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Miss Something, our English teacher, had a demeanor full of dignity and a little voice...
Closer to sixty than fifty, she possessed a gray caricatural splendor only lacking the possible fruit hat or other oddity for a five o'clock tea...
And I say lacking because maybe, with one of those particular signs, she would have really ended up looking completely, and not just partly, like a small queen Elisabeth in miniature.
The distance from the Albion standard was further emphasized by certain peasant-like bags from Romagna and a shapeless, very old coat that enveloped her in a ridiculousness tinged with sadness, similar to that of certain domestic aunts.
A very light ghostly aura hovered over her entire figure, barely shadowed by the dust of time... Oh yes, Miss Something seemed to have been taken weightlessly from another era and, for this reason, I liked her.
Everyone made fun of her, and only I said, “no, she’s so sweet!!!”
It’s that I have always loved anachronisms and a certain aunt-like side of me has always battled with the punk spirit... (“You, a punk, with that dumb face!!!” “Yes, dumb was always what my mom called me...”).
Well, one day in the late seventies I handed this lady a cassette where I had recorded "Closer", the immortal masterpiece of Joy Division... "Listen, wouldn't you help me understand what these guys are saying?"
Well, I will never forget her face when she returned that cassette to me... Mrs. Something was really struck.
“You shouldn’t listen to these things, this is a sick man...” “But what do the songs talk about?”
“I can't even tell you, but if I were you I wouldn’t listen to them...”
(She was really seriously worried)
I managed to get by with a smile and a little joke like, “if I don't understand the words, then there’s no problem.”
Regarding cassettes, how many times can a three/four-minute track fit into a C90? Many, I assure you...let's say, just for saying, that it fits twenty times...
So, I had made myself a C90 recording the same song twenty times in a row...and that song was “Decades”, the last of “Closer”...
“Closer”, what a wonderful album...
Side one is dark, obsessive music: icy kraut rhythms, underground Velvet textures, spectral interior landscapes reminiscent of Nico.
The most impressive number is “Atrocity Exhibition” with its exhausting metronomic beat and a rattling, self-twisting free form.
Then on side two everything changes, as if some kind of sublimation had occurred, as if an elixir confined for ages had been poured out and allowed to decant, releasing its magical power.
The sounds then become ethereal and expand into the void, and a light, maybe white, maybe spectral, perhaps even serene at times, best illuminates the sense of lack and loss.
It's the light that shines in the darkness of a famous Nick Drake song. It is the light of a surprising and unexpected classicism.
Crystal clear and hypnotic trance... songs of remoteness from the world... the certainly still icy rhythm, but as if revived (and humanized) by many little flames... the organ of “Decades” with Ray Manzarek descended into the underworld of post punk...
Yes, Manzarek...I remember after the first listening of “Closer” I called Orsetto saying “I found the new Doors”...
The impact of “Closer” was devastating for me and comparable to that of a few other records, like
“Pink Moon”, “Blue Afternoon”. “Rock Bottom” “The Madcap Laughs.”
Each of us has four or five records like this... four or five, it can't be more than that... And those are the works that, like our winged extensions, fly over the places of soul theft, becoming deeply personal shamanic rituals. (And I apologize if this might seem like a huge nonsense)
But we have talked about classicism.
“Closer” stands in between two parentheses that foreshadow and seal it... They are the two forty-fives “Atmosphere” (before) and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (after).
Regarding “Atmosphere” I quote the famous definition from I don't remember who, which would be of a sound that could have been born from the hypothetical collaboration between Nico and Phil Spector... and really, it couldn't be said better than this...
But let’s talk about “Love Will Tear Us Apart”... Which is many, many things...
It’s a little song from an abandoned amusement park, a bit like "Decades," the track I had put about twenty times on a C90.
"Decades," however, seems made of faded and washed-out notes, like something that is close to vanishing. and it is full of resigned tears, like certain tracks from Tim Buckley’s period "Goodbye & Hello", indeed "Decades" is EXACTLY the sound of resigned tears..
"Love Will Tear Us Apart" is instead almost dreamy... it is full of little stars, it is a trail of little stars, the amusement park indeed...
And it is a pop song, the Joy Division sound passed through the sieve of a kaleidoscope that creates snow effects.
But “Love Will Tear Us Apart” also has the fragrant air of eternity of the most magical folk song and an almost angelic fatalism in acknowledging the inevitability of the world’s laws...
And it has an innocence nearly like Nick Drake's “From the Morning” and even a hint of the apocalyptic shiver of Death in June...
But, most of all, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is all classicism, and the one singing is a kind of crooner... Before recording it, the producer had the singer listen to Sinatra... just imagine, Frank Sinatra!!!
Yes, it’s really many things “Love Will Tear Us Apart”....
Sinatra was something Miss Something used to let us listen to in class... Sinatra and the Beatles of "Hey Jude"....
Yes, because we have to return to Miss Something....
At a certain point in my life, I moved to live in a small country village, four houses in all. And one day, while exploring the area by bike, I extended myself about three or four kilometers beyond my home...
It was spring... and, at a certain moment, passing by a lovely little house, I heard a voice calling me... well, it was Miss Something... apparently she too had moved to the countryside...
“Oh, it’s you, teacher...”
She invited me inside and offered me tea... she hadn’t changed much, despite being nearly eighty...
We chatted about this and that, then at one point she started rummaging through a drawer of a piece of furniture...
She pulled out a little notebook which she then opened, showing me some pages...
Well, on those pages there were some verses taken here and there from “Closer”, that strange record I had her listen to many years earlier... she had advised me against listening to it, yet she had copied verses from it into a notebook...
“What became of that boy?”
“He hanged himself...”
“Ah, he wasn’t someone who spoke just for the sake of speaking...”
“No...”
“I guessed it... so he was one of those poets whose words pass through the gut...”
“What?”
“Yes, the poetry comes from the memory and then passes through the gut, I mean true poetry.”
Well, many years ago I was right when I said she was sweet... even though maybe this last part of the story I just imagined it...
Or did that last meeting really take place?
Ah, the boy, the poet (indeed the true poet as Miss Something rightly remarked) was named Ian...
Ian Curtis...
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