Gianluca Grignani against all

The records wanted it patinated, “well packaged”, a “well plasticized product”. Beautiful and impossible, easily overwhelmed to an audience composed mainly of girls: a teen idol that could send the hormones of the fifteen -year -olds. And the Milanese singer -songwriter, for a while, agreed to stay in that game there: the participation in the Sanremo Festival 1995 with “Destination Paradiso” led him to the attention of the general public and the media. The album of the same name, artistically produced by Massimo Luca, sold over 700 thousand copies in Italy and one million in the rest of the world (in Latin America it was a success). Apparitions followed practically everywhere, covers of magazines and newspapers, participations in the most followed television programs: as a real idol, in fact. Then, however, the machine stood: Grignani fell into a very long silence, disappeared from circulation. Some thought that he had “died of overdose”, others wrote that he had “come out”. Nothing true, all bullshit: simply, the boy – just 23 years old – had fled all that chaos. He had been holed up in a small recording studio in Garlasco, in the province of Pavia, also visiting the Abbey Road Studios in London. And it is right between Garlasco and London that Grignani recorded his second album, who arrived in stores in 1996. An emblematic album already starting from the title: “The plastic factory”.

Even more emblematic are the verses of the first song extracted from the album, the title track, which is also the one that opened the tracklist: “I tried to be like you want me, so much so that you know at the bottom I would change / but I am done too much in my own way, try to be you what you are not”. And again: “I come from the plastic factory, where they have well packaged / but they did not exactly come out a well plasticized product”. Dissonances of electric guitars, reverberations, filtered voice. Gianluca Grignani’s new album played everything like this: “I just wanted to redo the BENDS ‘of Radiohead,” he said, presenting him to the press. In the video clip of “The plastic factory” Grignani seemed almost the Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Tim Burton’s “Batman”: a evil and disturbing grin printed on the face, a pissed and shocked look. Even today, looking at him almost scares him. But what exactly had happened? What happened to the beautiful idol of the girls of “Paradiso” girls?

Always flanked by Massimo Luca and with the collaboration of Greg Walsh, former Technician of the sound of Battisti for cult disks such as “A woman for friend” and “A location day” as well as producer of “and already”, “Don Giovanni” and “The western bride”, with “The plastic factory” Grignani churned out a disk light years away from the pop-rock of “Destination Paradiso”, more angular, raw, difficult to understand. And – this is the main thing – not easily overwhelmed to the public that the singer -songwriter had conquered with his previous album. In short, anarchist and unruly with a punk attitude disc. Grignani twenty years after the release of the album will say:

“The fact that a 23 -year -old boy let out a record so after selling three million copies was a crazy thing. He created total disarray. The record company (at the time the Polygram, NDA) wanted a glossy Grignani and I shook, I was not inside that dress. They tried to give me an image, I was fighting like a crazy, I could not become another to please the record house. He became marketing. My father told me he went to a dinner and to have heard the then president of Polygram say: ‘Strong that Grignani, he is a boy who does everything alone and makes me earn a lot of money without spending a lira’.

With “The plastic factory”, Gianluca Grignani did everything in his head, also taking on the risk of making mistakes. That album was his fuck – as much as a skyscraper – to the star system, the discography, the idea of the beautiful and teen idol. The girls no longer understood him, they no longer found in Grignani the beautiful and impossible guy who sent the hormones on tilt and made them wet. “The plastic factory has a relief valve in the cost: it is from there that I passed,” he sang.

“The plastic factory”, needless to say, was a flop of sales, a total flask: he could not go beyond 150 thousand copies (numerons, today, but very few for the time), practically less than a tenth compared to the copies sold by “Paradiso destination”. But what does it matter? That album remains one of the most beautiful and important in the history of Italian music.

Today we see too many perfect singers, “school”, approved, who churn out records designed to sell copies on copies and to climb the rankings, but which often do not tell stories, have no messages to transmit: they are empty, plastic pieces. Here, in a world of all plastic and all so patinated, it would take someone with the courage to bring out the balls and teeth, like the Gianluca Grignani of “The plastic factory”: with that album, he, at 24 he managed to be – even if only for a moment – the largest Italian rock star (after Vasco, of course).