Home » Patty Pravo, Sanremo epiphany – Daniele Cassandro

Patty Pravo, Sanremo epiphany – Daniele Cassandro

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In 1984 the career of Nicoletta Strambelli, aka Patty Pravo, came to a standstill. She is 36 years old and, after the great successes of the late sixties and seventies, in Italy we talk about her more than for alleged scandals than for music. Patty Pravo is an easy target for the tabloid press: always beautiful, blonde and proudly nomadic and sexually liberated, as soon as she stops being successful, she is targeted and described as a toxic and unhappy former diva, always ready to undress to make two pounds. . In 1980, more for disfigurement of conventions than for money, she appears naked first in Playboy and then in the more free-range Playmen, and in 1983 she arrives at real pornographic magazines such as Le Ore and Men. On these magazines he is on the cover with titles such as “Patty Pravo and the terrible erotic temptations” and “Patty Pravo and her red light team”. Even in that context, with her tiny breasts and that cheeky childlike look (“pseudo-child” as she describes herself), she has nothing pornographic at all: she looks like an alien who has rained down there due to some space-time distortion. In those years Patty Pravo lived mostly in California and with the US Capitol made a rock album, You look for, which has very little success.

When she decides to participate in the Sanremo festival in 1984 she does so with a new label, Caterina Caselli’s CGD, and with the firm intention of making her return to the scene as the greatest diva of Italian song. Patty Pravo from the early eighties was a strange beast but the Italian song festival was also a strange beast. 1984 saw the great return of Pippo Baudo and the Ariston event began its slow metamorphosis from a popular singing contest to a highly popular national-popular television container, a distorting mirror of the country’s vices and virtues. It is the Sanremo of scandals (from the false participation contract of Loretta Goggi to Queen who, forced to sing in playback Radio Ga Ga, they perform without bringing the microphones close to their mouths) and of the news that breaks into live TV (Baudo hosts the agitated Italsider workers in Genoa on stage). It is the Sanremo for families that rewards It will be by Al Bano and Romina Power but it is also the modernist Sanremo that hosts the new wave of Garbo and Alberto Camerini and the tropicalist pop of the Italian Group. It is above all the Sanremo where the public discovers a very young Eros Ramazzotti and falls madly in love with him. For a consummate but given-up diva, like Patty Pravo, it is a difficult game to play: how can we not look like a ruin of the seventies in the Sanremo of Reaganian ebb and hedonism? She gets ready and decides to present herself with a large piece, subtle and dreamlike, just sprinkled with electronics, and with a memorable entrance on the scene.

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Her look (let’s not forget that it was the era of Roberto D’Agostino “lookologist”) remains secret until the early evening and, like a great diva, she refuses to appear on the initial catwalk along with the other contestants. When her time comes and she goes down the staircase that lights up with her every step, the Ariston audience and viewers of all ages hold their breath: Patty Pravo is back. The metal mesh dress designed for her by Gianni Versace is a cross between an evening dress and the kimono of a space geisha. From the point of view of design and materials it is the transformation of the minidresses in metallic jersey that Paco Rabanne had created for Jane Fonda in Barbarella in a maximalist, opulent eighties evening gown. Patty Pravo stages, with her look alone, the transformation from the wild girl of the Piper to a sophisticated icon of the baroque and postmodern eighties.

The song, written for her by the trusted Maurizio Monti (1941-2021) – already author of one of her most beautiful pieces, Dying among the violets – is entitled For a doll. As gorgeous as her look, the song is minimal and just whispered. Patty Pravo returns to singing about dolls later Doll, his great success in 1968. This time, however, the tone is different: the toy woman who is thrown to the ground by a capricious child tired of playing, here becomes a fairy fetish. Here too the doll-woman is neglected and abused but the narrator of the song is ready to take her back, clean her, comb her hair and dress her up. “There is a rumor that you hold it badly … how do you do it?” Whispers Patty Pravo.

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It is fascinating and very subtle this always speaking through third parties: the narrating voice of the song, without sex and without age, seems to follow the story of the doll from a sidereal distance: it learns from others that it is being neglected, it looks for it, as if flying over a pastoral landscape between hills and rivers, and then discovers where it is but does not seek direct contact with its “kidnapper”: “Send me to tell you if it is true, I will run to get it”. The doll becomes a bewitched object, it almost contains the soul of the singer, it symbolizes her thirst for freedom, for the sun, for the open air. With the verse “I will embellish her with pink ribbons, yellow flowers in her hair, she will laugh in disbelief, or doll” the lifeless toy, thrown into a corner, finds its beauty, smile and its way into the world. The lunar and detached interpretation of Patty Pravo makes the whole song sound like a spell, her solemn movements, the lost gaze beyond the theater audience, transform a pop song, with evident roots in a certain psychedelic folk of the seventies, in a ritual, an epiphany that is consumed live on TV.

For a dollin the end, she wins the critics’ prize and Patty Pravo is pushed by the CGD to quickly publish her album. The artist is not convinced that the work is ready but accepts to have it come out all the same. In February 1984 it comes out occult persuasioni, the sixteenth album of his long career. The cover is a portrait of the artist painted on a soft pink background by the South Tyrolean artist and cartoonist Marcello Jori. Only the title appears in the graphic occult persuasioni without the name of the artist. Just the hieroglyph of his face outlined by Jori.

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It is also the first Patty Pravo album to be released on compact disc, a brand new medium at the time. The album was made straight away, almost entirely live with a very small staff: the singer-songwriter of Serbian origin Goran Kuzminac on acoustic guitar (very often played with the technique of “finger picking”) and Maurizio Guarini of Goblin on keyboards. occult persuasioni is a minimal, diaphanous pop album that mixes acoustics and electronics in a subtle and absolutely pioneering way for the times. The choice of songs is also studied in detail: out of nine pieces, six are written by a Maurizio Monti in a state of grace, delicate and surreal. Riccardo Cocciante (in Walk, almost a page of magical realism) and Paolo Conte (with the pseudonym Solingo, in energica Voyage). The themes of nomadism, freedom, exoticism as escape and self-seeking return in all the songs that were clearly written with Patty Pravo in mind. “From tomorrow I’ll be in Mexico under a rough blanket,” he sings in Voyage: “… Less alone”.

The album has very little success, only the single from Sanremo is saved, which goes fairly well; the dreamlike and intimate turn of occult persuasioni it is not rewarded by the public and the relations between the artist and the CGD are cracked. Patty Pravo is also unconvinced in the promotional interviews for the record. In a clumsy television meeting in 1984, Gianni Minà asks her if she has ever felt “raped” by this profession. Patty Pravo, without losing her smile, replies: “Always. It is an illusion to think that you are not. How do I defend myself? Pretending nothing ”.

Patty Right
occult persuasioni
Cgd, 1984

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