1995-2025, 30 years of “2020 Speedball” of Timoria: Pedrini speaks

It is difficult to believe that on March 28, thirty years have passed since the Timoria, returning from an epochal album as “windless journey” (the first Italian independent rock album to win the gold disc with over fifty thousand copies sold) in 1995 they amazed criticism and public with the disconcerting “2020 Speedball”, A dystopian, Orwellian work, so current on a thematic and sound level that it is not being able not to be counted as a seminal masterpiece of what would later become all the music in the three decades to come.
The end of the last century is a period of great turmoil in the alternative scene. Marlene Kuntz, Afterhours, Subsonica, Bluevertigo. Cristina Donà and Moltheni’s songwriter. The Reggio Emilia CSI and Ustmamò. The schism of the late Paolo Benvegnù. The Prozac+, which even go to the top of the rankings with a single high -success punk, the “acid” catchphrase.

But while the other bands look at the sounds of Anglo -Saxon and American derivation adapting them to their canon, the Timoria follow a different path. They produce discs with concept structure, sometimes wink at progressive sounds, they place themselves as a needle of the scale between past, present and future, making a suggestive storytelling ante litteram in texts, with intimist but at the same time visionary lyrics, and sounds consions to seal its narration.
If “windless journey” It had been a musical tale of training, the initiatory escape of the protagonist looking for its own existential location, “2020 Speedball” is a prophetic anathema, the lucid and tragically anticipating vision of what has become our contemporaneity today.

Environmental disaster with the search for new lands to colonize (“Europe 3”). The spectrum of an obnubilant virtuality in “2020” and “Brain Machine”. The new “Speedball” drugs. The disturbing massful figures of frightening topicality told in the very hard “guru”.
But also, thank God, the hope of “without making noise” and the fabulous, unparalleled “Boccadoro”, perhaps the highest point of the whole album.

In “2020 Speedball” the Timoria opt for a muscle, distressing sound, made of guitars saturated and distorted, with Pedrini in a state of immense grace (both technical and writing), rents at the apex of its enchanting vocality and a band that does not He limits himself to asserting the two charismatic leaders but builds a high -drama sound tissue, perfect soundtrack for the apocalypse Next Venturo.
We talk about it with Omar Pedrini, guitarist and author of the band.

We said of a dystopian, prophetic disc that vaticinous a disturbing third millennium, dominated by untrue intelligence, environmental disasters and new drugs, including virtual ones. All fulfilled, unfortunately.
Yes, exactly, just as the future could be imagined in 1994. After the unexpected success of criticism and “windless journey”, we could really do what we wanted, and we decided to dare a visionary record in the themes, energetic, fresh lymph on topics to which many artists have struggled to resist. Themes dear to art that by nature owes “intelligent”, when it is true art of course.

“Wind -free journey” had been an album that somehow arose as a trait d’union between classic rock and new forms of alternative musicalities, gathered an important historical inheritance but at the same time indicated renewed guidelines that “2020 Speedball” He traced even more lucidly, accomplices very heavy sounds but at the same time dialoguing with other languages ​​that were establishing themselves.
The Timoria were musicians able to play any kind. Illorca and I were Rocker who had attended a jazz school, I had also studied classical guitar. We were open, curious, we listened to everything, and so we decided to push us towards more extreme sounds, metal, crossover contaminations, and thanks to that genius of Max Lepore we made a disc with sounds that in Italy were not very beaten. After all, I always thought that if I had been a director I would have been Kubrick (Maestro Ghedi is an exegete and a fan), capable of touching very different themes but always remaining Kubrick. We were like this, experimental, never Taliban. “Boccadoro” is prog, “via Padana Superiore” a little Neil Young a little dinosaur jr., “Guru” and “I miss the air” metal, “Europe 3” anticipates Musk’s spacecraft influenced by metal.

Awareness of the new one who was advancing, concern for the world to come, but also glimmer of residual beauty to be safeguarded. A lyrical universe capable of evoking fears without sacrificing hope.
At that time we dealt with the world, not with the Italietta of the time, we had begun to travel on European festivals with English and American bands. Someone in 2020 remembered that album, and interviewed me calling me prophet. I reply that if I were a prophet I would like the Scudetto for my Brescia. A few years earlier the book “Entropy” of Rifkin had come out, and I was very impressed as a student, as well as by his subsequent works in which he imagined a disastrous 2035. An interviewer asked me if I had been influenced by Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece film “The Army of the 12 Monkeys”, which, however, actually came out a few months after our album. It is cool to have been in tune with such brilliant artists and similar talents. When I studied sociology and read “State of the World” of Worldwatch Institute I realized that my X generation had been the first to receive a worst world from its fathers: disfigured, proper. This was the broth in which that psychedelic and visionary semi -concept that was “2020 Speedball” matured. And that today makes me say: ‘Fuck Omar, you had taken us’.

Compared to the late nineties, the rock stopped being subversive, it no longer seems to intercept the discomfort of the new generations, has left room for different musical codes that our generation seems incapacitated to understand. What happened in the meantime?
For about ten years, rock or rather the guitar bands have been banned from the radio, also I who have usually helped the networks for about ten years I have not found space. The thing that is now missing from rock is in my opinion that sense of duty to give voice to those who do not have and to talk about social, as well as cultural topics, in short, dig the surface of things and interpret their time without mimicking foreigners.We had the Banco del Mutuo Rescue, the Premiata Fornria Marconi, the Area, the New Trolls, record companies such as Cramps, Gianni Sassi who in his last years has collaborated with us – how much I learned from him! That was pure energy for the minds, not only for the ears. This is what I miss.

(About Gianni Sassi: the cover of “2020 Speedball”, a photograph by Mauro McKinney for the artistic direction of Claudio D’Onofrio, is a tribute of that of that of “Pollution” by Franco Battiato, who had Edoardo Sivelli and Gianni Sassi as Art Directors, Jerry Cassone as “Designer” and Mario De Paoli as a photographer – see them at the bottom of the article).

Rap also did, or at least a part of it, Marracash for example. But now the new generations seem impotent and sing their weaknesses. Perhaps they surrendered, and their indie or trap music are more intimate, minimalist, sometimes violent and chronachistic, rarely artistic. It is likely that the new generations feel defeated at the start, they understood that the Spotify era allows temporary successes, it succeeds as much as you can in the shortest possible time.
The majors gauge and earn precisely for the low cost equation and many productions, there are more people who sing about the one they listen to. But in my recent and frequent trips to the land of Albione I noticed with pleasure that the radio started to send Guitar Band again and, even in Italy, I see many young people who make Rock’n’roll.

Good sign for us too. Rock’n’roll Will Never Die.

Alessandro Berselli, born in 1965, began his activity as a writer in the nineties.
He participates in the “Maurizio Costanzo Show”, he writes for the magazines “Comix”, “The Apodictic” and “Judas” and, since 2005, he has been the author of noir novels and teacher of narrative techniques.
Passionate about music and cinema, he collaborates with the “Dictionary Morandini” and “Rockenerilla”. For the Pendragon publishing house he directs the series of divergent writings “Glam” in collaboration with Gianluca Morozzi.
Of his bibliography we remember “The Siamese” (Elliot, 2017), “The doctrine of evil” (Elliot, 2019) and “The high school” (Elliot, 2021).
His latest novel, released for Mondadori, is “The subversives” (Nero Rizzoli, 2023)