Nabat
Archivio Vol. 1

Once upon a time there were the eighties, once upon a time there was Bologna, once upon a time there was punk... once upon a time there was a friend from another city whom I met during a study holiday and then lost track of, who left me a cassette of oi! music played by bands he didn’t know, among which there was one whose songs were in Italian. There were no names on the cassette, no case, nothing. A line, a shout lingered in my head for a long time: it said: politics, vaffanculo! Clearly, it resonated with my mood at the time.

Once upon a time there was a Nabat concert, reassembled for the occasion, at the Livello 57 social center, when it was still a social center and when it was still at the old slaughterhouse, the bestial market. They hadn’t played in Bologna or elsewhere for something like ten years. The Nabat, who are the Nabat? an oi! band from Bologna? let’s go see, we said to ourselves. And I recognized them: but these are the songs from the cassette I. gave me! The cassette, I found out, contained recordings of the first songs composed and played by the Nabat, which ended up in their first demo and in the EP “Scenderemo nelle strade” (1982) (the songs that open “Archivio vol. 1” indeed). It was 1995, and on a personal note, after that memorable concert and because of that memorable concert we, my friends and I, were inspired again to write songs and play.

Once upon a time there was a cassette of punk songs that I recorded for my friends a few months after that concert, and on which “Tempi nuovi” by the Nabat ended up as well (from the album “Un altro giorno di gloria”, and let’s hope they reissue that one too, maybe inside a CD titled “Archivio vol. 2”...); once upon a time there was a person in another city to whom this cassette ended up by chance and who came looking for me one day, but do you know the Nabat? Because the Nabat at the time had been quite forgotten; of course I know the Nabat! and we left what we were doing and wandered around the warm city all afternoon and this person told me about how important the Nabat had been, what they said, and about how he had ten years earlier taken the train to come to Bologna to meet Steno (the singer from Nabat), knocked on his door, but Steno is at work, and Steno's astonishment when returning from the factory to find someone had come from who knows where to meet him. Finally, another personal note, once upon a time a doomed love was born between me and this person (not Steno, but the one who went to find him once), because of the Nabat I believe I can say! There were once my countless attempts to save it. But we didn’t live happily ever after, no.

There were once the Nabat; and today for some the myth of the Nabat remains, like a fairy tale indeed. But the Nabat in the eighties in Bologna were not a myth; in the raw simplicity of its form and the themes it addresses (Without money without home, Work), their music is above all the absence of myth. The Nabat in the eighties in Bologna woke up, put on their boots, went to work, came home, did grocery shopping, drank a beer, and so on, and two or three or four times a week they gathered with their instruments at the rehearsal room in Casalone. In the following decade when I lived in Bologna, it happened to meet Steno at Casalone (today Covo), or it happened to hear his show on Radio città del capo (or was it Radio K? or Radio città?). Topic: the popular music of Emilia-Romagna, songs collected by Steno-Lomax in the markets of Bologna and the province, sung by occasional interpreters (the street vendors) he sometimes invited to the show. Even the Nabat songs were folk, urban folk (to use an expression from Billy Bragg) dry and fast (and dirty, and polluted) like life in the eighties metropolises.

If today someone asks me to recommend an oi! band, I always say, the Nabat, for me unmatched even by the English scene. The rhythm, the speed that takes your breath away, the combination of harmony, lead voice, stadium-like choruses in tracks like “Senza soldi, senza casa” have given something new to popular music.