Something from the 80s remained. And what about Duemilaventi?

“What will remain of these eighties / who will take the photograph / what will remain? / and the radio sings / won’t you break my heart?”, sang Raf at the end of that magical and unrepeatable decade that was the 80s. It was 1989 and taking stock of the previous ten years, citing Reagan, Gorbachev, world hunger, Keith Haring’s graffiti and yuppies, the Apulian singer-songwriter wondered what would remain of all this. The choir of the beyond 3 thousand spectators of the Atlantic of Rome which rises on the chorus and fills the Capitoline club it certifies, if there were any need, that something, in the end, remained of those 80s More than something, one might say.

The .fortieth anniversary of “Self control”, whose tour stopped yesterday in Rome after Raf filled the Assago Forum in Milan at the beginning of the month, is only a pretext to reiterate the concept.

There was also a rather long period recently when Raf seemed to have disappeared from the radar It happened after his return to competition at the 2015 Sanremo Festival with “Come una favola”, twenty-four years after the last time (it didn’t go very well: struck by bronchitis, he was excluded before the final).

The album “Sono io” remains to date the last title of his discography and the new one, already announced (complete with title, “La mia casa”, like the autobiography published last year), there is still no news . In between there was the joint tour with Umberto Tozzi, another great protagonist of the magical 80s. .Then, at a certain point, something started spinning again for the voice of “Ti pretendo”. It happened spontaneously and naturally, without strategieswhen Gradually the aura of an Italian pop classic began to appear around Raf. Thanks to a repertoire to be enviedwho reels off on stage: “Two”, “It’s never a mistake”, “Sea People”, the same “What will remain of the 80s” and “I demand you”, “You are the most beautiful in the world”, “The animal heartbeat”. When they say have the pieces. Maybe how many of the Italian pop stars that are popular today will be able to boast such a repertoire in forty years. Perhaps none, if it is true that the catalogs that attract the interest of investors are those prior to the year 2000. Raf’s, from the repertoire, is worth more 20 million copies sold worldwidewhen records and singles were purchased seriously and streams on the platforms did not turn into sales. With titles like this the concert immediately takes on the contours of something specific: a intergenerational karaoke that spans generations. Just like the singer-songwriter’s music, a spaceship that challenges space-time.

On the tour poster Raf wears the same white shirt with drawings of Keith Haring that he sported in 1984 for the cover of the iconic single. Even the pose is identical to that of forty years ago. At the time he was a 25 year old who arrived at Italo disco after a long apprenticeship in the punk circuit: he played bass in a band considered seminal for the Italian punk scene, i Café Caracas (which also included Ghigo Renzulli, who would soon co-found Litfiba), with whom he also opened a Clash concert in Bologna in 1980. “When we went on stage there were the Clash technicians having fun to turn us off and turn on the lights on stage.

We also clashed with thousands of fans of Crass, an English punk band in open conflict with the Clash. They covered us with spit and insults, and then moshed as soon as the Clash started the concert with London Calling,” he would say many years later. .“Self control” was born “from a typically rock guitar lick”he recalls today, at 65, as he enjoys his classic status in front of a party-goers. Listening to it again today, it seems like an international hit freshly churned out by a trendy producer or DJ, which has gone viral thanks to some dance on TikTok: it’s just that “Self control” spoke the language of the future at the time. And today he speaks in the present tense, like most of the successes written by Raf.

The homages of the rap circuit, unexpectedly linked to his hits, have made him discovered by the new generations and in the Atlantic parterre there is no shortage of twenty-year-olds who go wild to the notes of the original version of “The most beautiful” written by Mecna and Coco, over 40 million streams on Spotify and double platinum. And never mind that, paradoxically, the original on the streaming platform has 14 million listeners: in any case not a small figure for a song released in 1995. The original “Ti pretendo”, on the other hand, remains among Generation Z even more popular than “Ti pretendo XXX” reworked in 2022 by Guè and Bassi Maestro. The concert is not a banal revival. It’s something different. It is a way to celebrate a catalog that has survived fashions and trends, to become immortal.