Disturbance: “you can't remake De André as if you were De André”

Four years after their last album “(Dis)Love”, they return Disturbance with a disc that contains live recordings from 2010. They are not new songs or from the band's repertoire, but rather a complete rereading of the album by Fabrizio De André “The good news” (1970), an account of the earthly passage of Jesus Christ as seen through the Apocryphal Gospels (texts believed to be unofficial that were never included in the Bible).

“Lgood news (live with Nada and Alessandro Raina)”, available March 22, is kingrecorded live at Civic Theater of Varallo Sesia (VC) on 23 October 2010 and, as the title says, sees the participation of Nada And Alessandro Raina (Amour Fou). That was a unique event, never repeated, carried out on a special occasion. Together with Perturbazione, Nada (su “Hail Mary”, “Mary in a carpenter's shop” and “The Testament of Titus”) and Alessandro Raina (who sings in “The Return of Joseph”, “Way of the Cross” and “The Testament of Titus”) they were present that evening the accordionist Dario Mimmothe actress Paola Roman And Don Carlo Maria Scaciga, the latter two with recitations and stories before the musical performance. At the time of the concert the Turin band was still in its largest lineup composed of Tommaso Cerasuolo (voice), Cristiano Lo Mele (guitars, synths, electronics), Gigi Giancursi (guitars and choirs), Elena Diana (cello and choirs), Alex Baracco (bass and backing vocals), Rossano Antonio Lo Mele (drums). Gigi and Elena left the band in 2014, which thus became a quartet.

The singer in a chat Tommaso Cerasuolo he remembered that project and talked about the band's present.

What does De André represent for you?

I would say a part of the Italian cultural DNA, not just musical. I discovered De André in the 80s, he is someone who gave me the opportunity to understand that one could feel at home even in apparently distant worlds. By this I mean that I have always heard him sing at student protests, as well as at the oratory or with the scouts, like in my family, which were my worlds when I was growing up, I who still had my feet in the years of lead (it's from 1972).

You could find De André on both sides. It is no coincidence that the “Good News” arises from the reading of the Apocryphal Gospels that Fabrizio discovers and does with Don Carlo Scaciga, who is the priest who invites him to Verbania to meet some students, a young priest who was then. just been ordained a priest, when there was 68. We had Don Carlo as a guest on that evening in 2010 in which we recorded the album we're releasing now. You could find De André everywhere, in the sense that he was transversal. Here, for us De André was someone who had created allegories, metaphors to talk about his time. But those allegories are still valid even in the present time.

How did this show come about in which you reread the “Good News”? And why did you choose that album?

The two things are intertwined and in reality we didn't choose the album, it was a commission. There Holden School he collaborated with Alberto Jona, who is a very cultured and clever Piedmontese musicologist who they asked to set up an event for the restoration of the chapels of the sacred Monte of Varallo, where there is a beautiful restored Via Crucis. They asked us to do our version of “La Buona Novella” and so we did. We also wanted two guest voices, from one generation younger than ours and the other from a more mature generation. The choices fell on Alessandro Raina (Amour Fou) e Nadawho in addition to being a great performer is also a woman, a female voice and women are very present in this album and finally have a voice in the world of the Gospels which is always narrated by men.

How did you approach the rereading?

Leaning heavily on the original arrangements of the album, especially for the first part which is more acoustic, using the timbre of Elena's cello, Dario Mimmo's accordion and the piano.

We had the opportunity to listen to the arrangements that Giampiero Reverberi, Roberto Danè and Fabrizio De André had written. And instead in the second part, what we can call a B-side, and so it will be on vinyl, we are a little more “disturbed”, there is a greater imprint of ours that you feel strongly in “Via della Croce” or in “Il testamento di Tito” and especially in “Laudate hominem”, the last piece. Playing that record was an immersion into Fabrizio's writing, rediscovering it again for the umpteenth time and with great pleasure.

From a singing point of view, how was it dealing with De André? In delving deeper into it, what did you learn from his lessons?

I speak for myself. In 2010 I still had the reverential fear of moving certain tones and this pushed us to use registers that belonged to De André's voice and that in certain passages I struggled to follow, and those imperfections can be heard live. So much so that now that we're rearranging that material again we've found a different way of singing. De André had an incredible combination of melodic and metrical lines and it's beautiful how he shifts the accents and how each word has weight. This is what you notice and learn but then you understand that reinterpreting someone doesn't mean aping them, but it's trying to make them talk a little about yourself through their world. You wouldn't be doing De André a disservice by trying to make him like De André again.

Why have so many years passed since that concert without anything being published?

That performance was carefully recorded then, but then we had an album of unreleased songs released recently (“Of our time stolen”).

Then, other recording projects followed, Sanremo arrived (2014), the exit of Gigi and Elena and then the career continued. Over the years we realized that those recordings were good. We also played them to our old bandmates, then to Nada and Alessandro and finally to Luca Bernini who works with us as project manager, who in turn played them to Warner Italia and in the end the album was released . It's like seeing something that you sowed a long time ago, which has grown and which gives you a beautiful snapshot of what it was. But beyond this there is not only the. desire to experience a page from the past. So we started playing those pieces again in the hall, with the current lineup of four, because this summer, if we can, we would like to perhaps propose it live again and for this reason we are rearranging the songs for what our sounds are now, in quartet.

I imagine that each of you has a favorite De André record. What is yours?

“Not to money, not to love, not to heaven” (1971), the album with Nicola Piovani, which is a fresco of many stories, many different characters and then the “Spoon River Anthology”, which inspired it, is a masterpiece. I also love “Hello Souls” (the last album in 1996) and “Clouds” (1990). The curious thing was that when they asked us this I didn't know that album well, “La Buona Novella” and so I discovered many things such as the fact that on a narrative level De André invented himself to describe and talk about Jesus Christ and the his revolution through all the figures around him, without naming him. It's like a great absentee, which is a narrative method that may appear banal, but it isn't. He removed the figures from the nativity scene and asked himself what people they were, he said that they were still human beings and what problems they had.

Let's talk about Perturbazione: what have you been up to lately? What is going on?

We worked on many different projects, some with theatre, there was also a graphic novel and sometimes things overlapped a bit.

Then in the middle came an album of unreleased songs released at the beginning of the pandemic that we had worked so hard on. However, there was the crash against the wall of the pandemic and perhaps also of all our ambitions. So the last two years have been a pause for reflection and we have dedicated ourselves to other things, including personal matters. The wisest thing to do when you don't know where to go is to sit down, look around and not wander around in circles. Now we are happy and are back to work. We hope that between spring, summer and next autumn there will be live opportunities to play again.