Musical pastiches: the progressive pop of Franco Battiato

This article was written in 2015 and re-edited on May 19, 2021.

I want to see you dance
Like gypsy women in the desert
With candelabra on their heads -
Or like the balinese on holidays.
I want to see you dance
Like the whirling dervishes
That spin on their spines -
Or at the sound of Kathakali anklets.

- Franco Battiato, Voglio vederti danzare (from L’arca di Noè, 1982)

Now, you wouldn’t think a song featuring this kind of lyrics could actually become that successful. It’s not the usual pop shtick— unless you’re familiar with 13th-century Persian religious orders and/or Indian dance-drama practices. But ask any Italians who are even mildly into music at all and they’ll know the song: Voglio vederti danzare (“I Want to See You Dance”), by Franco Battiato. And they’ll gladly sing it, and by the time the chorus arrives — “And everything revolves around the room / While we’re dancing / Dancing” — they’ll be shouting and waving their arms around in fervour.

The song is so well-known in the country that even two gentlemen known as Prezioso and Marvin, 90s eurodance figureheads, covered it — passing it on to a generation whose defining songs come from the likes of Eiffel 65 (you know Blue, right? Da ba dee da ba da) and consider “clubbing” to be a two-week August stint in the Italian riviera listening to dance hits.

Battiato’s success was highly unlikely, given his modest background and his staunch anti-establishment stance — which he carefully and passionately expressed in most of his work. Also, before entering the subconscious of, like, every Italian ever with perfectly-crafted 80s pop songs, the name “Battiato” meant experimental music, progressive rock, musique concrète. It’s basically as if Terry Riley had had a series of top-10 hits in the UK.

While all-out weirdness is kind of ok in the pop space nowadays, when Battiato first started to have a brush with mainstream success Italian audiences weren’t that used to the lovely clumsiness he brought to the table. Just look at him dancing in the video for Voglio vederti danzare. He has no sense of rhythm whatsoever, his skinny frame clumsily trying to land some steps, any step. He’s donning a scrawny brown shirt and plain pants. He looks like a faceless employee working at a huge corporation. The camera work is practically non-existent. But we’re talking about a song about folk dances from all over the world with a Waltz bit at the end. There are no percussions whatsoever. Yet, it was wildly successful and still remains one of his most well-known songs.

Battiato was born in tiny Ionia — a small town in Sicily which does not even exist anymore; it was split in two even smaller municipalities after the Second World War and now bears the name of Giarre-Riposto. He spent his first years trying to make it as an artist in Milan, where he moved after his father’s death in 1964 and a brief stretch in Rome. He started out as a cabaret artist and sung Sicilian folk songs in the streets with a friend under the name Gli ambulanti—“The Peddlers”.

Eventually, he was discovered by Giorgio Gaber — creator of what is known in Italy as Teatro-Canzone (“Song-Theatre”), a peculiar blend of monologues, sketches and songs which are presented in a dialogic fashion, making the audience part of the show and drawing on political and social themes. Gaber landed him his first recording contract marketing him as a “protest artist”, with May 1968 coming along and everything.

Battiato presented his first single on national television in 1967. The host of the show he guested on was Gaber, his mentor. La torre (“The Tower”) is a classic 60s beat piece, shuffling drums and gang vocals and an audience clapping — nothing too noteworthy about it. It’s a thematic shift from politics to love that landed him his first success: a corny, cutesy, tedious ballad called È l’amore (“It’s Love”), which obviously sold 100.000 copies.

Had Battiato kept this approach to music, he’d surely have had a nice and fulfilling career in Italian pop, probably disappearing after a decade or so just like a lot of his peers at the time. But! Battiato, feeling like a cog in the recording industry machinery, inked a deal with an independent label, Bla Bla, with whom he would publish a series of forward-thinking experimental LPs which remain among his best. It’s during this period that he developed his unique style, painting weird, exotic pictures with his words and music — a quality he will nurture throughout his entire career.

