Shampoo
In Naples

Shampoo - In Naples (1980)

A product made in Naples does not necessarily mean that the city represents the ultimate Dump, the garbage repository of the north, the Buffalos, the recycling, the BassoIervolino, the spoiled Chinese knock-offs, counterfeit jeans, defective mobile phones, fake diplomas, ultra-short degrees, or an army of the Vu'Cumprà robots sent to the Continent...There is something rotten in Campania, but there is throughout Italy, folks! So, let’s discover this "counterfeit" group that set the La in unsuspecting times for the hallucinatory and widespread phenomenon of cover bands. The Shampoo are Neapolitans, they formed in 1976, just for fun, thanks to a free radio-truly free at the time!-which announced the Beatles' appearance on the show thanks to the president of Napoli, Ferlaino, to celebrate the Napoli-Liverpool football match. The joke gathered around the radio about 150 thousand listeners...From here, thanks to their fun-loving mentor Giorgio Verdelli, the group became a true band with a repertoire of Beatles songs amusingly counterfeited in Neapolitan. The Shampoo never took themselves too seriously, unlike the cover bands more genuine than the originals, that infest venues everywhere, preventing emerging groups from creating new musical expressions. There are look-alikes who clone outfits and undergo plastic surgeries to increasingly resemble their idols, and I swear I have personally met some, they are impressive plastic automata, terrible CTRL-C/CTRL-V of the Beatles, Aerosmith, U2, Kiss, Michael Jackson, Pino Daniele, Dream Theater, and so on... They have monopolized the venue market, and even created a new sensitivity in the audience for which they do not step out of the circle of clones, tribute bands, super-musicals, Amici, assembly line reviews on old names, gratuitous xenophilia: anyone trying to propose original material, especially in Italian, is an alienated person, finding no place even in a brewery.

This 33 RPM and some 45 RPMs from Shampoo were also released on CD after several reissues and had a creeping national and beyond success: their fame went around the world, and often their only album is included in the international discographies of a namesake English duo. The songs are all disrupted in form but impeccable in music: Nowhere Man becomes N'omm ’e nient, She Loves You is Si e' Llave Tu, Help becomes Peppe, A Hard Day’s Night is Si Scinne Abbascie E’ Night Day Tripper is E’ Zizze. The magic of the Neapolitan dialect is restored to its great musical tradition, which certainly does not pale in English songs, indeed comes out renewed despite even a Dante Alighieri, who, in his De Vulgari Eloquentia, considered the Neapolitan dialect, along with Roman, Sicilian, Sardinian, Ligurian, Bolognese among the most De Baserati.