Raf, from the Clash to Nick Kershaw in Sanremo: “I come from rock”
Eleven years after the last time, Raf returns to the Festival with “Ora e per semper”. a song that was born in the family and has its roots in his personal history. In between there are the rock of the origins, the “alienation” of the first success with “Self Control”, a wedding in Cuba and the cover of “The riddle”, 1984 as his hit
“It was a song that convinced me”
“It was a song that convinced me, born from an idea of my son Samuele”, he says of “Now and forever!”. “Originally it was his song, he helped me develop a refrain, to continue this song. We sat there one afternoon at the piano and moved on.” A few days later came the turning point: “He said to me: “Dad, I listened to this song again, in my opinion you should sing it, it sounds better to you”. Raf was already thinking about a new album, due out in the autumn, and decided to take the song back and bring it to completion.
Precisely in those days he found his wedding vows in a drawer, written in 1996 in Spanish, because the wedding had been celebrated in Cuba. “It ended with the classic phrase “until death do you part”. I remember that I had deleted that last line. I had said to this very nice priest: can’t you say something else instead of this? And he asks me: what would you like to say? I thought about it for a moment and wrote, again in Spanish: “Now and forever””. Rereading that sentence, Raf found the title and the key to the text: “It’s very personal, very autobiographical. At the beginning it talks about me, about those years. About “Self Control”: I had had my first success. In the text I say that I felt like an alien, I felt alone. It was exactly like that, because I woke up in Paris and thought I was in Tokyo”.
“I came from rock, I felt a certain annoyance”
That sudden success was not easy to manage. “I experienced that with a bit of frustration, because I wasn’t prepared for that success, with that song. Because I came from rock, and I felt a certain annoyance.” A statement that explains well the double track of his career: “I come from rock”, he reiterates, “even if I had success with pop”. The beginnings, in fact, tell another story. “The concert of a lifetime was in 1980, in Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, the first Clash concert. I was in the support group, we were Café Caracas, we opened their concert. For me it was an incredible blow. That was the concert of a lifetime.”
The Riddle
On the covers evening, Raf will sing “The Riddle” with the Kolors: a pop classic from ’84, the same year as “Self control”, by Nik Kershaw (here is our interview): “I chose ‘The Riddle’ because I remember Nik Kershaw’s album as one of the best albums of that year. I involved The Kolors because they seem to me to be a band teleported from the ’80s: they interpret that imagery well, both in style, in how they present themselves and dress, and for their way of being on stage. In them I see myself and many artists or bands of that period. Among other things, Stash sings very well, especially those types of songs in English. I had no doubts: it was a spontaneous, natural choice, and they accepted immediately with great enthusiasm.”
