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Silvio Bernelli was born and raised in Turin. Born in 1965, he should belong to that small group of elect (??) who during their preadolescence (an age, as we know, crucial for the development of the Young) had the (mis)fortune of being struck by the Word of the New Rock.
It was still the '70s, do you remember those crazy mutants roaming the cities, no longer Autonomists, not yet Something Else? Remember "Odeon, tutto quanto fa spettacolo"? Remember Michel Pergolani? It seems that even Our Man is one of Us, given that in the years to come he would become the bassist of bands such as Indigesti and Declino, and Negazione.
In this first text of his, published in 2003, he tells us about his epic in the Turin punk scene of the early '80s. The book flows simply and quickly, with a few entertaining episodes and few surprises: stories of friendships among youngsters, projects, anxieties, loves, music, school, mopeds...
Yeah, but where's the punk? Who saw it?
Let me explain: the little book doesn't say anything about that fundamental experience that literally changed the lives of many from "that" generation, of those situations that make us think we lived in a parallel universe, of those fast-paced years that left us with marks and make us recognize each other on the street in an instant. Nothing.
If Bernelli had told us about a group of friends who, in place of punk, gathered around a passion for motors, or for modeling, birdwatching, Risk, or any other foolish youthful obsession, the little novel could have had exactly the same development and the same (scant) pathos. Digging into memory, I find almost no point of contact between the lived experiences of those years and the adolescent-bourgeois affair of these mama’s boys; contact points that, on the contrary, clearly emerge in many other texts written by protagonists of that same scene (among others, I mention Roberto Perciballi, Riccardo Pedrini, and even the "suspect" Marco Philopat). A partial explanation is provided by the author himself who on page 40 writes: "In the lyrics of Declino, an intimate vein took shape. Slogans gave way to a personal formula that would later become our trademark. The underlying message was simple: stay with your friends and ignore all other environments. Family, school, and work were for regular people: all those who didn't follow hardcore".
What Bernelli calls "An intimate vein" is nothing more than the reflux that very soon swallowed punk into the drift of indifference and the shallows of self-isolation (social centers turning into ghettos).
Both in Philopat’s lucid sociopolitical analysis and in the raw awareness of the thug Perciballi, or in the multifaceted and creative Bolognese reality of Pedrini, the message that emerges is exactly the opposite: Stay out, around, on the street; feel the pulsing reality on your skin, piss people off, read everything readable, listen to everything listenable, don’t get screwed by the rhetoric of the adolescent locked in his bedroom!! Moreover: The author staunchly defends the essential diversity and "purity" of punk, while instead the beauty was precisely in getting your hands dirty, mixing with everything and everyone, in short, always being ready to jam the mechanism.
If there is a lasting merit to attribute to punk beyond the musical and stylistic aspect, it is precisely curiosity, the push to see things always from the other point of view, the flipping of canons for creative purposes (how? destroy? yes, yes...). But the appearance at every corner of so many "Bernellis" soon made the young metropolitan brats lose interest, and then the '80s did the rest...
And now, who is going to tell Silvio Bernelli that punk passed him by but he stepped aside?
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