Luca Carboni “Forever”: the 40 years of the most cult disc of all

Internationally, 1985 is remembered as the year in which the Tears for Fears consecrated with “Songs from the Big Chair” (that of “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule The World”), the one in which Sting debut as a soloist with “The Dream of the Blue Turtles”, the one in which Prince reimed his music with “Around the World in A Day “after the sensational success of” Purple Rain “, the Dire Straits sent their best sellers” Brothers in Arms “and Mick Jagger” detached “from the Rolling Stones with” She’s the Boss “, while Bruce Springsteen continued to ride the wave of the world of world with” Born in the US “and the U2 Unforgettable Fire “. And in Italy? 1985 was undoubtedly the year of Claudio Baglioni and his “Life is now”, twenty -seven consecutive weeks in the first place in the superclassification of TV Sorrisi e Canzoni, 800 thousand copies sold only between June and December of that year. Vasco Rossi archived the news events and the controversies with “What happens in the city”, Gino Paoli and Ornella Vanoni united their forces with the live album “Together”, recorded during their triumphant tour around Italy. Eros Ramazzotti with “agitated hearts capitalized the success of the previous year in Sanremo, when with” Promised Land “had won the festival among the” new proposals “, waiting for the return to Ariston with” Tu you “. But 1985 in the Italian discography was also the year in which a young Bolognese singer -songwriter without defeat and without pretending to be pop stars taken by his hand the songwriter and accompanied him to the year 2000with an album destined to become a sort of worship. The singer -songwriter responds to the name of Luca Carboni and the Ellepì in question is “Forever“.

The Bolognese scene of the 80s

When the September 3, 1985exactly four decades ago, the Italian RCA published “Forever” (entitled as the word in English pronounced by Carlo Verdone and Eleonora Giorgi, with the accent moved forward, “Fòrever”, in “Borotalco”, three years earlier), Luca Carboni is almost 23 years old. Born and raised in Bologna, quarter of five children (three males and two females), son of an employee in a carriage and toys company for children and a housewife, made his debut the previous year with a 33 laps entitled “… Meanwhile Dustin Hoffman is not wrong a movie”, Taken under their protective wing from Lucio Dalla And Gaetano Curreri of the stadiums after having played for years in the Teobaldi Rockone of the most active formations in the Bolognese punk and new wave scene of those years. «When I met Lucio for the first time in 1981 I was 19 years old and I was a young musician from the Bolognese scene looking for the turning point. I had known that after midnight the Trattoria da Vito, in the popular heart of the city, was transformed into a meeting of artists who remained to drink until dawn. I found him sitting next to the stadium: they were intent on discussing the need to find new authors for the group’s songs. I put on me. I gave him an envelope with some texts I had written and my number inside. Lucio opened him, he took a look at those sheets and passed them to Curreri, “he would have remembered Carboni years after Carboni, who on 11 November on the occasion of the concert-event at the Assago forum of course will certainly not fail to celebrate the anniversary of the album. “Good strawberries”, one of the individual extracted from the debut album, has allowed him to obtain many radio steps and to carve out a prominent place among the new idols of the under 30s. With “Forever” Luca Carboni is called to confirm himself. Alongside the young Bolognese singer -songwriter there are again the custodian angels Lucio Dalla and Gaetano Curreri, who make choristers in “You are there why“(The frontman of the stadium signs the music), one of the eight songs contained in the album. From the appearance, always as a chorister, also in”Our words“. The album is recorded in the Fonoprint studios in Bologna, produced, like the previous one, from Roberto Costaformer sound of stadium and Dalla, but also by Ron and Ivan Graziani.

No proclamations: just so much tenderness

As a single hand is chosen “Will be a man“, Which is also the song that opens the album: it is a five -minute ballad and duration – five minutes and sixteen seconds, to be exact – in which Carboni imagines a problematic future, winking at the master from. As of 2000, “only” fifteen years old, in 1985, and in the collective imagination he mounted heartiness around the new millennium. Nine years before the release of “Forever” in his “The 2000” engine “the voice of” Futura “with those visions of storyteller and the hidden observer of the company had described the new millennium with irony and disenchantment, like the millennium in which technological innovation would have been lived as an promise of unlimited progress. In “It will be a man” Carboni imagines the future with more tenderness, with more uncertainty, between the nostalgia for the authenticity of obsolete habits (“they are already greeting those born without television”) and the curiosity for the new (“and the dance that makes us dance will now be a distant noise”). “It will be a man” is in all respects the “Focus Song”, as the good ones would say, of “Forever”: more than “you are because” (the only of the eight songs of which Carboni does not sign text and music, the latter composed of Gaetano Curreri), of “Our words” and that “Juice“Which owes its title to a statue present at the Oratory of Bologna in which the singer -songwriter benefited as a child, depicting Sant’ugo, whose wording was read by other children without taking into account the punctuation and therefore confusing it with the male noun” sauce “). Inside “it will be a man” there is all the essence of “forever”, a disc suspended between new wave, bright synths and a very personal songwriting writing, the one that will make coal a sort of putative father of the disengaged songwriter of the two thousand and ten years, with disposal to reflection and a lot of tenderness, away from the great proclamations of the Cantiutorato 1970, now Démodé. (For the record: always in September 1985 the Italian RCA released “Chess and Tarot”, the album that marks the great return of Francesco De Gregori after three years from “Titanic”, containing that “The History” destined to become an evergreen).

The impact of the disc

Republished last year in black and white vinyl (first colored vinyl edition) 180 grams autographed, “Forever” was for Luca Carboni A transition disk who anticipated the turning point of two years later with the eponymous “Luca Carboni”, the album of the consecration with “Silvia you know” and “Butterfly”. When in 2015, thirty years after “Forever”, the singer -songwriter will publish “pop -up”, he will call him a sort of sequel to the 1985 album: “What remains forever is the desire to tell first of all, and then, entering the story, the desire to tell his time – he will say – At the time, I was a boy who somehow told his generation, and also the amazement of the world he was changing. But in the end things always change: therefore, even after thirty years, you still have amazement; the desire to stop what you are feeling, the changes you are experiencing. Everything changes, but not the need to tell ».