Garbo
Fuori per sempre

THE REVIEW

Those were the university years. The lira was still around. And above all, there were still record stores: and in one of them, I found myself one afternoon, I remember the moment as if it were today, rummaging through one of those boxes where you could find everything and its opposite: from Castellina Pasi to Claudio Villa, passing through the best of this or that. While rummaging, an album caught my attention with a male and female face depicted on the cover. It was the cover of Forever Out by Garbo. My memory of Garbo at the time was linked to a few radio broadcasts and a Sanremo where singers performed at the foot of a staircase, introduced by Pippo Baudo. But from a media perspective, Garbo had been out of the spotlight for several years. And this pushed me to buy the CD. And today, almost 30 years later, what remains etched in my mind from that album are the sounds and words of Australia, a track dedicated to his mother who had left him a few years before the album’s release; the atmosphere of Another Spring, with the collaboration of Japanese singer Yoshiko, and the Spanish-flavored Seville. Setting aside the more forgettable episodes, even the tracks with a more singer-songwriter approach on the album (Inside and Forever Out) and the covers of Italian Boys by Ron, to which Biagio Antonacci also contributed, and Billy Idol's Eyes Without a Face (Two Leaves of September) slipped by without leaving particular traces. And this transitional work by the good Garbo left very few marks on the collective imagination, capable before and after of works of an entirely different caliber, like Guarded and Blue.