His debut LP, Fetus (“Foetus”), saw the light of day in 1972. It’s a sad, bitter concept album about birth which depicts human life as a hopeless attempt to find peace in a weird, unforgiving world ruled by technology and hopelessness. It feels like some kind of weird Italian musical version of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a series of singer-songwriter-ish songs in which the usual chords-and-vocals approach is twisted with synthesizers, electric guitars and almost-off-key vocals.

Two versions of the album exist, one sung in Italian and one in English—which goes to show how Battiato’s multilingualism, one of his most important stylistic features throughout his career, goes back a long way. “My eyes are mechanical / My heart is made of plastic / My brain is mechanical / The taste is synthetic” he sings in Mechanics, the best song on the album. It starts out with a complex prog rock lick, evolves into a quiet acoustic piece with violins, gets back to prog weirdness and ends on an ambient coda which incorporates a dialogue between Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, NASA and President Nixon about the moon landing.

Battiato is particularly prolific in his pre-pop years (1973–1978). He becomes influenced by minimalist behemoths such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich and starts to incorporate Karlheinz Stockhausen’s playful sound-collage techniques in his work. Some songs of his are particularly meaningful in this regard. Ethika fon Ethica (a play on words which could be tentatively translated as “Phon-ethic Ethic”), from Clic (1974), is nothing more than a composition of sounds, a musical pastiche in which juxtaposition becomes the main source of meaning in the song. Faccetta nera, an infamous fascist song from 1935 praising Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, is presented along soundbites from Italian television, Neapolitan folk songs, the Italian national anthem, opera pieces and conversations between lovers, painting a dismal picture of a country which was — and still is — torn by political extremism and a general lack of direction.

Sequenze e frequenze (“Sequences and frequencies”), the opening track from Sulle corde di Aries (1973), is a free-jazz/noise/prog-rock/folk piece whose 16 minutes would fare well with contemporary experimental music appreciation circles. Battiato’s synthesizer game is reminescent of what Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company was doing at the same time across the ocean — simultaneously paving the way for today’s avant-garde electronica and 80s synthpop. In less than a decade, Battiato would use the same synths we can hear on this track, but he’d constrict them into something resembling a song: verse, chorus and all.

Orient Effects, from M.lle Le Gladiateur (1975), kind of predates Tim Hecker’s Virgins by almost 30 years. Recorded in Monreale, a small town overlooking Palermo, Sicily’s biggest city, it’s a 12-minute drone which Battiato played on the organ of the town’s stunning cathedral.

Monreale’s church is a symbol of the cross-cultural artistic expressions that are at the roots of Battiato’s curiosity towards cultures other than his own: in it, Catholic imagery coexist with Middle-Eastern approaches, Byzantine and Arab carvings share a space with Renaissance porticos. In Orient Effects, Battiato creates a slowly-evolving cascade of sound which lulls the listener into a trance, echoing Riley and Reich’s approach to the instrument. He plays with the sound, adding layers and layers of notes before abruptly ending the stream of sound only to restart playing again as if nothing had happened.

It’s Battiato’s violin teacher, a man named Giusto Pio, that turned him onto pop. The two developed a friendship, and he became Battiato’s producer of choice. Their first LP together, L’era del cinghiale bianco (“The era of the white boar”), was published in 1978. It didn’t chart, but is now seen as a milestone in Battiato’s discography. Its titletrack is his first true foray into new wave and pop: opening with a glitzy violin arpeggio and a classic rock guitar lick, which are the recurrent theme of the song, L’era del cinghiale bianco leaves plenty of room for Battiato’s apparently-nonsense lyrics.

Hotels are full in Tunis,
It’s the summer holidays.
Sometimes, a downpour
Wouldn’t let us go out.
A man of a certain age
Would often offer me Turkish cigarettes, but
I hope the era of the white boar
Will soon return.

