Van de Sfroos: “I follow the wind and people, not politics”
“How many times have I lied, how many dreams I messed up. How long I sang for those who had left.” How many stories said, how many squares made Davide van de Sfroos dance with his comaco dialect. More than thirty years of triggered folk who, over time, has left more and more space for introspection.
Do you still feel a constant rebel with thunderstorms in your pocket?
Maybe even more than before. After 60 years of course you had imagined a future in a certain way, or in any case you expected to become great to be able to understand certain things closely. In the meantime, the world has replaced the cards on the table. The thunderstorms in your pocket are always there and have wet the pants because they have exploded several times, and you have repeatedly changed pants. You still got them ready to explode, but you don’t know where to go to graze these thunderstorms. Certain things you thought extinguished over time – like certain forms of violence, wars, social differences – are still there, and even more complicated. Many times I feel defeated. Because my projection, my idea, my dreams I saw them fall into a world that has not kept its promise.
Do you warn a contrast with the new generations?
No, indeed. A few years ago I made a tour with a group in which the oldest was 25 years old. We had fun and they re-re-caught me the verve, the desire, because something was flattening. I always try to find talents. It is clear that there are genres that interest me more and others less, but also in the trap and rap world there are brilliant things. When I was young, for the elderly there were only Claudio Villa, Tajoli, Mina; All the others were not able to sing, they had no voice – or, if they had a voice, they had too long hair, like Battisti. Then, when the moment of Battisti came, the various De Gregori, De André, were not going well, because “those do not sing there, the words are not understood” … and instead they were our poets. Today, if you hear certain speaking, it seems that there have been only Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, Beatles. It is not true. There are thousands of groups of the highest level that we do not know. The problem is that you have to go a little to browse around to find them.
To look at the rankings, the Autoune counts more than talent.
If we only based on radio, those like me would have already starred. Ours is not a mainstream genre, everything we have earned have earned cities for cities, disk disk, door -to -door. Folk music lives it in the squares, on the street, in the theater – and you do it all by playing it. Without Autoun, bases or playbacks. The song is arranged and ends up on a disc, but then it then ends up in front of the people who want to dance, jump, listen. The records shake their heads: they thought dialect wanted to say at all costs mold, cellar, dust. Instead we revived it: with rock, blues, reggae.
There are those who challenge fashions and try to carry on your own tradition as Setak. Are you afraid that dialect can get lost?
There are many who carry it forward, many who also make our covers. There are many in the world, in what is called “New Folk”. Passenger, Doc Horn, up to Ed Sheeran. Tools like Spotify are like a Chinese box: listening to an artist then you discover ten more. Let’s use it, let’s discover them. We must also look elsewhere, overseas, up to northern Europe.
Your specialty is the portraits. Is there any story that you haven’t sang yet and that you would like to sing?
I hope so, otherwise it would be a problem. The portraits come just when they present themselves in front of you. It is very difficult, because it means knowing how to catch a snapshot. You have to go around continuously, listen, see, get attracted. And put yourself in conjunction with the time of those who meet, with his memories, with his story. I make an example. If I go to a bar where you enter, you pay and run away, I have few portraits to do there. I can portray a world in coming go, but not the individual people. If, on the other hand, I have the patience to stay in the bars where people still lean on reading the newspaper and I have the strength to stimulate them (and they are the patience to tell), then there the stories I have always told emerge there. Often they are elderly people, because they are the custodians of memory. It is important to collect certain testimonies before they should be lost.
There are those who have made memory their reason for life: Francesco Guccini. Three years ago you participated in his “songs from Intorto”. What relationship do you have with the teacher?
I have always met him at the Tenco prize. We have always made some good chats, especially in the infirmary, where the wine is shared. Francesco is a great narrator. He has a great historical memory of his pavana and history in general. On the record I made this small participation together with others, then at the time he invited the whole label to him on the Apennines in a large restaurant and we also spoke there. He remembered exactly what he had done and said with me to Tenco. Then he spoke of the history of his places, as if he had all mapped inside. And he still lets himself go when someone pulls out the guitar. At the beginning Scantona a little, but in the end he is pleased if he plays around him.
Avoid politics and all the flags, except the tricolor and that of Como.
The flags are sacrosanct and delicate, because they represent a land that is vast and contradictory many times. I feel Italian, I am also quite patriotic, I like Italy and I had the opportunity to cross it all by playing it inside, knowing extraordinary people. But it can be frightening for many other things. The flag is connected to an auction, and the auction can become weapon. The flag must not become war against another flag: it must be belonging. I understood from a young age that I would be distant from political-swarm-particical positions, because I did not trust and I don’t trust politics. I don’t understand it, I’m not cunning enough, I’m not prepared enough. I am interested in radical issues, that is, evil, war, the lack of freedom, the strength of a people and the disaster that happens when a human being is overwhelmed by arrogance or by that thing we call “progress” and that no longer looks in the face and nobody. The one that pulls on buildings where there were first tribes.
You said that, in the face of the tragedies of our time, the guitar has become as heavy as concrete.
There are moments when it seems impossible to solve something with a guitar in the hand of corpses. You also feel that the condolence or the heaviness block you, but the story you have seen in some way must be told, in a way that can make it clear from the inside. You have to find the right key to tell a tragedy leaving the spiral of the light open open beyond the wall. And in that way there, the song probably manages to make sense, otherwise it is a bad thing in itself. I can’t consider people as numbers, deaths they talk about on television while I am cooking. If they tell me that there are 300 bodies of children and parents killed, wherever they are, then I see them all in my garden. It is as if I viewed them, as if I climbed them one by one in the morning. For me, as someone said, a person’s blood should remain in his veins and bullets should not exist except to the Olympics.
At the end of your album there is always a reference to the wind. Where is you bringing you?
Until now he has brought me here. The wind continues to be an element with which I have a relationship: sometimes it is salvific, sometimes it gives me oxygen, sometimes it prevents the water from stagnation; Sometimes it disturbs, because it moves the sheets, blows you in the microphone, when it is too strong it throws you something in your eyes, you unwind you, it bothers you. But it is precisely the breath of life. The wind is that entity that you don’t see except through. There are people who show off every day, without combining anything really. Then there are those people who, like the wind, are not seen. But they move, move, move and eventually jumps out that the world has changed thanks to them. You don’t see the wind: see the plant that lowers, the dust that flies, the hair moved. You see the fire, you see the water, you see the earth, but you see the air only through what it does. That’s why it is such an important symbol: because it is like life.
