“I don’t see a future in the automobile; this is a means that it no longer has any reason to exist”: this is how Lucio Dalla spoke in 1976. He didn’t do it by chance: that year his third and final album was released in collaboration with one of the great poets of the 20th century, Roberto Roversi.
It would have had to be called The Future of the Automobilebut there was a bitter conflict with the record company that didn’t want that record: Dalla decided to make a compromise, giving up half of the songs and changing the title to Automobiles. A formidable show broadcast on Rai was made from that album. On YouTube you can see several clips, in particular the legendary Interview with the Lawyerwho was obviously the lawyer Agnelli, an imaginary interview with a Manchester Guardian journalist who asks very clear questions and gets perfectly incomprehensible answers.
The collaboration between Dalla and Roversi is entry into the history of Italian musicalso because of some beautiful songs like Nuvolari and the prescient The engine of the year 2000“nice and shiny, fast and silent”, which looks just like the engine of our electric cars, an engine, says the song, about which we know everything while we know nothing about the boy from 2000“we can’t draw the heart of it”.
After almost fifty years, that show comes back on stage and does it on the opening evening of the Italian Tech Weekon 27 September in Turin (if you can’t go to Turin, streaming on the Repubblica and La Stampa websites): it’s a small, big cultural event, curated by Ernesto Assantewhich will see the Zois reinterpret some historic songs from that union and also a couple of unreleased ones.
As a journalist wrote at the time, “it contains the history of our country”, progress, the workers, the smog. And there is a vision of the future which, among the wonders of technology, tries to keep the human being at the centre. A future which, as the poet says, “isn’t that bad”.