly neither fish nor fowl. Eh...the parabola of life!!