Ivano Fossati: “My story with Oscar Prudente”
“Stories and songs by Oscar Prudente”, the new book by Alfonso Amodio and Ferdinando Molteni which is released today in bookstores by the publisher Coniglio, retraces the career of the musician and producer who has recently passed the milestone of eighty years through a conversation with Prudente by the two authors. The introduction of the book consists of an interview by Amodio and Molteni with Ivano Fossati, in which the singer-songwriter recognizes Prudente for the decisive role he had in the beginning of his activity in the world of music. Courtesy of the publisher, I propose it to you below.
A summer afternoon. In a beautiful house in Leivi, behind Chiavari, a stone’s throw from Genoa. With Ivano Fossati and Mercedes Martini. A beautiful, large dog smells us and welcomes us. In the living room you can glimpse a piano with an electric guitar placed on it. The bookcase contains art books. The big ones and full of illustrations.
When talking about Oscar Prudente with Ivano Fossati, questions are superfluous. Even if sometimes we have to do them.
«My story with Oscar – begins Fossati – seems to me like a real bildungsroman. I have a fairly clear feeling that my artistic career, after the Delirium episode, would probably have ended, would have stopped. Instead there was Oscar, with whom we had started writing some songs. Because he simply realized that I knew how to write lyrics. But it was a really unlikely bet, he was already an established author who had seen this boy of about 19 years old, and had understood that he could write the lyrics of the songs. Beware: the lyrics, which were a rare commodity. A young man of 19 or 20 who knew how to write song lyrics was truly very rare back then. Oscar understood this immediately and without any ifs or buts he took me by the collar and I found myself in the world of music that counts in an instant. He tore me away from Genoa, where my path would probably have run aground, and took me to Milan, where in a very short time I met Lucio Battisti, I met Fabrizio De André for the first time, I met everyone, Ornella Vanoni and all the most important authors like Giorgio Calabrese, and everyone knew me.
So it’s clear that I owe a lot to him. Why did I say before that it seems like a Bildungsroman? Because we were really together, together in the sense that we went around together, we had girlfriends and we spent a lot of time in the Riviera di Ponente, we knew the artists, for me that was a wonderful world.”
Adventurous years that led to great results.
«Very often – says Fossati – we played to pay for dinners. And more. We lived an almost hippie life. We weren’t really hippies, but we looked a little like them. And then, even more importantly, Oscar introduced me to the idea, which I absolutely didn’t have, of music for the theatre. He was already working for the theatre, he had worked with Dario Fo, he had worked with the Teatro Stabile in Genoa and that of Turin, with the Teatro della Tosse in Genoa, all things that I didn’t know, all things that seemed distant from me because I had a much more rock, much more pop idea of music. I loved bands, I liked The Who, I liked Led Zeppelin, I would have put electric guitars everywhere, but Oscar taught me that there were other horizons, other ways of looking at music, for example especially in the relationship between the theatrical text and the music, that is, when the music must be put at the service of the theatrical text. I didn’t understand it right away, I struggled.”
The adventure of music for the theater was, in any case, decisive.
«When Oscar did all the little voices in the soundtracks we made for Emanuele Luzzati’s cartoons, he made funny music that later turned out to be perfect. He knew how to do it and he taught me, he taught me the relationship between lyrics and music, sometimes they were songs, sometimes simply music, so I owe a lot to him because all these teachings that I had around the age of twenty or a little more, were then useful to me later, in the part that came later in my career, in the songs I wrote. I always took into account, afterwards, the relationship between the lyrics of the song and what the music should be. But I learned this thing from him. For this reason I am convinced, very convinced, that Prudente is much more than a singer-songwriter and that it is reductive at best to label him a singer-songwriter. Because he is much more, and in his musical life he was much more, also due to questions of generosity. He is a man who has so many ideas, is so disruptive – and he was a disruptive person – that he probably didn’t even realize how much he gave to others, how many ideas he gave away. In my case I know it, and I say it, I recognize it. I really owe a lot to Oscar.”
In the field of songwriting you are considered the “most musician”. With Oscar this relationship was reversed and you essentially became a lyricist, many of your songs, the most successful ones, have your words and his music. How does the musician you are live with the fact of being, in this case, only the author of lyrics?
«Initially this made me suffer a little, because on the one hand I was very happy to be able to work with him, also because he is a refined composer of music. He was never one to go for bold lines, he always looked for refined solutions which I liked, but it was at the beginning. Then it is clear that, years later, I started writing the music because I wanted to do it, but I accepted all the work done together with Oscar as it was, I accepted it for the simple fact that it seemed like a formidable opportunity and because he is still good, he is someone who, even for the thousands of ideas he has a day and which then flow into his music, in the end is very original in his writing. So it was fine with me, I limited myself, I did half of my job, but I did it willingly.”
You made a record together, “Poco prima dell’aurora”, of 1994. In your book All this future of 2011, edited by Renato Tortarolo, we read that it was an unsuccessful work due to problems with record labels, Fonit Cetra and Numero Uno. What memories do you have of that experience?
«In doing so I remember that we had a lot of fun. I also remember a detail: we were working in a studio in Milan, in via Barletta, and next door there was Battisti who was recording one of his albums, and so there was a bit of contact, we were together a bit.”
Why wasn’t he lucky?
«He wasn’t very lucky because we tried something very difficult, putting together two record companies, among other things the most different ones imaginable. I still had a contract with Fonit Cetra, which was unfortunately the most “state” and backward of the whole panorama, he had a contract with Numero Uno which, on the contrary, was the most futuristic record label at that time. So the two things couldn’t work, we should have understood immediately that they couldn’t work. The album was distributed partly by RCA, if I remember correctly, and partly by Fonit. Something crazy, so it was a total disaster. But the memory is very beautiful, because in the meantime I worked with him, which was always fun. In the long time we were together, I don’t remember a shadow of Oscar. I try to remember a time we argued or had a disagreement, but I can’t remember it.”
You mentioned Oscar’s versatility. His touching so many territories perhaps didn’t benefit him too much from a communication point of view. Today we are used to pigeonholing everything, defining everything, putting labels on it.
«Hasty definitions are not good for him. You have to understand – and I hope you dig this concept – that he has a bigger dimension. In these little drawers that are built and then put us all in there, he doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit because already in 1990 he had a vision of music with respect to images, with respect to the musical construction linked to the image which then emerged fifteen years later. When – I’ll give an example to be clear – when there was that Delirium staging in that useless Sanremo, all that choreography was Oscar’s idea, we would never have had it, we weren’t interested, we would never have thought about it, because precisely he saw the music, and also the song, as a function of theatricalisation. Having already worked with the theater for years, he tended to theatricalize everything. And that passage from Delirium, which we then saw too much of, is a true moment of theatre, where everyone was playing something else, something we weren’t, we were all playing a part. And when on another occasion, perhaps he will tell you about it later, we put on a small show, a small concert, he and I, who had no luck at all, did just one performance, but it was equally staged, full of movement, it was theatricalised.”
Fossati concludes:
«He had built, as director, on himself and on me an hour and a quarter of absolutely theatrical show based on the songs. And it was only 1993. He was really far ahead. That thing would probably have happened five or ten years later. For this vision of his, which he always had, at least in those years. It was as if he always carried what he did into the theater. I remember him in all the things he did, the advertisements, the theme song for “Domenica Sprint”, there is always something new musically, I obviously remember the work he did with Dario Fo, there is always something that goes back there, to that matrix of his, which evidently marked him culturally. And that’s why I insist that he is something more. It’s more.”
