Le Orme
Venerdì

If in the mid-seventies Le Orme left and fled Los Angeles with the famous "Smogmagica" in hand, in 1982 it seems they did more or less the exact same thing, this time from the other side of the United States, in yuppie New York, gray, sad, silent, and minimalist. In "Venerdì", the only synth beat episode of their career, it is the nocturnal chill pop that takes center stage, and tracks like the title track and "La Notte" are emblematic of this. The former is an instrumental all piano, bass, and computerized drums, good for a chase in an American cop movie, while in "La Notte", among the most overused sounds of that decade, I imagine Aldo Tagliapietra doing piano bar in a club with blue walls decorated with silver stars, also lit by the inevitable soft neon light.

"Cuori soli in mezzo al traffico/ Volti senza sguardi teneri/ Stelle bianche, stelle gelide/ Labbra perse nei telefoni..." ("Storie Che Non Tornano")... Le Orme are in the midst of "Le Mille Luci Di New York" (or those of the Milan of drinkers?), but the three former boys, although sensing its potential and charm, are not enchanted by it, and their point of view remains "external", critical, not complacent, distant... They would never trade, just as it was for Los Angeles in '75, the event in the chaotic metropolis for the festival in the Triveneto village, among liscio, sausage and mustard sandwiches, and - nowadays - the inevitable League stand at the entrance.

The difference, between '82 and '75, for a prog band that long since gave up chasing international success, is not so much, but Le Orme are, prog or not, an Italian band, and while in the Eighties Anglo-Saxon formations like Yes and Genesis had second youth, side projects, members who lived flashing solo careers, and other bands with four-letter names starting with "A" and ending with "A", what was granted to the Italian prog-band in front of the dulling of the domestic musical (or societal) audience?

Ok, none of what the prog bands did in the seventies were reached, in qualitative terms, by what they themselves produced in the eighties, this in Italy as in England, let’s be clear, just as vulgar and ignoble phenomena like the new romantic, the gay romantic, and the chart-topping pop-pettone will take root everywhere, but nowhere in the world will music be violated as it was in Italy, among youthful paninari self-caricatures, among Palermitans addressing you in a Milanese accent, epochal novels like "Sposerò Simon Le Bon" and especially with the Volvo 740 car of the year!

In '82, Le Orme tried to frame their experience in a context of Italian light music, of singer-songwriter matrix; other bands of the era found different solutions... All tried to survive, as best they could, the eighties. Le Orme had the best cards to play, they translated the anxieties and easy wall street suggestions into the aforementioned tracks, they updated to the new decade the rhetoric of female portraits, as in "Biancaneve", "Arianna", or even in the splendid "Rubacuori", another story of innocent female betrayed and cast aside (this time seemingly without violence) by the usual jerk in turn.

Le Orme were conscious of being famous and appreciated in Italy not so much for pieces like "Collage" and superprog instrumental, but for the particular, simple and evocative melodic line, which rises to the highest heights in the history of Italian song in famous tracks like "Gioco Di Bimba", or "Canzone D'Amore" etc... So what to do with "Marinai", if not bring it to Sanremo? The song sees Tagliapietra as a little cabin boy on a sailing ship, and from his naive and submissive but undoubtedly panoramic point of view, he observes the world polluting and ruining itself: better never to reach land, better to sail forever, better to keep dreaming. Epic and romantic, innocuous, and evocative, a Rodari poem set in a spectacular symphonic music, Sanremo rejects it, and the public does not grant it the "success of the defeated", an unwritten but fairly recurrent rule in the most famous national singing competition. It's the end, and the release of "Venerdì" is nothing but a 'due act': the general public has forgotten Le Orme, or is no longer able to appreciate their music.

Yet there are episodes worthy of the band, like the interesting crossovers "Cercherò", half prog (the choruses) and half American nightly chill, and "La Sorte" (perhaps a bit less successful), a totally plastic funky pop with choruses similar to a stadium chant, or the already mentioned "Biancaneve" and "Arianna" (rhetorical texts aside), on pop-prog bases typical of their style, but very rich with interesting musical solutions, and spaces where instruments, arrangements, and rhythms vary wisely. Or even the concluding "Com'Era Bello", a sort of pop-wave whose finale is dedicated to the ‘cabin boy’ of "Marinai": after all, the drummer is rock, the keyboards are updated to the latest sound, and that bass, well, that bass was never as fashionable as it was between the late seventies and early eighties...

In light of these commercial outcomes, in front of an audience like the Italian one, given that here one reads not Jay McInerney but Clizia Gurrado, given that in England the gays were the Bronski Beat of "Smalltown Boy" while in Italy they were the Cattaneo of "Una Zebra A Pois", Le Orme surrendered, and disbanded. The return, when it happened, was in 1990, which says it all...

If this is Italy, and given that this is Italy, I am even more convinced they were wrong, in '75, to leave Los Angeles...