François-Regis Cambuzat
Uccidiamo Kim

Everything began within the walls of the Asphalt Jungle. I believe that was the name of the Roman venue dedicated to live music, managed by François-Régis Cambuzat and Roberta Possamai around the mid-80s and it became the incubator of the Kim Squad & Dinah Shore Zeekapers. But after winning the Indipendenti and publishing Young Bastards, which would remain their only LP, the Kim, feverish but not yet defunct, were changing their skin, following François's new trends and shifting towards singing in Italian and towards a genetic modification of their primordial rock in favor of more reflective forms, yet no less intense and no less prone to sudden explosions. Evidence was provided by the new material performed in concerts around Italy, the 1988 release of Notre Dame Des Naufragés (St Malô Perdono), an acoustic album credited solely to François, and the production in the same year of a demo containing the songs that would appear in 1990 on Uccidiamo Kim, the album released by Caesar Records under the name François-Régis Cambuzat sings Il Gran Teatro Amaro and which from its title marks the death certificate of the Kim Squad.

François continues, then, on the path taken with Notre Dame Des Naufragés, but this time accompanied not only by the indispensable Roberta Possamai on piano, but also by Giulio Caruso on bass and Raimondo Mosci on drums. Once again, eight tracks, all with lyrics in Italian except for "Où l'on parle d'amour et d'anarchie," in French. Kim's specter inevitably haunts the background, but it's a Kim who has shed the rocker’s clothes and donned those of the bohemian, contaminated from time to time by gypsy, jazz, post-punk, singer-songwriter suggestions. And this aroma of romantic dishevelment can be felt right from the cover photo that portrays a splendid and damned François. The sense of anti-bourgeois protest, of rebellion against a society dominated by the laws of economic productivity and that no longer recognizes the value of art, is also evident in the lyrics, fascinating though sometimes a bit naive.

The opening is entrusted to "Fratel Coltello," a beautiful and engaging ballad, played on the call and response between the electric guitar (admittedly penalized by the mixing, which is the weak point of the entire album) and the piano. Years later, in 1995, François would record a new version for the album Swinoujscie-Tunis, this time under the name François Regis Cambuzat Et Les Enfants Rouges, probably a sign of awareness of not having done full justice to a track that has the stature of a classic. "Où l'on parle d'amour et d'anarchie" are the most hallucinatory Velvet Underground suddenly finding themselves in the Balkans. "Âmes sèches" is another ballad that would not look out of place on one of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' early albums. "India Song" might be a posthumous Luigi Tenco song. "Djamila, Johnny, I and the Stones" sounds as if the Birthday Party were born on the shores of the Mediterranean rather than in Australia. The coordinates of "Aspettando la pioggia" bring us back to the side of the "Mocaibo" of the Kim, but with a decidedly less sunny atmosphere. "Preghiera d’Occidente," sung by Roberta Possamai and characterized by an acoustic guitar arpeggio supported by an organ backdrop, appears to be the weakest track of the collection, but it is followed by the excellent epilogue of "Cardi sul Baragan," with its rising and syncopated rhythm, balancing between psychedelia and jazz.

Uccidiamo Kim, fatal right from the title, is an excellent album, extremely original, combining singer-songwriter music, rock, world music, jazz, and avant-garde outside codified schemes.

After this album, Francois will continue in his decidedly iconoclastic sound research, between jazz, rock, punk, ethnic music, electronics, and noise, through the experience of Gran Teatro Amaro and then of François R. Cambuzat et les Enfants Rouges, which will become L'Enfance Rouge, until, reaching today, the Putan Club in a duo with bassist Gianna Greco. But Young Bastards by Kim Squad, Notre Dame Des Naufragés, and this Uccidiamo Kim remain, for the writer, seminal and emotional works, perhaps also for purely anagraphic reasons.

"we are almost all already dead. Life is too short for all dreams" (F.R. Cambuzat).