Zucchero and the sound film linked to its roots
There are records that cannot be ignored when talking about the history of a particular artist. Think about “Rimmel” (read the review here) For Francesco De Gregorito “The Master's Voice” For Franco Battiatoto “Bubbles” For Vasco Rossito “From the” Of Lucio Dalla, just to mention some of the greatest Italian singer-songwriters. In the case of Sugarthat record is “Gold incense & beer”: released on 13 June 1989 and consecrated the bluesman from Reggio Emilia as one of the giants of the national scene, later transforming him into a star on an international scale.
“Oro incense & beer”, Zucchero's fifth album of unreleased songs, arrived two years after the previous “Blue's”, which had allowed the bluesman to begin to enjoy some success among the public and professionals, leading him to also perform in stadiums : “So how do you repeat such a huge success with another album less than two years later? But I didn't think about it, I wasn't stressed, I didn't experience it with anxiety, I preferred action to thought, and this is because I had accumulated many, many things during the years of apprenticeship, of orchestras, of bands. I had gone through many musical genres”, recalled Adelmo Fornaciari a few years ago. It was precisely in this spirit that he began to record the songs for the new album, the one that would later become “Oro incense & beer”. The result was surprising.
Produced by Corrado Rustici, “Oro incense & beer” was recorded between Peter Gabriel's Real World Studio, the Ardent of Memphis, the Power Station of New York and the Umbi Studios (attached to the Po, on the border between Veneto and Emilia Romagna).
Internationally esteemed musicians such as – among others – Eric Clapton, Rufus Thomas, Jimmy Smith, Clarence Clemons and David Sancious took part in the sessions: “I had a lot of input that had to come to the surface and in fact for this reason the album arrived straight away 'Gold, incense & beer' is this thing here, it's a record that sounds very current even now, and it was born like this, without too many thoughts, without too many things planned or calculations of any kind, a spontaneous work at best it must be said that in that period you made a record with nine songs, so you concentrated all the best in the setlist. I'm happy to have made a kind of concept album, my personal film, a sound film linked to my roots”.
The album included songs that within a short time would all become true workhorses of the bluesman: from “Overdose (d'amore)” to “Libera l'Amore” (fruit of the collaboration with Maestro Ennio Morricone), passing through “Nice (Nietzsche) who says”, “The sea (impetuously at sunset rose to the moon and behind a curtain of stars…)”, “Sweetest mother”, “Devil in me”, “Iruben me”, ” A wonderful World” and “Diamante” (with lyrics by Francesco De Gregori).