No one like him has contaminated genres by connecting high with low, the sacred with the profane, pop with pure experimentation
No one has ever fully understood this Franco Battiato. For a very simple reason: when applied to him the conventional schemes with which an artist is judged have never worked. First of all because his musical works cannot be traced back to any pattern. Battiato has always rejected conventionsjust as he always rejected with a look of ironic compassion all those who for various reasons addressed him as a guru, a master who emanated light.
Franco Battiato wasn’t exactly the type to be flattered and the respect he earned over the years by gathering an increasingly larger audience around him, he achieved with music, with the suggestions he managed to create, contaminating genres, bringing together sacred and profane, high and low, classical and pop, becoming from time to time accessible and mainstream but also incomprehensible to most.
We all remember him in the magical three-year period 1979-1981 when with three amazing albums: Age of the White Boar, Patriots and Voice of the Master had changed the face of the charts by making the most surrealist and unsettling side of his pop vocation broadcast on the radio. He had started in the Sixties experimenting, doing electronic avant-garde, immersing himself in the dilated atmospheres of progressive rock and then he changed direction, once, five, ten times. Giorgio Gaber and Lucio Dalla were immediately aware of his talent. Followed by all the others.
He passed away in silence, gradually untying the threads that tied him to life and surrounded only by the affection of his closest people. As a legacy, he leaves a legacy of albums and songs that are there to excite those who were there when he composed them, those who will come or those who were not yet born when those wonders were released on vinyl and CD. From Permanent center of gravity to Up Patriots to arm, passing through Alexander PlatzSummer on a solitary beach, The birds, And I’m coming to look for you, The season of love and then again the political and social invective, an act of love towards Italy expressed with the harshest words, those contained in Poor homeland. And finally, above all, The cure, a universal love songa milestone that should not be commented on but only listened to. And possibly recommended to those who have never had the fortune of encountering such beauty.
