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Rating: Core de Roma!
The sneaky kids swarming out of every alley to gather in Ostiense, with the gasometer silhouetted against the horizon, and in Rome, you're a kid even at 50, no question, everyone there responding to the call of mama, because it's time to bring home a whole lot of stuff.
And mama Roma is more than a film, more than Pasolini and Magnani together, it's an idea that gathers them and much more.
A bit like saying "under the gasometer," which when I was truly a kid meant that we met at the Ostiense station and from there took the metro to arrive at some strategic point in Rome.
At Ostiense station, for instance, there's a pyramid, but saying "at the pyramid" is one thing, "under the gasometer" is quite another, maybe because I'm fascinated by industrial archaeology, but "under the gasometer" is really something else.
Today, then, it's said "at Eataly" and it's an indefinable sadness.
So, I rewind the tape, bring back the memories, and it definitely gets better.
The tape, for sure, was rewound by Lorenzo and Simone too – Bloody Riot and Blood 77 – they looked back and decided to reconnect the threads of a great story, at least for someone like me who lived it, which would then be the story of the most street-smart rock Rome has known, the kind that shook the city from the guts with more hardness and roughness than a cobblestone.
I don't remember them in my group because they weren't there, but they were still kids, or kidz to put it in a cooler way, but the essence doesn't change, and so they came up with a collection, only on vinyl, and on the comic cover is Anna Magnani in the foreground among the trash and 'the gasometer prominently in the background.
Which then excites me like I'm still 15, and for me, this cover is like the first Clash one, the three of them on the steps leading to the neighborhood market, the Ostiense gasometer like the popular market of Camden Town, a choice of stance, choosing which side to be on, at Eataly or under the gasometer.
Only that I haven't been 15 for a while now, same for Lorenzo and Simone, but the music that resonated inside Rome, my music, our music, hasn't lost a bit of its soul.
Even making this record only on vinyl I think is a choice of stance, only on vinyl I've already said, but I haven't mentioned the title yet, so here it is, "Rock These Ancient Ruins", even if there's little left to shake the ruins of Rome, zero aggregation centers, zero venues, zero record shops, zero fanzines.
And yet, in Rome, there are still those who go under the gasometer and reclaim it with pride.
Aliens, Wendy?!, Queen Kong, Mad Rollers, Ferox are the new wave, those who perhaps weren't even born when I went under the gasometer, yet have the spirit to play today as if they were there back then.
And there are also those who were already there at the time, and without taking anything away from those who came after, finding Alex Dissuader or the Cyclone shaking the ruins for me is priceless: because Alex is the one from Bingo and Bingo were the ones on the cover of the fanzine "Bassa Fedeltà" with the shout "PUNK IN ROME!" and we're the group from under the gasometer passing by the newsstand, eyeing it, pooling resources, and grabbing a copy, and then I wouldn't miss any until the end; because the Cyclone were the ones who opened for the Meteors at the Asphalt Jungle and that was the venue of Francois Regis Cambuzat who sang and played guitar in Kim Squad and their record was the one that filled its lungs and then let out a high-pitched scream that there was a beautiful scene in Rome.
And this vinyl's cover screams too, with 14 killer bands inside.
All killer no filler, to put it like Jerry Lee Lewis.
Which maybe not everyone knows that the ancestors were Romans of Rome.
Core de Roma!
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