Almamegretta: “Sanacore, symbol of contamination and coexistence”

In 1995 “Sanacore”, the band’s second album Almamegretta: came later”Animamigrante” which won the Targa Tenco as best first work).
The Neapolitan band’s album, which reaches 14th place in the Italian charts, is a novelty in the varied national panorama of the mid-90s. Raiz and his associates dare and bring together, inspired by the Bristol scene, elements that have never met before in a winning and shocking chemical alchemy. They use electronics applied to reggae, dub, and combine it with Neapolitan song, thus blending tradition and innovation.
The result: a winning album that still today, 30 years later, sounds fresh, alive, pulsating, current although created with the technological availability of three decades ago, a period of time in which everything evolved and changed.

Obviously a “round” figure like 30 years cannot escape the “celebrations”; here then Almamegretta decide to bring that album back to life with a tour entirely dedicated to “Sanacore” which in March 2025, they will perform live from Italian clubs with this calendar. It is not the first time that the Neapolitan band has re-released the album, a live recording recorded in Naples with the songs from “Sanacore” was already released in 2021. This time, however, the operation is more “philological”. He tells it to us Raiz talking about that record

What does “Sanacore” mean now?

More than me, you should ask our fans. Looking at it from the outside, I realize that this is a record which, together with many other albums of the time, changed the cards on the table of music in Italy a bit and meant that today, for example, a artist like Geolier may be the most listened to in Italy, as Celentano probably was at the time.

This also comes from the success we had with “Sanacore” and therefore I believe this is the meaning of the celebration. However, it is an epochal album, it was fundamental for us, we had a lot of fun making it and now we celebrate it, we will let you hear it live and we will also tell you about it, because there will also be a small story about the album.

So is there some sort of theatrical part to these dates?

Yes, not too much though, because it’s still a club concert. In a particular place like the Settimo Ringtone in Turin, which isn’t huge, maybe there could be a little more narration, at Alcatraz instead there will be more space for the dance moment and where we will tell it with songs, and less theatrical cues. Overall we will have fun with our fans reminiscing and revitalizing the revival of that record.

Yes, but not at Amadeus or Conti, so to speak, at least I hope it isn’t that kind of revival…

(Laughs) We wouldn’t even know how to do it; that too is an art from which we are far away. We do our concert and I am aware that as a band, we are old. Many artists often feel immortal, they see themselves as such, you see them doing those things that I call “adultescent”: I am an adult but I behave like a teenager. Each band has its own temporal position, we are that thing there and therefore by returning we propose our music which however can still be current and was seminal in which perhaps contemporary artists can recognize themselves.

You said seminal and this is a seminal disc. What has it produced from an artistic point of view and what type of audience do you find yourself facing now?

It has also produced the cultural idea of ​​contamination, of coexistence, which today in the light or rather in the shadow of what is happening in the world is an increasingly lively idea that needs to be defended. Because in the future there will be no destruction in the name of one’s cultural belonging, but rather one will learn to coexist with different cultural, ethnic and religious souls. This has been the message since I was 22, when I made Almamegretta. Time has passed but I continue to believe extremely in the necessity of this idea and “Sanacore” is a bit of a symbol of that. We carved out our Jamaica on the island of Procida, we made our dub, but there are clearly Neapolitan melodic songs, as if Sergio Bruni was born in Kingston, it’s like a layer cake. We worked on this and this is the message we left and which those who come to our concerts continue to find themselves in and I believe they still appreciate this thought.

In light of the current artistic and recording situation, would a record like that be current at this moment? Would it have life?

Perhaps more than I had at the time, in the sense that today certain sounds are accepted.

At the time we thought we were doing pop, but we ended up being a super experimental band, even if we make songs. Putting together dub with Punjabi, Indian influences in the mid 90s was an everyday thing in England, it was super pop, it went to BBC One, we did it with Neapolitan, our ethnic influence was that and we built it on the bed of electronic dub music. I love .Geolier and I use it as an example that explains things. If a piece like the one he did in Sanremo had been released in 1991, it would have been super experimental stuff: but look at this rap guy, there’s also a bit of dance in it, then there’s also a bit of Neapolitan melody of the neomelodic type and all done by a boy from a neighborhood. It would have been super underground, today it’s super pop. Maybe “Sanacore” would have been released as a pop record at this moment, it would have been perceived that way.

“Sanacore” thirty years later do you look at it with nostalgia, with sympathy, with affection or what look do you give it?

With self-love, even with amazement, in the sense that I still recognize its merits and intuitions, then there is a lot of naivety inside like the records of twenty-year-olds, but above all there are many beautiful intuitions that make me proud to have done it. So I look at it with so much love.

What will you change about that album? Would you do it like this again or would you change something?

