Milo – A winding road leads to one of the greatest mysteries of contemporary music. In a volcanic lava terrain perched on the slopes of Etna, in the small Sicilian town of Milo, it has lived for years Franco Battiato (Riposto, 75 years old). In the garden, where he usually paints, there is a small consecrated church. Inside, a studio with a grand piano, a huge living room without a single record – only listen to classical music on the radio – and a fabulous library full of titles on philosophy, mysticism and religion. The musician moved here when he discovered that a friend of Silvio Berlusconi had fraudulently won the elections in Catania. That’s it. But he never talked about these issues in public or about anyone else in his private life. Instead, we learned from his texts that Vivaldi prefers raisins, salads to Beethoven and Sinatra; also that he was desperately seeking the permanent center of gravity of the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff and that his desires and ours, no matter how the years pass, will never grow old. However, hardly anyone has heard of him for a long time now. At 72 he left the stage, interrupted his prolific career. Friends, family, old collaborators have made a pact of silence around him. Whatever has happened to him it is right that he lives it intimately, to perpetuate an enigma that begins and ends in his work, a long journey towards himself.
Battiato was all he wanted. Musician, writer, documentary screenwriter and also a painter under the pseudonym of Suphan Barzani. He was also regional councilor in Sicily, he resigned and was sacked after six months for having defined the Italian parliamentarians as “whores ready for anything”. He triumphed in pop, sang at Eurovision in 1984 and broke the boundaries that until then had united high and low culture. He was the first Italian artist – before giants like Vasco Rossi or Lucio Dalla – to sell a million copies with the revolutionary The Master’s voice. But that sound emerged from the depths of experimental music and progressive rock. Touched by the magnetism of Karlheinz Stockhausen – he won the composer’s award in 1977 with the album Egypt before the sands – and the influences of dodecaphonic music, albums like Fetus (1971), Pollution (1972) o On the ropes of Aries (1973), three recently reissued albums that often went unnoticed among those who scoffed at his concerts along with the hits of the Eighties and Nineties and that today are coveted pieces on the shelves of vinyl collectors. Instinctive musician, it was a period in which he learned harmony and to play the violin on the advice of Stockhausen himself; a time when he was obsessed with technology and increasingly packed the old VCS 3, an analog synthesizer that was only used by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour at the time. But all this was before the penultimate reincarnation which caused an earthquake in Italian music.
A perfectly symmetrical world could today be divided among those who were malleable teenagers when it was published The Master’s voice (1981) and those who already had too rigid an identity to change their worldview. A legion of fans learned at that moment that Caetano Veloso’s dove also sang to invoke “the fatal wrath of the Afghan refugees who moved from the border to Iran” and discovered that strange “mythical desire for Libyan prostitutes”.
Piero Negri, a music journalist who followed him closely, believes that this widespread intellectual isolation is fundamental to define the release of the album that changed music in Italy. “It is the most important album in the history of Italian pop. It has completely changed all musical logic. It was very electronic, but also elementary. Everything was done through citations and cultural references and everyone could interpret them as he wanted. Some argued that they were only given birth, others argued that they should have been deciphered in a certain way. Battiato admitted that it was also some kind of joke. It came from experimental music, but The Master’s voice it was a way to show that if he wanted to, he could make a pop album better than anyone else ”. Nobody could doubt it.
The Master’s voice, third shot of a fabulous trilogy also composed by Patriots (1980) e The era of the white boar (1979), whose title evoked the spiritual authority of a Celtic myth, was an involuntary interlocking between two worlds. “Let’s put the shirt back on, times are about to change” he sang in White flag paraphrasing Bob Dylan and remembering his Mr Tamburino. It happened when Italy was facing a historic passage trying to escape the years of lead and was entering a new era of freedom. The album, as Negri points out, definitively opened a fracture comparable to the one that Umberto Eco had caused a year earlier with The Name of The rose and her ability to act as an interpretive matryoshka. In short, an encounter between those cultural universes that the Bolognese semiologist opposed in his own Apocalyptic and Integrated from 1964. A perfect puzzle that everyone could assemble at will: pieces of mysticism, philosophy, science. Also references to Theodor W. Adorno and his work Minima Moralia, to the false myths and abuses of power which, moreover, could be sung in a concert. But the hermeneutics of Battiato’s work is usually a risky sport.
