Piero Pelù talks about his years of anger, music and commitment in this interview with Fanpage.it.
A long musical experience and commitment that has materialized, this time, in the song Musica libera, which already from the title makes it clear that it is a song that speaks of freedom and mingling. You understand it even more with the choice to sing it together with Alborosie, the Italian star of reggae music in the world. The two artists will also be the protagonists of the May Day Concert, a stage that is historically linked to work, therefore perfect for the former Litfiba who has always had social commitment as a compass for life. From horoscope to music, passing through family, passions and anger, Pelù told Fanpage.it
You define yourself as Aquarius Rising Aquarius: What does that mean?
Unfortunately it is a kind of death sentence because as far as I can understand it is a guarantee of total instability.
An instability that has given you something on a creative level, though, hasn’t it?
Sometimes it results in creativity, sometimes in inevitable chaos.
And does this chaos scare you or have you learned to manage it?
I’ve learned to handle it, though when you’re a troublemaker or trouble magnet like I say in a song, the variety and genetic transformation of this chaos is unpredictable. But it’s in my nature to live like this, I can’t live a quiet life.
What are the troubles you speak of?
But no, forget it, for God’s sake!
I insist.
Just think about the history of Litfiba, how fucking complex, twisted, controversial, creative, exciting and humiliating in some respects. All this range is part of my lifestyle.
All this has created a band that has written important pages of our rock. Today I would struggle to find the you of the present, I don’t think it’s the Maneskins.
The Maneskins are children of their time, but I would say that the Fasks are closest to the Litfiba.
In your biography you mentioned landmarks like Black Sabbath and the Beatles from Revolver…
And Jannacci.
Jannacci, right.
Yes, I had an ear attentive to many trends, from the more songwriting, bewildered but brilliant ones like those of Jannacci and Jacopo Fo, embracing the theater, which is a love of my life, with music, mime, masks…
The masks?
Yes, I have a house that is covered with masks, it’s something that worries Gianna (the conductor Gianna Fratta, the singer’s wife, ndr) she still hasn’t gotten used to it, while I adore them, think that around here I don’t even have a portrait of myself. It will also be because the Commedia dell’arte has always fascinated me, Arlecchino is a fundamental figure for my training. And we reconnect with the multiplicity of my influences, which are also those that form this partly creative chaos of my existence.
Does this matter of masks and mime have to do with your period in Paris?
For Paris I have to thank my family, despite the fact that they devastated my existence by sending me to a school I didn’t want, namely the Liceo Classico Dante which greatly influenced my subsequent anger which then translated into music.
What did you want to do?
The Art Institute, but my mother was about to graduate in French Literature so she was very attached to France, instilling in me her love for their culture. Already as a child I went to Paris with my brother and it was there that I discovered Paranoid by Black Sabbath. At that moment I understood the importance of travelling, of confronting realities that are totally different from ours. Yet we came from a beautiful Florence, a Renaissance city, a very creative, open city: it was the first city to host a gay club, the Tabasco, the one where Renato Zero had bought a house, where Romanina, the first Italian transgender, lived and enjoyed the life, where when you went downtown it felt like Woodstock, because there was so much kids playing in the street, sharing stories in a freakish way. Then it was the city of Giorgio La Pira, Don Lorenzo Milani and it is that of Stefano Massini, a great person and an incomparable author and writer.
All in all, it was a nice place to live…
Yes, a beautiful place to live, with democratic and progressive energies at a very high level.
Was the anger you were talking about mixed with this teeming Florence the engine of your career?
I lived through a very difficult adolescence… Now, I don’t want to be victimized, because my family was united, we easily reached the end of the month, I would never allow myself to compare my adolescence to that of many kids who had difficulties, families destroyed etc, but I experienced this double soul: living in a bourgeois family where I had a rebellious soul, different from the rest of the family, which was neither accepted nor understood. I experienced this acceptance frustration.
And how did they experience your success?
They got there very slowly, certainly after tens, hundreds of thousands of fans and records sold. However, just to say, this morning I spoke to my mother to find out how my father is who is almost 96 years old and has senile dementia, so every day that passes is a great conquest but above all a great suffering, especially for my mother, and she answered me he said, “We need to meet to talk about May Day.”
Was it a threat?
[Ride] Yes, I asked her what she wanted to talk about, that I know exactly what I’m going to say and she says: “Be careful because I’m disinheriting you”. We’ve come to this, okay?