We’re about to come out with two songs from that album completely redone today.

Tonality and flow are the same, only that they are played and sung with an awareness that at the time we couldn’t have due to limitations of age, experience and also awareness of what we were doing. Now that everything has been cemented, I know, we know what Almamegretta are and let’s do everything again as they would do now. For my voice I knew exactly what I wanted, today I also know exactly what I would have wanted at the time, which due to poverty of means, skills and singing limitations I was unable to do. We will redo “Nun te scurdà” and “Se stuta ‘o ffuoco”, it would have been fun to play the whole album like this, it would have taken a while, but maybe we’ll do it, if the show satisfies us we could go out with a live show, where more or not these things happen, but even in the studio it would be nice, because our dimension is more of a studio where there is always fun to be had.

How much did that album influence Almamegretta’s subsequent journey?

Initially we didn’t want to do those things anymore. With “Sanacore” we combined reggae and Neapolitan melodic music through electronics and we passed a bit for this type of group which in reality was very, very acoustic, very authentic. So three years later (with a dub album in between) in the next “Lingo” we changed everything, we have always been a group that changed things. I confess that for a while we couldn’t stand “Sanacore” anymore either. Then you see this son growing up, who was good anyway, and you think that you are his father and you become really proud of him.

How did you present that record live then and how will you present it again today?

We’ve always been fans of electronics mixed with live, so we had an exoskeleton to reproduce things that were quite unreproducible live to give that same effect, on which the entire live performance then rested. This skeleton was very open so you had room to improvise. Now I believe we will do the same but there will be less naivety and much more awareness. The direction of the live show is entrusted to PaulBaldini who was also the producer of our latest album of unreleased songs called “Senghe”.

He plays bass with us, so he’s the stage director. He knows this sound very well, he is a younger person who grew up with our music, so by his own admission, he is an external ear to Almamegretta but now incredibly internal, he knows what we have done well and as a fan he approaches us by saying: ” As a fan, I would like Almamegretta to do this.” The concert will be dub. Sanacore is a plot that we know well, we also understood that it is probably the highest level of approval from our fans. When those pieces arrive during the concerts the rave starts and people dance, have fun, then at that point we say: “well, the people, our audience, our friends, those we grew up with, our employers work, they want this thing, we have fun, they have fun and everything is fine.”.

How much is new from an electronic point of view in the current proposition that you will do in the concert? That is, did electronics help you, would they have given you the opportunity to do different things if there had been what you have now then, or do you remain vintage?

No, it all sounds much louder, from a sonic point of view, the means we can use today change the cards on the table a bit, and everything is easier, before we needed a lot of tricks. We will help ourselves with electronics but the sound will always be quite 80s reggae dub.

Will you do the whole album again live?

I think so and chronologically we will do things that are before “Sanacore”, in short it is a photograph from the 90s, the concert wants to be that

For the concert, are you from the “Dylanian” school, that is, do we overturn everything, or are you from the more philological school, do we bring back what was on the album also live?

Usually we twist everything, but I think this time we’ll be more philological, because we know that’s what our fans want. We are doing “Sanacore”, so let’s do “Sanacore”.

You mentioned Geolier: besides him, what is your vision of the current Neapolitan and Italian music scene?

I see the homologation with fear, due to many things, fundamentally to liquid music and the fact that you can have immediate feedback on what you do.

On the one hand it is an advantageous thing, on the other it risks being a boomerang, because we had time to develop a concept, bring it out, after six months we realized from the sales whether the public liked it or not, so sales affected us when it was over. Now everything happens during construction, that is, you do a piece, see how it goes, and immediately make comparisons and move based on the market and with comparisons from your past and the results of others. So I see everything as homologated, as I noticed in the rankings of the top ten most listened to projects on streaming platforms which sound impressively similar. But then I go to a music contest organized by the municipality of Rome and I find fantastic kids. There was a quintet that played like the Experience and they really played, high school kids, super funky, while others proposed nineties stuff, all sung and played, performed in a crazy way. It’s clear that these were exploring outside of the more pop tracks of today. There are kids who do different things, but record companies no longer focus on them. And then there is artificial intelligence which does nothing but bring out all the human knowledge and allows you to write things drawing on this, but it is no longer your own personal knowledge and so you get a different sensitivity.

This is the calendar of the Almamegretta tour dedicated to “Sanacore”
7 March 2025 – Florence, Viper Theatre
8 March 2025 – Nonantola (Mo), Vox Club
11 March 2025 – Settimo Torinese (To), Combo Club | Ringtone
March 12, 2025 – Milan, Alcatraz
14 March 2025 – Naples, House of Music
16 March 2025 – Ciampino (Rm), Orion
21 March 2025 – Padua, Hall
March 22, 2025 – Cesena, Vidia