Francesco De Gregori
Rimmel

"Holy Desire to Live and Sweet Venere of Rimmel"

There are albums that remain etched in the collective memory of every young person, records through which one relives part of their youth, "pieces of glass" on which words are engraved that will linger in our minds forever. Yet, back in 1975, the young Francesco De Gregori was not entirely aware that he was about to write his greatest work, putting down a peak of high musical and lyrical lyricism.

Yes, because "Rimmel" is like this: it's a blooming flower in a meadow of kindness, a delicate breeze of wind on the sea, a hermetic poem seasoned in sweet-and-sour sauce. All this and more: it's your ideal girl, the one you haven't met yet but whose existence you are certain of, it's a bunch of words scribbled on a school diary. It’s a simple phrase, but one that hides a thousand meanings: "I light up with immensity". What could it ever mean? There isn’t a precise meaning, and its poetic nature is right here. And just like Giuseppe Ungaretti, the Roman songwriter had already accustomed us to this multiplicity of uncertainties, of fabled illusions: even the Alice who was looking at cats a few years earlier seemed completely unaware of what surrounded her. But in this album, everything is wonderfully homogeneous, splendid, poetic, heartfelt:

"Now you can send your lips to a new address and overlay my face with that of who knows who else. Your four aces, mind you, of a single color, you can hide or play them as you want or let them remain good friends like us."

Here, a finished love is not seen as something tragic, but it's a mix of sweetness and disillusionment, among few gestures and shy smiles. It's a confused and dreamy memory, it's a caress brushed on the face. But Francesco's voice, already very evocative here, expresses even more its expressiveness in the tender ballad of "Pieces of Glass", heartrending in its apparent frivolity and rhetoric, a faded impressionist watercolor:

"Together visited is the night they say has two souls, and a bed and a hut roof useful and sweet as an umbrella stretched between earth and sky. He offers you his last card, his last precious attempt to amaze, when he says 'It's been four days that I love you, please, don’t go away, don’t leave me wounded’.”

Margins so high, soaked with so much sensitivity and fragility, will be rarely reached during the Italian seventies. And to think that back then, when "Rimmel" first appeared in stores, it was even accused of being commercial and "too fashionable." But the beauty of certain rhymes is not fashion, because the latter passes but certain tracks remain. "Poets, what horrible creatures, every time they speak it's a hoax" our same author tells us in his "Stories of Yesterday", a bitter and resigned reflection on the unfortunate consequences of Fascism and how the latter pushed the fate of our peninsula into the abyss. But the third discographic effort of our songwriter is also and above all innocence, a childlike living in the world of fantasy and stories: thus emerges the figure of the outlaw who steals from the rich to give to the poor, "Mr. Hood", complete with a dedication to Marco Pannella, or the carefree and ironically cheerful waltz of "Goodnight Little Flower":

"Goodnight, goodnight my love, goodnight between the phone and the sky. Thank you for having amazed me, for having sworn to me that it is true. The corn in the fields is ripe, and I need you so much, the blanket is cold, summer is over. Goodnight, this night is for you."

And so you can spend a night romantically looking at the Moon, so physically distant but inwardly very close to us, like the "Four Dogs" of the track of the same name, or set off and let the future cradle our destiny, maybe with a suitcase lacking string, because "only a little love held it together, only a little resentment held it together" as in the reflections on emigration in "Pablo". But there is also room for the little things, the more intense and profound ones:

"I put a small flower in my pocket, I put a small flower in my pocket. They'd tie you tight to the oldest oak, if you really don't want my heart."

Or maybe because in the end, we are all somewhat melancholic and sentimental, like the piano Bar pianist who "will play as long as you want to hear, he won’t let you down" and "will sing as long as you want to hear, he won’t disturb you". So, my review on "Rimmel" should probably end here. Maybe there are no more words, maybe the phrases are finished, maybe it's right for you to put the record in the player yourself: because some emotions are right to experience on our own skin, because certain feelings are strictly personal…

"…like when it was raining outside and you asked me if by any chance you still had that photo in which you were smiling and not looking. And the wind passed over your fur collar and over your person and when I, without understanding, said yes. You said 'It's all you have of me.' It's all I have of you."