Vasco Rossi
Live @ Torino 22.04.10

THE REVIEW

A ritual. A tradition. A religion. A nonsense. A routine. A who-knows-why.

I don't know why I, and millions of others, always go to see Vasco, every time he goes around singing.

Maybe for the young ones, it's fashion, identification... well...

And maybe for the old ones like me, it's a kind of psychiatric flight backward, towards one's past, one's yesterday, towards that little guitar strummed rebelliously at the parish parties of the eighties.

In short... trivial yet very good reasons, those that lead us to see Vasco, even when the concerts were disappointing or simply too focused on songs from recent albums, overproduced and not very meaningful.

Not this time.

This time I really enjoyed myself, and quite a lot.

First of all, my brotherly acoustic guitarist bought me, sneakily, the tickets in the field.

At our age... So, if something is to be done, it should be done well, for God's sake. Under the stage, with screaming boys and girls, all pervaded by weed that somehow managed to get past the very efficient police dogs at the entrance. Us, with our white hair and our Cohiba cigars...

And Vasco hasn’t been seen in this form for ages. Maybe ever. As a youngster, he was great, truly, but, to be honest, he was anything but fit.

Now he jumps and sings for two and a half hours. He performs a lot of songs. He entertains the audience with almost half an hour of an acoustic interlude, just voice and guitar, almost at the center of the stage, pleasing everyone, from those who were twenty, or ten, with Sally, to those who grew up with Jenny E’ Pazza and Non Siamo Mica Gli Americani (yes, I swear, he did both, and well too, with the right amount of desperation for the first and glee for the second).

The rest of the repertoire ranges from old to new with few, really few, concessions to recent classified triviality.

It’s clear: Vasco is and remains an industry, an ex-author, a monument to contemporaneity, both good and bad.

But he knows how to be on stage, and he knows how to do his job.

He knows how to entertain young kids of those who were twenty during the time of Albachiara and aged guys who are forty in the time of Mondo Che Vorrei.

Vasco is Vasco. Like it or not. Positive and negative. True and false, profound and trivial. If it weren’t an unforgivable bout of rhetoric, one could say he resembles life a bit.