Stefano Senardi, then president of PolyGram, which after 30 years took the musician away from EMI and recorded three albums with him (The Ambush, Shellac e Flowers), delves into this Dadaist conception of the writing of his now great friend. “He doesn’t like explaining things. He prefers them to be understood through the discs. The approach to his art can be done on several levels: instinctive, epidermal, intellectual, religious, study of sound, the way of singing as in the album Flowers (1999). Not to mention his lyrics. In The Age of the White Boar he mentions the invasion of Afghanistan, migrations, social changes. It is very rare to find an artist who can be tasted, understood and consumed on so many levels ”.
Battiato inserted ne at the last minute The Ambush the song The cure, through which several generations have pledged to protect loved ones from those “fears of hypochondria that by your nature you will normally attract”. At that time, after the mid-eighties, the philosopher and faithful companion Manlio Sgalambro already composed almost all of his texts. “He was curious, because in that song he contributed only one sentence: ‘I was wandering through the fields of Tennessee, who knows how I got there”, recalls Senardi.
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From the covers begins the journey through all those landscapes of his 30 studio albums, which in 2009 included Inner eye, a fierce and unusually explicit criticism of the then Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Graphic artist Francesco Messina designed them for a great friend, with whom he shared thousands of travels, spiritual retreats, days of meditation and the same street where they lived for years in Milan. At the beginning, like that of The Master’s voice, all covers came from pencil, scissors and glue. “But that was the hardest thing. Franco was not convinced. We were on a trip, the taxi was at the door and he told me he couldn’t see it well: ‘I think I’ve made my best album. If you think the same thing about your cover, let’s get in that car, “he remembers. The taxi, of course, has left and EMI typography has forever fixed that suggestive image of Battiato’s silhouette” in his Mediterranean environment “from which one is not never detached. “I saw it as a parallel reality. It is not dogmatic in its ideas, there is a lot of transversality. I created a very contrasted space and I tried to leave it suspended, that’s how I saw it. It was postmodern as a sign. But he actually composed in a Dadaist way, his work is more of a collage. It worked in the way of Cocteau, “Messina explains.
The enigma Battiato, his geometric conception of spirituality and the space occupied by the human being hanging by a thread in the cosmos, traveled the world in an irregular way. It usually happens with most Italian musicians. Outside his country, he lived as a cult author idolized by artists such as David Byrne, John Cale or Brian Eno … even in Italy great directors such as Claudio Abbado or Riccardo Muti have shown great respect for his work. In Spain, however, he sold hundreds of thousands of copies and found an audience capable of singing from the first to the last letter of his songs. A natural journey, accompanied by that strange desire of record companies to translate their songs into Spanish.
The adaptations, however, were made with extreme care and used musicians of proven Battiatian sensitivity. Jota, singer and composer of Los Planetas, and Manu Ferrón, of the Solynieve Expert Group, were entrusted with the landing of Open Sesame (2013) in Spanish. They went to Milan, they shared five days of study with a “nice guy, with an extraordinary culture and always concerned that everyone would feel at ease”. Battiato’s track, admits Jota, is also found in Los Planetas, perhaps the most influential Spanish pop group of the last 20 years. “I’m interested in investigating the formation of popular music, how it is created, how it is built. I’ve always looked for that path he explored. From him we must also learn his lesson on how to apply certain popular phrases or concepts in songs that have greater intellectual complexity. He builds all his work on that idea, on how popular culture shapes that of the elite ”. It was the last time they met.
On 17 September 2017 the Roman Theater of Catania attended Battiato’s last concert. Two years earlier, during a performance in Bari, he had suffered a hip fracture from which he had difficulty recovering. Rumors about his health began to circulate. That performance was to be accompanied by four others. Nobody knows if it was a coincidence that this farewell took place in the city that saw him take his first steps. But nothing was known about him until last year when he launched We will come back again, recorded with the Royal Philharmonic and built on old songs and a single new theme that seemed to herald something. “Life doesn’t end. It’s like the dream. Birth as awakening. Until we’re free, we’ll be back anyway.” This time his manager assured him it would be his last dance. But how he sang in Distant Worlds (1985), it is possible that time and space no longer exist in his music. Battiato believes in reincarnation. “It’s idiotic to think we’re from the monkey,” he said on one occasion. And make no mistake, if you are still determined to find your center of gravity, come back soon. Even if he turned into that white boar.
The original article on The country
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