Riccardo Cocciante: “Singing is undressing, that’s the soul”
Richard Cocciante yesterday he met the press in a Milanese restaurant to present the concert he will hold on September 29th at the Verona Arena to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his third album “Soul”which gave him his first success and which includes the two classics “Beautiful without a soul” And “When a love ends”.
In front of journalists, the 78-year-old musician born in Saigon, Vietnam, told from the depths of his memories how the album “Soul”released in May 1974, was a very important album, crucial for his career, since it had been preceded by “Mu” (1972) and “Poetry” (1973) (a curiosity, the song “Poetry” it’s the only one that Richard Cocciante he composed on the guitar and not on the piano) that had not achieved great success. “Those were times when record labels, unlike what happens today, allowed an artist to grow by testing himself with more songs, a single song does not tell anything about an artist”.
Cocciante continues his story: “I recorded “Anima” and the album was rejected. I was really desperate, full of doubts, I was helped by the invitation to play together with Antonello Venditti and Francesco De Gregori, who were already famous, at the Teatro dei Satiri, a place for only 400 people. It could have been a risk, my songs did not talk about social and political issues. It was the Seventies, it was a time of change and the public understood that, in my own way, I too was in revolt, I too was part of that change”.
The audience’s response to the performance of Richard Cocciante made to consider Ennio MelisRCA’s big boss, to re-record the album “Soul” and to do it in a big way, so much so that they were called to arrange the songs Ennio Morricone And Frank Pisan. “Beautiful without a soul” had been chosen as a single, but the radio wouldn’t play it (the so-called free radio stations had yet to invade the airwaves with their new proposals, ed.). “I was atypical,” explains Cocciante. “I had a rather particular way of expressing myself. Melis invented a stratagem to make the disc jockeys of the time listen to RCA songs. Completely unexpectedly, with “Bella senz’anima” I reached the top of the charts. I was called to sing on television and they didn’t know how to treat me. It was unusual for a singer to perform in a television studio at the piano, and with his eyes closed, too.”
“I owe my success mainly to the public. The public has a nose, they understood first that it was a breakout album. Even “Margherita pizza” (published in 1976, ed.) which came out in a very political moment was immediately understood. “Bella senz’anima” surprisingly passed the censorship in Spain and Chile,” says an astonished Cocciante. “Where there were the dictatorships of Franco and Pinochet. People welcomed it as a song of freedom.”
Speaking about concerts, the ‘father’ of Notre Dame de Paris explains that it is live, on stage, in front of an audience, that songs become hits. “When a love ends” became one through concerts. “The concert is a story, you are a man, you exist. You are not vinyl or television. For the Verona concert I chose not to rely on the orchestra, to make songs as they used to be made. Also and above all with the imperfections and essentiality of the instruments, with a choir. The concert speaks to the audience: I am here for you, you are here for me.”
Every era has its own rules, its own habits and its own customs.
The Franco-Italian musician with great education, without going overboard with words, reflects on what happens in the discography nowadays, very different from the one he grew up in, “There is too much attention to image. When you go on stage you do it to put on a show, but also and above all to propose your soul and your thoughts. Often in many new songs the arrangement is used as a shield because the song does not have much value. Once upon a time we tried to make an artist and a song, today we try to make a product, not an artist. By definition the product must be uniform, an artist instead is different and must be able to express himself with his own diversity. “
Cocciante is sorry that in Italy there is no recognition that values the entire chain of workers in the music sector, a bit like what can happen with the Grammy Awards in the United States, or with our David di Donatello for cinema. In his opinion it would do justice to everything that is below the singer and that is not recognized for its merits. He cites some examples: the authors, the sound engineers, those who create the covers and all the others who work so that everything can work at its best. In this way, greater dignity would be given to all the great work of an industry that is too often seen as a producer of songs. A term that hurts Cocciante, he doesn’t like, a term that he considers disrespectful and demeaning.
One of the words he used most Richard Cocciante during the press conference he was soul, not by chance the title of that album that fifty years ago gave him his first success. But, in the end, what is soul? “It’s what’s there but you can’t see it. Singing is undressing, that’s the soul”, he says.
At the Verona Arena the musical director of the concert is Mark VitoThe band is composed of Alfredo Golino (drums), Roger Brunetti (guitars), Alexander Biasi (guitars), Roberto Gallinelli (Bass), Luciano Zanoni (keyboards/piano), Lorenzo Nanni (keyboards/programmer), Marc Chantereau (percussion). The supporting voices will be those of Mark Vito, Roberto Tie rods, Moris Pradella, Gian Marco Schiaretti, Claudia D’Ulisse And Alexa PillepichThe arches will be taken care of by David Agamemnon (violin I), Andrea Ricciardi (violin II), Julia Sandoli (purple) and Ilaria Calabro (cello).