Hasn’t he made peace with this rebellious soul of yours yet?
No, he still hasn’t made peace with his rebellious son, we’re blackmailing.
What are you afraid you’ll do on that stage?
He’s terrified I’ll go there and piss me off, he knows how I’m made anyway.
And will you get pissed on that stage that has been so political for years?
The way liberalism has taken hold in Italy, May Day automatically becomes a political stage. The May Day celebration is a celebration of rights and when rights are trampled upon, as happens in Italy on so many levels, one cannot help but talk about all this. There are countless other opportunities to play while thinking about pure entertainment, because music is entertainment, but it also has a social, connective, sharing and storytelling value. And the story of this day cannot ignore the trampled rights of workers, such as the unrecognized minimum wage.
A few years ago you held positions close to the Movement…
Well, I’ve never sided with any party, even if my ideas are progressive, I believe in the value of freedom, equality and brotherhood, I was born with this approach and I don’t intend to change it, even if fashion and the general trend are for closure, suprematism and wild liberalism. In short, I will always feel closer to the GKN workers than to certain entrepreneurs.
Do you feel represented today?
I feel represented by the words and figure of President Mattarella, an institutional figure that I feel like bringing closer to that of Pertini, another President whom I loved very much.
All presidents with a very clear idea, for example, of a holiday like that of April 25…
On the value of our Constitution, on which all the institutions swear, from the first to the last.
Let’s go back to music: at the Concertone you arrive with Musica libera, speaking of mingling…
Free music is a song of open contamination, a word that is incredibly assuming an impressive political value. We in music live on contamination, like all art and all of our daily life even if someone insists that this contamination is the devil.
You wrote the song with Alborosie, Italian and pillar of world reggae.
I wrote this song with Alborosie, yes, whom I consider yet another brain fleeing the country, forced to leave because of a piece of the recording world, the same one who took advantage of young talents who didn’t recognize the royalties of the records seen , as also happened to Litfiba in the early days, teased by the first labels before going independent in ’85. When emerging artists ask me for advice, I tell them that first of all they have to find a lawyer, then study and play where nobody knows them. First of all, however, they must find a good lawyer.
So it also happened in Alborosie?
Yes, for what he told me: he went away to Jamaica, he brought tea to the studios of the big producers, he made his great artistic value understood and today he is an international reggae star.
Piero Pelù and Alborosie (ph Maurizio Pavone)
And how did your love for reggae come about?
It has deep roots, as a boy we listened to Bob Marley while we smoked our first joints. Marley himself recorded a song like “Punky Reggae Party”, the Rolling Stones recorded in Jamaica a beautiful album like Black & Blue, not to mention the Clash, the Police, in short, it is full of connections between rock, punk and reggae. The May Day version will be a little rockier than the recorded one, I’m taking my revenge.
Do you have revenge to take?
No, it is to say, there is no revenge to take me. Then I’m not a competitive one, while many people around me are and are ruthlessly competitive. I play to have fun and I face any game like this, while other people live only to win and be first, an obsession exacerbated by our age, first places, gold, are exalted, even if you’ve come within a cent of third place you’re loser , and all the effort and sacrifices made lose meaning with respect to the stigma of loser. And this is a terrible thing.
And in Sanremo how did you do it?
I couldn’t care less about positioning, but I realized that some colleagues were infoiated about the position in the leaderboard, how to climb it, how to look. But that’s not art!
Could it be that you don’t feel this thing because you achieved success and your name is part of the history of our music, freeing you from the burden of looking for it at all costs?
Inside Litfiba, someone had this tension and still has it, but I’ve never been interested in this thing, perhaps also because I’ve never had financial problems, you know, when you know hunger, it happens to try a way to success to turn your life around and for that I have the utmost respect. However, I’ve always written out of necessity, when I happened to be pressured by managers or record companies to maintain a certain level of sales, etc. I went through the worst moments of my life.
And how did you come up with it?
I had a lot of trouble because I found myself writing according to something: radio broadcasting, rankings, sales but these are all things that if they come out well, otherwise we won’t make a tragedy of it. I’ve always felt very poised for these needs, because the main one is to dig deeper and deeper inside myself, to get to know myself and bring out those parts of me that I haven’t been able to tell and admit to myself, so it’s a good duel with themselves.