A carnival of the mad, the seduced and the abandoned
A whirlwind carousel ride, which lasted just over five years, but which left several traces in the world Italian alternative scene. To tell the story of Carnival Of Fools, in a documentary film signed by Filippo D’Angelo, Dimitris Statiris and Mauro Ermanno Giovanardiis the founder of the band himself, Mauro Ermanno Giovanardi, who, through archive images and testimonies offered by those who lived that period as protagonists, shows all the great artistic and cultural ferment of underground Milan in the Eighties.
Having put his bicycle aside due to a whooping cough, as a promising cyclist Mauro, known as Joe, comes to discover all the catalysing power of music, letting himself be inspired by American crooners, as well as by blues, new wave and post punkgiving audiences an extraordinary epiphany of encounters and freedom through its engaging narrative. A daily life made up of concerts and rehearsal rooms, but also of social unrest and creative turmoil that would lead to the writing of one of the most incredible and craziest realities of our music scene.
Slightly grainy images fixed on film that recall an analogue time in which there was above all the intuition of belonging to an “other” world eager to tune in to distant frequencies, breaking down certain somewhat pre-constructed patterns of Italian song. Structured in a long description by Giovanardi of the entire Fools affair from beginning to end, the film shows the shock of a passion capable of completely shuffling the cards. In the fertile city environment the pieces fit together one after the other, with the choice of a name borrowed from some poetic lines of “Witt” by Patti Smith: “A carnival of the mad, the seduced and the abandoned”generational anxieties and internal reflections placed before collective ones, the spirit of aggregation and collaboration between young musicians as an inspiring wealth.
In this way Joe’s memories follow one another, his lucid anecdotes, poised between irony and awareness of what has been, interspersed with those of Manuel Agnelli, Cristina Donà, the producer Paolo Mauri, the experimenter Giacomo Spazio or the former Mox members Cristadoro, Max Donna, Andrea Viotti, Luca Talamazziaimed at reconstructing key years and passages of the band. Above all, the incredible leap from the small venues for non-conformists to the opening of the concert of Nick Cave and the Bad Seedsand a rather lively aftershow, complete with advice from a legend: “If I become your woman I’ll give you the chance to write deeper songs”.
This is how one’s experience takes shape Italian band capable of playing with an out of the ordinary live impact, of competing with sick versions of “Summertime” and vocal and piano covers of Joy Division, but also of trying their hand at Nick Drake or Sonic Youth in a period in which it didn’t even seem imaginable that all this could happen in Italy. And, again, despite a discography limited to just three albums published between 1989 and 1993, being decisive in giving the push to Vox Pop, the legendary independent label destined to make history in our musical panorama, founded among others, by Giovanardi himself , Lambs and Space.
Finally, the epilogue, with Joe’s desire to sing in Italian and the new La Crus project which effectively puts an end to Carnival Of Fools, with the rest of the band transforming into Santa Sangre. Of that fantastic adventure, the film reports the shared experiences, the live fragments, the places and the road traveled back and forth. A predominantly nocturnal world made up of stages and kilometres, from one evening to another, from the Bar Tabacchi in Via Larga to the Accademia di Brera passing through the shows with the Beasts of Bourbon and Hugo Race. It is precisely the cavernous voice of the Melbourne singer that cinematically conveys the meaning of the documentary. “It was 1993, I think. I was on tour with my band True Spirt, we were doing our first concerts in Italy. There was a surreal feeling. And then there were Carnival Of Fools. Wow.”
With a deliberately off-cut, the film tries to avoid the nostalgia effect to visually and musically reconstruct and rediscover the epic of a band capable of anticipating consolidated independent realities by many years. An extraordinary human and artistic story presented with raw realism, without giving up a touch of lightness. And madness, of course.
