A trip down memory lane. Singing. The special episode of is dedicated to the great author of songs that have marked many generations of Italian music Techeteche Show broadcast this evening, Friday 2 February at 9.30pm on Rai 1. Lucio Battisti Number one – the evening hosted by Flavio Insinna – will retrace the life and career of the genius through materials – partly unpublished – from the Rai television and radio archive.
To remember Battisti, we have chosen ten songs. Among all those that have hooked our heart and soul (too many to remember them all), fished at will from the basket of memory.
You come back to mind – 1969
It has become so familiar that the artistic contours of this song that changed Italian pop now escape us. A magnificent melody that suddenly becomes a blow to the heart. A pain made into song. Two songs in one, no one had ever dared so much.
Emotions – 1970
“The” song of that era. Battisti said he wrote it after the Milan-Rome horseback journey with Mogul “and I put into it that intimate tension, those abrupt passages, suspended in the air, to better express the sense of discovery, of amazement, of freedom that Mogol and I felt as we ventured across meadows, hills and rivers”. Nothing in Italian music was ever the same again.
Mondadori Portfolio/Giorgio Ambrosi
Pink peach blossom flowers -1970
The torment of a love thrown away. Perhaps the most dramatic interpretation of that Baptist period: that “I was really beside myself” is the image of desperation shouted with unprecedented force. Battisti is without filters, he is the voice of hopeless lovers. And then they said he couldn’t sing.
public domain sourced / access rights from The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
And I think of you – 1970
’70 is the year in which it was written by Mogol and Battisti and then entrusted to the voice of Bruno Lauzi. Lucio’s version arrived in 1972: intense, delicate, moving. The stroke of genius was that final chorus: a crescendo of “papapapapa” that everyone sang. A liberation and hope for a love that is suspended but (perhaps) not yet finished.
The Light of the East (1972)
“To you who are my present” is the attack of the chorus of a song that shifts the axis of songwriting, projecting it towards the future. The whole album Il mio canto libero was a leap into the future, with its progressive taste and imaginative lyrics. Here Battisti brings together folk heritage and made in Italy melody. The result is sweet.
Wind in the Wind – 1972
Love conquers everything: pain, loneliness, fear. It’s not sung at bonfires, it doesn’t play on the radio, but the arrangement, the singing, the orchestra make it an absolute masterpiece. The string solo is mentioned in The football draft of the class of ’68 Of Francesco De Gregori.
Yes to travel – 1976
Raise your hand if you have never mentioned “that great genius of a friend of mine”, a mechanic who repairs everything. International sounds, suggestions of escape, irresistible melodic constructions. He travels “avoiding the hardest potholes”, a simple sentimental metaphor that reaches everywhere in an instant. And she never leaves.
The company – 1976
Battisti didn’t usually sing songs that weren’t his, but he fell in love with this song written in 1969 by Mogol and Carlo Donida per Marisa Sannia. A classic piece that Battisti tears to pieces and rebuilds from scratch, transforming it into a very modern tale of fall and rebirth. His falsetto reaches unexplored tones.
Take it like this – 1978
Yet another artistic turning point leads Battisti to choose a very British pop sound, modern but captivating. The song conveys winter colors; the love story ends, and with it an entire Baptist era: the cover of the album Una donna per amici shows the last public image of Lucio, who from that moment becomes a ghost.
Don Giovanni – 1986
The ghost destroys his past: after the divorce from MogulBattisti entrusts the texts to the poet Pasquale Panella, which dismantles all the rules of the song known up to that point. Battisti marries electronics by wrapping texts full of suggestions, alliterations and paradoxes of words: in this fascinating and unsettling revolution the romance of the new millennium emerges.