Silver Convention
All The Best

Silver Convention - All The Best - 1978

Hey, Bulgarian choir, I can offer you something much better than a simple
Ramaya: I could give you Kung fu fighting by Carl Douglas. Gnacchisnà.
Fly robin fly? Not interested? Gnacchisnà
(Elio e'Pippero part one)

Chronicle of a dreary winter afternoon: you toss and turn in the room, the loud mumble mumble can be sensed even by the dog, who starts barking on the balcony... yep, you've been pondering over that pile of CDs for a couple of hours... Mmmmh you think about Genesis, Selling England by the Pound, whose lyrics you haven't quite digested, feeling them momentarily unrelated to Italian history from the breach of Porta Pia to today; and this after you tried the exegesis of the literary sources of Animals, trying to understand if the Pinks were more or less pink like the Pigs On The Wing, or if they were just the Pigs, and then to relax you set the mood with a randomized tour: Battiato Fetus, Lucio Dalla the sailor, the Area at the general markets with watermelons in their mouths, ELakePalmer, Gentle Giant and Yes, whose sound waves ruined the vol-au-vent alla maria that your wife lovingly prepared for you; Witchcraft? Synchronicity? Are gastronomic molecules sensitive to sounds as in the Chladni experiment?

I lie on the sofa. I thought back to the juke box of the Sante Katzone villa in Fellini's film City of Women... A priceless Wurlitzer that contrasted with the embraces of the women seduced by the super-phallic master of the house, recorded in the niches of the funeral gallery of the tiny ovens - digital, actually still analog at the time: after all - this aseptic digital, the play lists from an undifferentiated sonic aquarium, I want the scent of vinyl... I swim into the next room towards my juke box, I turn it on: it seems like lunar base, a Rockola 464 with those psycho-disco wings neon-designed - but who was the graphic designer of those times (1977) - how did he conceive them? Or rather, what was he on? Oh sure, this space monolith is not a nanoipod-sofri-mp3: it's an analog dinosaur, yes, but it deserves respect, like a mammoth weighing one and a half tons. I turn off the lights, and I look at it, I scrutinize it, like an astronomer with a constellation... The stout cabinet is a "lived-in" piece of furniture, bears the signs of time, a blue spaceship winking at me like a box full of secrets. Finally here... here's the trip of those wings. Maybe I've unveiled the mystery... the wings are those of the Bird of Paradise, or perhaps the Hippogriff, and they were inspired by a particular song... from those years. The wings of Fly Robin Fly. So many memories; Monica  do you remember when you danced, with those tight jeans, cork heels, the ponytail, and you played the suburban disco-diva. I can still smell the virginal soap and water scent of your skin.. Well enough with the reminiscences, but also enough with that proggish stuff, a little reflux is needed...

I call the record man; I dial the analog long-distance, key 1, key 7, then 7, I select something carefree, with a short but meaningful text: Fly Robin Fly of the Silver Convention - an European trio disco-music, 3 fraulein with beautiful voices and physical presence answering to the stage names Ramona Wolf, Penny McLean, and Linda Thompson. I know it's disco-muzak - and who hasn't written or sung along to it? - No, my dear 13 readers, the list of artists would be too long.

There's no message in this song or maybe it's hermetic-sexual, in the distich Fly Robin fly/ up up to the sky-repeated ad nauseam - but our playful side responds to stimuli that aren't always lofty, and then, as Fellini the master said, "I am convinced that if at the end of our existence we were allowed to say something, if we were truly sincere, we would sing a little song!". And yes, that the Venerable, as a child, was shocked by 3 and 4 songs and nothing else - the circus march of the gladiators, old slow ones from old American movies with frosty and busty stars, Fred and Ginger, Titina, boogie-woogies, ancient rocknroll, pieces that in his films always return in disguise. Eternal return, fashions, flow and re-flow, which is also an in-flux, a de-flux, a Proustian de-baser of consciousness. Back to the compilation of Silver Convention: the real creators are composer Silvester Leavy and, above all, producer Michael Kunze who, like a new Dr. Frankenstein, controls everything. From this single onwards, the role of the bass in disco music is unraveled, that is the music for disco libraries: the Silver Convention (or "the miracle of Munich," as they were later called), unleashed a feverish activity everywhere, so much so that soon the king of disco made in Munich, a luxury emigrant, became our Giorgio Moroder, who was indeed a bassist and a keyboardist.

That incredible series of bass lines that so helped the bird "Fly, Robin, Fly" to soar so high, and then the follow-up, the famous Get Up And Boogie (That's Right) are alone worth this collection, which still contains several other gems from '75 to '78: the pop soul Telegram, complete with Barrettian beeps (?!) with which they participated in Eurofestival '77, No No Joe another super funky bass hammer of the period with ritual orgasmic screams, Tiger Baby, B-side of the single Fly Robin Fly, Save Me, the first successful 45, the sensual San Francisco Hustle, then Son Of A Gun, Heart Of Stone of '76, whose obsessive piano plus the drums and bass attack, were directly used by Duran for Notorius, the dreamy "You Got What It Takes (To Please Your Woman)", the frantic boogie "Play Me Like a Yo-Yo."

And even a bit of pop-reggae The Boy With The Ooh La-La, the soul-disco of Always Another Girl, and finally the million sellers Lady Bump sung by Penny McLean. Then slow songs for end-of-evening smooching with Chains Of Love... In short, it's an all-flavor cake from the first 3 albums, but online there are several compilations from the golden, or rather, silver, period of the Silver Convention, which indeed represent the first great success produced by a German laboratory - number 1 of the 45 rpm hit parade, platinum record 1976 for a million copies sold in the States alone - Fly, Robin fly anticipates by a couple of years the great explosion of disco as a mass phenomenon and allows pragmatic German producers to test a machine destined to churn out an impressive amount of hits. The music industry of those years is providing formidable support for a brainwashing of the young generations tired of so much intellectualism, with a return to a certain physicality of sweet new style soul music: and they will throw behind their backs the commitment of the older brothers. Their new horizon will be the floor of a discotheque, and their music will be produced in series. But rock is not dead: it will recycle and draw new life from rhythmic beats. Everyone will convert, from Kiss - I was made.. - to the Stones, Miss you, Bowie-Young americans, Station to station, to P.Floyd - Another brick, Run like hell, Stones - Miss you, Zappa, in a desecrating key Sheik Yerbouti, E.L.O., Bob Marley, Peter Tosh. Decibel-Indigestione disko-etc. etc. an endless list. Imagine that in the near future, you have to spice up an evening and to create an atmosphere, you can choose between 2 holograms: a stunning redhead like Penny McLean of the Silver Convention singing Lady Bump, and at the intercom, a Romero choir of Bulgarian voices... You shout I DON'T NEED CARPETS, CDS, DVDS NANIMORETTI, aipodNANISOFRI, Darksaide ICI 2007versiondelux-remix, WHAT DO YOU WANT? Meanwhile, you try to hit one of them pretending that a vase fell... Stonk, missed. HOW MANY ARE YOU, WHAT DO YOU WANT? BEG, they reply, are the holographic forms in the formation of: Dalla-Ron, De SicaConticini-Zero, aDepeche, Battiato-Pezzali, Bonovox, Cocciante, Peter Gabriel, Gilmour-Waters, Baglioni-Guccini, Elisa and Caselli, Silvestri, Nek, Minghi, Fiorello and Fiorellamannoia, and many more... 

WHO DO YOU CHOOSE? I lock myself in with Penny McLean, and whoever sees has seen.