- Franco Battiato, L’era del cinghiale bianco (from L’era del cinghiale bianco, 1978)

The song is influenced by a French writer, René Guenon, a famous scholar in the fields of symbolism and occultism. In his Symbols of Sacred Science (1962), Guenon analyzed the figure of the boar, comparing the Celts’ view of the animal as a sacred being with the Hindu belief that the boar is both a manifestation of the god Vishnu and the namesake of an era in which every man will reach a complete and fulfilling spiritual conscience. But you wouldn’t know it by reading the lyrics.

L’era del cinghiale bianco is one of Battiato’s most upbeat songs and is regarded as one of his classics — and rightly so, just because of the way it blends new wave and pop’s musical accessibility with a deeply obscure lyrical subject matter. It’s a hopeful song about an utopic future in which everyone will be happy with the world they live in, the complexity and pessimism of his earliest material now turned into a message of faith. Lots of narrative threads which would be explored at large in his discography make their first appearance here, most of all his use of the Sicilian dialect.

Battiato’s next LP Patriots (1980) became his first mild commercial success, reaching the 30th spot in the national charts. Still, it remained a deeply experimental and anti-conformist LP. Up Patriots to Arms, the album’s most-successful song, is an anthem against human foolishness, an anti-establishment and anti-music-industry chant clumsily but endaringly sung in English, French and Italian.

The way Battiato deconstructed the Italian music of his time is particularly striking: traditionally militant singer-songwriters from the 60s such as Francesco de Gregori and Fabrizio De André were struggling to find an identity after the turn of the decade and the consequent deflation of the anti-capitalist radical left-wing approach they had adopted until that point, while pop artists were mostly creating derivative versions of whatever music craze was huge in the UK and the US—Italian cover versions of rock classics were a thing. “It’s not my fault if oppressors exist, if imbecility exists, if benches are filled with people who aren’t well”, Battiato sung: “Up patriots to arms / Get involved! / Contemporary music bums me out”. And again,

The empire of music has arrived,
Bringing falsehood with it.
Let’s make artistic directors
And cultural workers retire.
It’s not my fault if there are performances
With smoke and laser beams,
If dancefloors are filled
With dancing idiots.

- Franco Battiato, Up Patriots to Arms (from Patriots, 1980)

Up Patriots to Arms is the opening song on the album, a perfect pop track whose artificial synths, wonky basslines and piano licks are as good as 80s pop gets. Still, on the same album, Battiato sung in Arabic, quoted famous Italian poets such as Leopardi, Pascoli and Carducci and straight-up recited a passage of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Not the usual pop album shtick.

It’s with La voce del padrone (“The Master’s Voice”), published in 1981, that Battiato reached his artistic and commercial peak. Every song on the album is regarded as a classic in Italy, and the LP remains among the most critically acclaimed by the Italian press, ever.

The album opens with the sound of crashing waves, a darting synth line slowly making its way through the speakers, erupting in an uptempo drumbeat and a sax solo. Then, Battiato starts singing: the piece is called Summer on a Solitary Beach — it’s a bittersweet song about moments spent at the sea and a longing for the infinite which the narrator shares with an unnamed interlocutor. “Sea, sea, I want to drown / Take me far away so my ship can sink / Away, away from these shores / Take me far away on the waves”, he sings in wistful meditation.

Next comes Bandiera bianca (“White flag”), a stomping mid-tempo pop masterpiece which, in a way, is Battiato scowling at the man in the most gentlemanly fashion imaginable. It’s him who raises the titular white flag in the chorus, surrendering to whatever the world of culture and media feeds the population. His eccentricity transpires from the lyrics; “I’d rather eat a salad than listen to Beethoven or Sinatra, I’d rather eat some raisins than listen to Vivaldi, I get more calories that way”, he says, comparing highly idealized artists to his daily calorie intake.

In the same song, he also takes on terrorism (“Horrific idiots — exactly what we needed!”) and politics (“Those demented TV shows about electoral debates”). A mantra is repeated throughout the song, “Minima immoralia”. It’s a play on Minima moralia, a seminal text in critical theory by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno whose message was, basically, “We can’t lead an honest life because we live in an inhuman society”. The song ends with Battiato quoting the Doors and singing, in English, “This is the end / My lonely friend / This is the end”: but he does it in a joyful voice, his high-pitched vocals hiding the subversive potential of the song to the untrained listener.

