Watch Vinicio Capossela
perform
The minotaur in the grey striped jacket stops, takes out his mobile phone and
checks for messages. Nothing. He replaces it in his pocket, turns back to
the microphone and starts demanding, in a desperate, hoarse scream, that
Troy must burn, just as he burnt for it. It is only a sound check, but the
noise that results is compelling evidence that minotaurs make good music.
In its short life, rock has thrived primarily on the limited lexicon brought
to life by Chuck Berry: cars, girls, teenage frustration and brief glimpses
of the promised land. Yet the further it has travelled from the Mississippi
delta, the more local palates have given it unusual flavours. In Britain,
the Beatles employed their love of music hall for Sergeant Pepper; and
without a knowledge of Max Wall or Olivier’s Richard III, Johnny Rotten
would have been just another Tommy Steele impersonator. The man in the
minotaur mask, Vinicio Capossela, is Italy’s greatest secret. Although
marketed at the start of his career, almost 20 years ago, as “the Italian
Tom Waits”, for the past 15 years he has been forging a unique musical path
into the roots of Mediterranean culture, into a different language entirely.
At first, it was folk and wedding dances (mazurkas, waltzes and tarantellas
featured heavily), but as he continued his backwards journey, weirdness
surfaced. “We are a small country,” he says, “but deep, with many layers.
Dig two metres and you are among the Romans.” We are trying to find a
convenient phrase to describe the songs on Ovunque Proteggi (Protect
Everywhere), his sixth studio album, from 2006. Etruscan rock may have to
suffice.
Dressing like and singing about minotaurs are liberties you can take when the
English-language markets are closed to you because you sing in Italian. The
American guitarist Marc Ribot, who has played with both Waits and Capossela,
is one of the latter’s greatest cheerleaders, and sympathises. “There’s an
inherent frustration among artists here,” he says after a gig in a
14th-century piazza in Tuscany. “Theirs is a limited market. What is cool
about Vinicio, what is punk about him, is that instead of prostituting
himself for the larger market, he has decided to play for the audience in
front of him.”
I catch up with Capossela in Genoa, where he is playing the opera house,
towards the end of a six-month tour in support of his latest album, Da Solo.
That’s six months touring just one country; he is preparing for a further
leg that winds round the rest of Europe and reaches Queen Elizabeth Hall on
May 16. The night after Genoa, there will be a date in the former Olivetti
typewriter factory in Ivrea; then it is on to Turin, where he will be
attending a celebration of Jack London, reading from The People of the
Abyss. There are also calls from a publisher to contend with, as his second
book is due soon. The first, Non si muore tutte le mattine (One Does Not Die
Every Morning), was published to considerable acclaim in 2004. It sounds
like an arduous life, and, touchingly, his parents have arrived to ensure he
is eating well.
Having just completed a 20-hour ferry trip from Sicily, where he played five
shows, he is slowly readjusting to terra firma. So, while I sway in front of
his eyes, he talks about being the biggest rock star nobody has heard of. He
speaks first in Italian, then goes back to repeat himself in English. When
he stumbles, I throw in useless suggestions for words that sound a bit like
the Italian. Somehow, we get there in the end. He tells me he fell in love
with the blues as a child, then saw Waits in concert. “That inspired me to
stop going to university and start getting drunk.” When a girlfriend dumped
him, he started writing for the first time: Sinatra-style sad songs about
the places they used to go.
What made him turn his back on American music, three albums into his career?
“My marriage ended and I spent a year without a home, living in a Volvo, on
the road, la strada,” he explains, dipping focaccia into his cappuccino. “It
was the call of the wild, and I was drawn towards rural magic. There are
places in the south, where my roots are, where people still believe in
magic, in spirits.” The results, recorded in churches, caves and a disused
monastery, and featuring centurions, minotaurs, Medusa and bloody death in
the Colosseum, tapped into the shared memories of his audience. Ovunque
Proteggi, which he calls his “hairy, horned” album, topped the Italian
charts, surprising everybody involved. “Perhaps our grandmothers used to
tell us all ghost stories,” he offers.
Da Solo, in contrast, was mostly written on keyboards in his Milan apartment
and inspired by a visit to a circus in America. “Not the circus, the
sideshows,” he corrects me. “Jugglers and tightrope walkers are artists in
the proper sense, but in the shows it is not ability, simply attraction —
‘Come see the five-legged cow, the midget being fired from the cannon.’ It’s
like a film screen with nothing behind it.”
He looks forlorn. “I went to one in Arizona. It was cheap. There was nothing
but a disabled cow in a jar. A perfect metaphor for many things.” There,
however, began the concept of Vinicio and the Freakshow, in which the
monsters and myths from his previous albums share the stage with balancing
acts, a fire-eater, a performing dog, a human piñata and his latest songs,
which turn the spotlight away from the Mediterranean and onto America. “I
needed America for Da Solo, because there is something behind that cinema
screen, there is substance behind the symbolism. I went to visit my ex-wife
in Missouri — it was the first time I’d seen her in 10 years. She’d been a
model, now she worked in a butcher’s. It reminded me that America is not
simply a fantasy or a movie.”
Capossela then spends an age enthusing about the Organ Stop Pizza, in Mesa,
Arizona, which provided a culinary reminder of home while he was in America,
playing the South by Southwest festival, in Texas, and recording with
Calexico. Clearly, a little American fantasy has crept into the mix
alongside his romantic vision of a pre-industrial Italy. As the customers
were tucking into their Hawaiian Specials, a loud roar announced the arrival
of one of the world’s largest Wurlitzer organs, which rose through the
floor. That was the moment he realised what Da Solo should sound like.
From this trip grew a series of songs that Capossela describes as hymn-like.
Though his Catholic background has influenced many of the images he employs,
they are hardly a traditional sort of hymn and are bereft of choruses. The
closing song, There Are No Disappointments in Heaven, was inspired by
Frederick Lehman’s poem, but there is also an existential meditation on loss
(Sock Heaven), as well as memories of meeting intriguing strangers on the
road (The Giant and the Wizard, two characters who appear on stage).
The finest track is the devastating ballad Soldiers’ Letters, which he finds
almost impossible to play live, as it builds towards a climax as
overwhelming as Gregory Burke’s play Black Watch. Perhaps it is not what you
want to hear when his hussars and deep-sea divers promised a fun night of
dressing up, but it would be a shame were it — and the singer — to go
unheard by British ears.
I decide it would be tactless to ask if Capossela sees himself breaking
through the anglophone’s antipathy towards rock in foreign languages, for
clearly he would love to. His conversation is peppered with references to
Jack Kerouac, Dickens, Coleridge, Bukowski and more. When we talk about the
British date, he is lost in a reverie for the city described in The People
of the Abyss: “That’s my fantasy, the London that has always interested me.
The old, 19th-century place, crowded with sailors and Oliver Twists. And
Shane MacGowan.” The minotaur should feel right at home.
