Sciusten Feste n.1965

...Rather, an album for the fiesta, and inescapable after-party blues.

These songs has been a long time in the making. Owing to the weird euphoria mixed with melancholy that seizes us all between the end and the beginning of each year, back in 1999 we started playing concerts during the Christmas season. Ever since then, we have been playing every December for 21 years.

These are solstitial songs, smacking of beer-soaked confetti, of love letters, and of reckoning at that time of year when one bounces through life like a flipped-out ball in a giant pinball machine. There are attractions, wheelies and falls, there’s the big wheel that turns and, like a windmill’s sail, sometimes propels us towards the stars, sometimes flings us into the mud.

With undertones reminiscent of Vito, my father, and the most extreme funfair revelry he’d ever seen as a youth in Hannover, the city in which the largest Schützenfest1 camps are traditionally held: a noisy gathering with target shooting stalls, where a winner is proclaimed, there’s a lot of drinking, and music is run-of-the-mill. At first glance, it recalls one of those picturesque, at times even a little disquieting, rituals of the Germanic world. However, upon closer inspection, you’ll find that the noun Schützen (marksmen, shooters) is also a German verb meaning to protect, shield, defend what you hold most dear, preserve our innocence in a world hell-bent on denying it. Mysteriously enough, this can be done even with things of little value, like fairy lights, confetti, songs, or target shooting stalls. Defending the celebration is a bit like saving the game and the childhood of the world.

Bullseye target, wheel, vinyl: they are all concentrical circles propagating outwards, like ever-widening ripples when tossing pebbles into the water. This album's tunes are those pebbles.

Some have been specially written, other are imported. Owing to a set of assonances, I feel the latter bear a connection with the theme of celebration.

There's the universal thanks tune, Wayne Newton’s Dankeschoen, turned here into Grazieschoen.

There’s a song about Christmas time binges, Aggita, a bit gastric malady, a bit existential pose.

There's also Charlie, my first Tom Waits cover: Christmas card from a hooker in Minneapolis, who, in this version, from Minnesota goes back to her family in Scandiano.

There are two hymns from the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Abide with me by Scottish Anglican cleric H.F. Lyte, set to music by English organist William Henry Monk. A tune more spoken than sung, which, in Jacopo Leone's adaptation, becomes Sopporta con me (Endure with me), a conversation with the Eternal Father, almost a friendly request to hit the road and endure the hardships of the journey together. And then the Dickensian Christmas Carol, God rest you merry gentlemen. A stern testament melody in support of the words Conforto e Gioia (comfort and joy), the lyrics of which have been adapted to highlight the inherent incongruity of celebrating the salvific spirit of the nativity at a time of fences around fortress Europe.

There is Santa Claus, the bearer of gifts, who, like any other logistics clerk at Amazon, is driven to suicide because he is unable to deliver the objects of desire in prime time, which are thus multiplying together with the returns.

The dreamy I wanna be like you from Disney’s Jungle Book, becomes a competitive I wanna be like you. Indeed, like you and more than you!

White Christmas is Non soffrire più (Don't suffer anymore), rock ballad shouted to the sky to reclaim snow’s lost innocence, a call to silence to ease pain.

Jingle bells, the best-known Christmas jingle, here is the Campanelle jamboree, in the style of Lou Monte.

Homage is paid to Italo-American swing in Louis Prima's Jungle’s Book episode, as well as in Agita, Nick Apollo Forte's hit in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose (which I regard as one of the best show business movies), the lyrics of which have been adapted to lengthen the list of courses for the feast. And then Eh cumpari, another classic from 1950s Southern Italy, emigrated to the United States to wound up in Coppola’s Godfather and be interpreted by a string of artists, from Dean Martin to Julius La Rosa, Renato Carosone, and now by our "big orchestra" too, to present the instruments with all their names turned feminine.

To avoid dwelling solely on the Italo-American world, and to pay homage to Italo-Germans too - whom cinema, music and literature have dedicated little - in addition to the aforementioned Dankeschoen, Sciusten Feste n. 1965, is a kind of Pogues-styled ballad set in a Bavarian funfair. Like a matryoshka, it holds the marvels of the children's books of the great Deutsche Mark Heimat: Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel's gingerbread house, and Dr Hoffman's wonderful Struwwelpeter (Shockheaded Peter). And then, eins neun sechs fünf…, the numbers 1-9-6-5 counted in the manner of Games Without Borders, the names of the attractions, the quotation from the Trish Trash Polka from Strauss' New Year's Eve concert, and finally the immoral verse Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei! (Everything has an end, only the frankfurter2 has two).

As we grow old, we need to become familiar with all our bones’ names, so, from a closet-skeleton rib we have come up with an osteopathic Voodoo mambo, which has morphed into “E ancora mambo”, “quantunque mambo”, “per sempre mambo” (“And again mambo”, “despite it all mambo”, “forever mambo”), the exorcizing mambo to dance to on hollow-pumpkin night. After all, the Feast of the Dead ushers in all the winter celebrations, with the Mexican calaveras3 of the Día de los Muertos, and the bone marimba that resurrects the spirits and takes them to the zenith of solstitial darkness.

There’s much more, but to wrap it all up, there’s the viewpoint of those who really can't bear revelries. The Grinch that lurks in each of us, who loathes confetti, forced sociability, and the socially-driven urge to revel.

Il guastafeste, the party pooper, whose contrite satisfaction lies in spoiling the party for others, who’s there to put an end to the merry holiday cheer “You and your beastly feasts, I’m gonna knock the daylights out of you … Enough with this bash!”

The Christmas holiday season is the worst time of the year for many. But there’s something deeper harbouring in the spoilsport's soul: an overwhelming desire to break the illusion of the game, unmask the merrymaking convention, and shatter it once and for all. After all, the revelry only makes sense in that it represents a suspension from ordinary time. It is therefore vital that someone puts an end to it, so that it can be periodically restarted. He’s there precisely for that, to put an end to the illusion.

Twenty years of concert practice have sharpened the repertoire, resulting in an unrestrained show that celebrates the feast and makes it happen. Concerts that saw a community sprouting up, some families were born, other were shattered. Concerts that had to do with the substance of life, at which everyone, no matter what life was throwing at us, found a second family. Even more so in the club where a tradition was born: Christmas at Fuori Orario, a legendary venue overlooking the railway tracks between Reggio Emilia and Parma, in the Gattatico area. To celebrate this unique story, the documentary film Natale Fuori Orario is due to be released with the tour, featuring footage taken by Gianfranco Firriolo during the Christmas gigs held over a fifteen-year period, from 2007 to 2023.

Like the Schutzen, the carnival shooters, we are publishing this now to defend our innocence with toy guns, and also to spoil the party for those who are celebrating at our expense.

1 Schützenfest: marksmen's funfair

2 Frankfurter: sausage

3 Calaveras: skulls