Nino Ferrer
Blanat

Forgive me Nino.

I ask your forgiveness because I always saw you as a playboy who fluttered around light music in the late sixties with catchy tunes enriched by a pleasantly raspy voice, comfortable in the easily engaging Italian television. A dandy with an apartment in Piazza Navona, a butler in white gloves, dozens of flirts with the most beautiful actresses, and a luxury car with a driver ready to move.

 Forgive me because I discovered late your past as a jazz musician in France and your love for so-called "alternative music." Your infatuation with progressive music in the early seventies led you to dedicate an album to it, bewildering the orthodoxy of your "light" fans: that wonderful "Metronomie" for which you gathered your French jazz friends.

  And your love for rock to the point of tearing up every contract to play it without compromises? You recruited an English mercenary who was a great guitarist (Mickey Finn, owner of Blue Men where pre-Zeppelin Jimmy Page played), and you completed that journey backward from the stage of the Ariston to the home garage with this "Blanat" of 1979. Indeed "Little Lili" seems like a warm-up, the sinuous rock slowly enters the veins with your warm voice and Finn's gritty solo halfway through the song; the boogie piano makes us nod with a sly smile meaning "...everything's alright!" Even "Boogie on" has the flavor of a daring hit that only a young and enthusiastic band could deliver with such fresh beat. Instead, "Michael and Jane" is a funky groove with a catchy chorus that ridicules the earworm "Johnny and Mary" that Robert Palmer would place in charts just the following year. Then Mike Finn's guitar darkens in "Fallen angels", where you unveil that vocal grain that manages to scratch us, making us bleed without feeling pain.

  You have no more obligations Nino, so with "Scopa" you can have fun without mincing words with a trilingual English/French/Italian blues ballad (" ...there's nothing else to do/ just do whatever I fancy/ and I fancy sweeping/ so then sweep through life... sweep... sweep") which remains of disarming beauty in that transition from a hoarse voice handing over to Finn's long solo. Or with an unlikely "Bloody Flamenco" that borderlines on psychedelia and risks becoming the most intriguing song of the bunch due to its oddity. Quite a difficult operation because ending the record is "L'arbre noir" reminding us that you are a great modern chansonnier: melancholy, pain, energy, all encapsulated in five minutes of sonic progression.

Forgive me Nino. Because I didn't know about your anger for a world falling apart, for a nature repeatedly violated, for humanity increasingly tending to overpower others. To the point of not being able to bear this burden and ending your existence, which anyone else would have defined as golden. And they will never understand how someone who had everything in life — success, money, women — could shoot himself in the middle of a wheat field on a sunny morning, sending a sparse group of black crows into flight like sinister winged messengers.

 And the remorse for not understanding you leads me to somehow ask for your forgiveness. A hundred reviews are not few, and to prevent others from making the same mistake, my one hundredth is dedicated to you.

"All music, all opinions
must be heard even if the approval rating
stays at zero.
We must ensure that it is us who choose,
otherwise we will never be free,
otherwise, it's all imposition, all industry, all marketing.
They do not love music, they understand nothing.
All they love is what they recognize.
Then they divide pears and cheese.
And for twenty years, it's always the same stuff,
Bouvard and Pécuchet, Tartuffe and company.
We want to listen to what makes us vibrate,
we want to talk about what interests us
even if it's called sex, drugs or despair.
We want free radio,
free television."