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Julian was just what we needed, just what we needed. I swear, I can’t understand anything anymore…
Simply nothing.
To start with, Susanna now makes colorful music, I don't know, she says she's read a book and babbles things like: "Okay with the gothic, okay with everything, but have you ever taken a dive into a kaleidoscope? No? So what are you waiting for, fools?"
And Roberto, well Roberto has taken up pop, a crooked, moody, bizarre thing, all you want, but in the end, it remains pop, right? Moreover, he also doesn't joke about colors, actually, he’s even worse than Susanna. So what are we doing here?
Then there are the Rossis, those guys who scatter flowers everywhere and make songs that could be described as Oscar Wilde meets jingle jangle. But come on, are you kidding me? Proposing those shiny little guitars to us!!! That sort of spring!!!
But damn it, didn’t everyone say that cinema was better in black and white? That a lullaby beats a nursery rhyme ten to zero? That black is cool and, above all, slimming?
I hope you don't expect me and my crew to redo our wardrobe? We are beautiful, damn it, a cloudiness between black and gray. Something, like, four or five Rokerilla covers hanging on the wall.
Oh Lulù, what can you do, style requires continuous refresher courses.
...
We stay in this bar where instead of absinthe they serve a slimy green broth.
We are here half relaxed/half nervous, clinging/clambering to an abstruse concept of self-proclaimed aristocracy, aware, I guess, of just spouting nonsense.
Standing out are Aris, anti-melodic master of elegance and Penazzi, a cube-shaped being irrigated by finesse.
Then, in the center of a swarm of delightful roundettes skewered in black, a couple of dreamily wicked bombshells reign, offering free advice on decisive topics such as dark fashion and etiquette.
Scattered through the streams of secondary tables sit shabby maîtres à penser specializing in assorted subjects: samurai ethics, cemetery aesthetics, Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil soaked in molten butter.
In short, quintals, indeed tons of attitude, desperately trying to be cool.
Blowing over this strange sky is music that drives everyone crazy: Joy Division, P.I.L, Bauhaus, Siouxie, Cure, A Certain Ratio. Our music, damn it.
So what the hell does this Julian want? And how dare the sun peep through our incredibly cool cloudiness?
Relax, luludia, relax.
Do you like sickly music, shadow/psychosis/anguish, and so on? Then don't worry. This sun is not exactly the picture of health…
No?
No.
...
Julian is the kind of guy who risked ending up in girls' diaries among little hearts and pink clouds, only he then took too much acid.
Memories of Top of the Pops with him walking on the piano fearing being sucked in. Better change the air...
He then takes refuge in his wild native village, the hills are in bloom, but people look at him badly. He moves on to amphetamines and feeds on Mars bars bought at the gas station.
The first masterpiece he releases is “World Shut Your Mouth,” a little thing suspended between post-punk sharpness, sixties freshness, and a disoriented pop instinct. It's about treacherous paths walked at an uneven pace between wild speed and bewildered elegance, one moment you’re terribly cool, the next you crash into the elegy.
Well, “World Shut Your Mouth” is an album that should blow the world away, but what happens is almost less than nothing. He feels “fried,” but he’s a strange fish and, despite the pan and the boiling oil, continues to flounder unperturbed.
And then, even if people continue to look at him askance, he, in response, buys a turtle shell from a junk dealer, then goes to live under it, sheltered from assholes and philistines.
The world from there is an out-of-tune motif, a cross between bliss and melancholy. “oh no, don’t throw me out, I have nowhere to go, waking hours are the loneliest for gloomy boys like me”...
A few months pass and “Fried” comes out and “Fried” goes beyond...
Imagine a psychedelia of enormous gentleness, aristocratic and wild. Julian sings in that very “long live England” way, half Kevin Ayers and half “I wouldn’t know who at the moment.” A perfect thing for all the tattered ones with a quarter of nobility.
Not satisfied, he also throws in the oboe, a damn wonderful chamber machine, as if to say, damn, we’re so high, but also stylized and pastoral to the core. Like bumping into the soft wall of a spring morning. Like the smile of the madman is a cushion of lazy clouds, a thin crack in the air.
Something “elegant and vulnerable.” A subtle vibration that captures the light, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry or plaster a silly smile on your face.
Then it’s not even over, this is just the ballad side. There's also the garage turned psych, there's the Morrison-esque howl, there's the brilliant jangle. There’s even the potential hit, that “Sunspots,” the opening and closing theme of our nights back then. Needless to say, though, that hit didn't happen…
…
Then, well, our leaden dark goths soon changed their minds. The fact that one is not unyielding is always a good thing.
Trallallà...
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