It’s with another song from the LP, Cuccuruccu, that the definition of “musical pastiche” becomes more apparent in his work: just like he did on Ethika fon Ethika, Battiato uses cultural bits and pieces to create a gem of a song in which he recounts happy memories from his youth, every line becoming a little madeleine — in the Proustian sense of the word — and causing an overflow of nostalgia in the author.

The title is straight-up ripped from Cucurrucucú paloma, a song by the Mexican Tomás Méndez. The first stanza talks about “serenades in high school / During PE and Religion classes”: it’s a touching recollection of teenage love. Then, the song hastily switches to a Middle Eastern scene: “The foreboding rage of the Afghan refugees / Who were at the border and have now moved to Iran”. Then we’re with a Native American tribe, witnessing “the erotic deeds of squaws as white as the moon”.

The song ends with a juxtaposition of lines and titles from famous rock songs, words that soundtracked Battiato’s youth: he gets Dylan’s Just Like a Woman wrong, but he’s so earnest in his clumsy English pronunciation you can’t help but forgive him and crack a smile.

Lady Madonna,
I can try with a little help from my friends.
Oh, goodbye ruby tuesday,
Come on baby, let’s twist again.
Once upon a time
You dressed so fine, Mary,
Like just a woman.
Like a rolling stone.

- Franco Battiato, Cuccurucucu (from La voce del padrone, 1981)

Centro di gravità permanente (“Unfading centre of gravity”), one of the album’s best songs, is a monologue between Battiato and himself. It’s him at his frailest, a song about the lack of a sense of purpose hidden as a killer synth-pop single. Apparently, the lyrics are just a jumble of nonsense, an enumeration of mysterious, old-timey figures:

An old Breton woman
With a hat and a rice-paper umbrella with a bamboo cane.
Captains corageous,
Cunning Macedonian smugglers.
Euclidean Jesuits
Dressed up as bonzes trying to enter the court of emperors
From the Ming dynasty.

- Franco Battiato, Centro di gravità permanente (from La voce del padrone, 1981)

However, these figures are examples of wise people from history Battiato imagines seeing in his “centre of gravity”: his own, fragmented self, whose expression is equally splintered in a multitude of influences. “I’m looking for an unfading centre of gravity / So that I’ll never change my mind about things and people”, he says, struggling to find an identity, unhappy with the way he quickly dismisses trends, and worldly things, and people. And so he hides in his mystic world of quotes and references, and he asks these people from the past for help, trying to find clarity—all of this during one of the highest points of his most critically and commercially successful albums.

Battiato only becomes more bitter in the second stanza, which echoes his dissatisfaction with contemporary music he first voiced in Up Patriots to Arms: “I can’t stand Russian choirs / Fake rock music, Italian new wave, English punk and free-jazz”. Battiato feels alone in the music industry, he has no idea where to turn to: yet, he’s more acclaimed than ever.

Come 2015 and Battiato still hasn’t found his centre of gravity. His output has remained extremely diverse through the years: he has collaborated with the philosopher Manlio Sgalambro; he published 18 more albums, among which you can find a straight-up rock album, a trilogy for piano and string quartet and a live album with Antony and the Johnsons; he has sung in French, English, Spanish and German. He even took up painting and had a brief stint in politics.

Lately, however, he has abandoned his pop formula and returned to his avant-garde days: his last album, the synth-based Joe Patti’s Experimental Group, features compositions from the 70s he never finished and new material that he composed for the occasion. Why did he do it? As Battiato explained to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica:”The only thing that matters in life is its existential part, the one that puts you to the test. I don’t care about validation, I don’t want to reinsure my audience and give them what they want. If you choose to do that, you’re betraying your role”. Battiato hasn’t lost it.