CSI’s incredible first place in the charts

In its own way, it is one of the most unlikely events not only in the history of a great band, but in the history of Italian music. CSI beating Oasis at the height of their career and taking first place in the rankings. The oustiders of national rock above the rock stars par excellence: other times, certainly: it was the end of the 90s, records were selling and there was neither digital nor streaming.
A few years ago we reconstructed the story of that event, which today is worth telling again to explain who the CSIs were – and who they are, given the recent reunion.

“Electrified blank slate”

It happened on 15 September 1997: first place in the Italian sales charts was conquered by a national rock album: it was the climax of a glorious career and long work behind the scenes. It was also something unheard of for the time, so much so that someone called it a conspiracy, saying that it was “due to” a counting error, that the numbers were those of Elton John’s song dedicated to Lady Diana, who had died two weeks earlier. Instead it was all true: CSI, after years of hard work and with a loyal following built since the days of CCCP, brought “Tabula rasa electrificata” to number 1, beating Oasis’s “Be here now” and selling more than 30,000 copies in a week.
The “punkettone” Giovanni Lindo Ferretti and his companions Massimo Zamboni, Gianni Maroccolo, Ginevra di Marco, Francesco Magnelli and Giorgio Canali had adultized and brought to the general public a genre that had always been a minority in Italy: the band moved from clubs to arenas, but the success created a rift between Ferretti and Zamboni. It would remain the last studio album of the group, which would return as PGR, after the separation from Zamboni. Ferretti said at the time:

It is surprising that CSI suddenly find themselves in first place, for a week, in the ranking of the best-selling records in Italy. And why on earth? (…) Only a small, provincial and therefore subordinate market can be surprised by the CSI in first place in the rankings. Dutiful, however, like a breath of fresh air. Promising. I’m waiting to see Ustmamò and then Marlene Kuntz and then… Then modern Italian music will prove to itself that it is adult.”

Zamboni would have told Rockol a few years later instead

I remember one day I came home and found the answering machine with a hundred messages. Everyone complimented me on the top spot in the standings. I also remember Franco Battiato’s flattering statements. In reality, that finish line left us feeling sorry for ourselves. A gap had opened, something had slipped between us that led to counting, to talking about numbers, about possibilities. None of this concerned us. Something arrived that hadn’t been part of us for twenty years.

A success that was anything but accidental

The group’s success was not sudden: after CCCP, CSI had found a home at Black Out, the Polygram label dedicated to “developing” new Italian rock, born from an idea by Stefano Senardi, president of Polygram, and Andrea Rosi, head of the Mercury division, and coordinated by Luca Fantacone. “It was Maroccolo who had these record contacts, we trusted and we were repaid”, says Ferretti in the documentary “33 rpm Italian Masters” from 5 years ago.

Senardi financed Ferretti and Zamboni’s trip to Mongolia knowing that they would not be able to record music there, but continuing to support the two’s vision. A choice that turned out to be right, together with another intuition: that of publishing the album in a period in which there were no strong competing releases. “It was a technique that I had already experimented with in the past, for example with Pino Daniele, who I had convinced to come out in the first week of January, taking it to first place, and I did the same with ‘TRE’, which came out at the end of the summer and after the first week was at the top of the charts,” Senardi tells Rockol.

CSI, Elton John, Lady D and the legend of the wrong barcode

When the record reached number one, there was widespread amazement. This is what we wrote on Rockol on September 16, 1997:

Who would have imagined that the Gallagher brothers would have to bow to the Ferretti-Zamboni couple? That the implacable hit factory of British pop would have been pushed back by the lunar standard-bearers of our homegrown avant-garde rock? CSI, with a record that is anything but conciliatory like “Tabula rasa electrificata” (almost a return to CCCP’s punk origins), surpasses the highly celebrated Oasis with “Be here now”. And then Bocelli, Pino Daniele, Ligabue and the other great protagonists of this recording season. A historic result of great importance for all Italian “alternative” music, as the record companies of Black Out/PolyGram, the label that publishes the group’s records, immediately underlined triumphantly.
(…) the CSIs are eagerly awaiting the assault from journalists and television stations: who are already calling PolyGram to find out “who the hell these CSIs are”…

The album sold over 30 thousand copies in a week: there were those who didn’t take it well and thought it was a machination by the record company. The urban legend spread at the time that the barcode of “TRE” was deliberately the same as an Elton John record, and that this alone had brought the record to the top.

“It was a rumor spread by our competitors,” Senardi recalled to Rockol a few years ago, when we reconstructed that story. “In reality it was really impossible: we had released a new version of ‘Candle in the wind’, played by Elton John at the funeral of Lady D, who died at the end of August. But it was a single, and singles had codes by definition different from albums.” “That day, when they warned me that we were about to go first in the rankings, I was at home with a fever but I went to the office anyway and spent the day answering phone calls from colleagues who complimented us or were incredulous,” says Fantacone.
“It was work that came from afar,” explains Senardi. “The previous album, ‘Linea gotica’, had sold several tens of thousands of copies and the tour had gone very well”. “Black Out, even before being a Mercury/PolyGram label, was a vision: to allow ‘other’ music to reach a very large catchment area and consequently the top of the charts, of recognition by the public and the media. Creating the conditions for a new type of mainstream while maintaining the artistic characteristics of the individual projects intact”, Fantacone told us. “A vision that transformed into a true laboratory made up of people, ideas, instruments, resources, which began to change Italian music and the public’s perception of it. An absolute novelty that gave rise to a very profound and inexorable change, from then until today”, recalls Fantacone.

The end of the CSIs

A month after the album’s release, the effects were also seen live: for the following year’s tour the band played in sold-out venues, with a tour of over 30 dates. On January 22, ’98, Polygram released another album, the live “La terra, la Guerra e una Question Private”, recorded in ’96 in Alba and dedicated to the writer Beppe Fenoglio. But internal tensions mounted, which exploded in Berlin in ’99, where Ferretti and Zamboni had originally met. The divorce was made official in January 2000; during the summer of the same year CSI announced a name change, which materialized in 2001 after the publication of a collection. CSI would become “PGR”, Per Grazia Ricevuta: the debut would be released in 2002.
25 years after their dissolution, CSI have reformed and are about to return live. The story, incredibly, continues.