The CCCP in concert of the reunion at Carroponte: the story

Let's start with a fact: a large part of the audience who was there yesterday to listen to the CCCP at the MiAmi Fest, at the Carroponte of Sesto San GiovanniMilan, in «former Stalingrad of Italy», for one of the first dates of the reunion tour, he had never been able to see them live. The band of Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, Massimo Zambonifrom the “well-deserving soubrette” Annarella Giudici and by the “people's artist” Danilo Fatur it disbanded in 1990, after the fall of the Wallwhen that their «pro-Soviet punk» – which was question of aesthetics and provocation, «bad» communists and steel against the «good» and seductive West, and then the red Emilia, Togliatti, Germany and the rest – it no longer made sense to exist. For heaven's sake, here and there there were elderly gentlemen, people who were in the front row in the Eighties and who saw spit, punches and insults flying at their live shows, not expensive tickets and chants on the «Free Palestine» in Mother, like now; but they were few and, what can I say?, lucky them.

For all of us, until yesterday the CCCP were an intangible, abstract entity. For those like me who were born in the mid-nineties, not only were they an already disbanded group: they were the answer to a buried era, which had not grazed us. A guiding spirit, yes, but with the values ​​of another time: what does that have to do with it? For us, CCCPs had an indiscreet charm, a secret that perhaps we had understood better than others, but we had no proof. Certainly, it was us who made them survive and, in some ways, get back together. We, who grew up with their grainy videos on YouTube, the fifty-euro reprints of vinyl records, an oral myth like Beckenbauer's plays, thirty-year-old quotes to make our own (“Produce, consume, die!”), the covers of Vasco Brondi and Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti, Zamboni's books, the debate on Ferretti «traitor»The Ferretti «fascist» who first waved the red flag and then voted Melons and writes collections of Catholic prayershis own solo concerts that reduce the various Emilia paranoid And Shoot Yurij to a personal story. «If it were up to me, I would spend hours on stage singing alone Emilia paranoid, putting into it everything that comes into my head”, he once said. But what could we know about what he was like when they were together?

Translated, the risk bigger than this reunion was that, in fact, it was a mess of papier-mâché, a remake of History but without History, a decadent parody: they could redo the CCCP for those who weren't there and get flooded with money, satisfy us, even if they are seventy years old, the world has turned upside down two more times and Fatur who undresses on stage he is not the same stripper of the good old days (“Now you see him like this”, Ferretti had once joked, “but in the Eighties he was an ephebe”). The problem, again, is that they are not a band like any other, but a collection of suggestions that goes from PCI by Berlinguer to the punk and to Cold War; difficult to replicate, difficult even just to explain. It would have been a disaster. And instead. And instead these concerts close a circle, really: they return them to new generations, and ok, but above all they show their other side, which had remained hidden from the beginning, and which those who came later found better than anyone else; and then they tell what they have become in 34 years of hiding and transformations.

On a technical level we are talking about a live with few flaws: right, perhaps, a strange alternation of slow songs and other halfway punk ones, in a ups and downs a little casual; but there is truly the best of a gigantic repertoire, and the four of them are charged in a way that is even surprising given the premises (“What must happen, happens”), with Ferretti who in the last fifteen years had never been so hieratic And charismatic, crooked voice of ritual and words of magma, while Annarella she is perfect – it is said that she is the soul of the reunion, the one capable of turning it on and making it fail at any moment – ​​and Fatur he probably hadn't expected anything else for years. There are no visuals or anything else that make this concert one of the many in 2024, fortunately, but this is not an example of resistance either.

It's not because hearing a band you grew up with play live for the first time (indeed: in whose myth you grew up) is a alienating sensation, almost disarming in its power and intimacy. And it isn't because, beyond this, it testifies to what CCCP are today. Probably no one, not even them, forty years old would have thought that those tales of paranoid province and discomfort (“I don't study, I don't work, I don't watch TV; I don't go to the cinema, I don't do sports”from I am fine, one of the many classics brought to a close) could surpass their time and reach this point. Maybe he didn't even hope for it. And yet here we are, under the same sky, old punks, people who discovered them with music magazines and others with the random playback of Spotify, united by the profound sentimentality of their songs, always underestimated but which instead remains, more than by taste for provocation, which passes.

Today, it's true, such impactful messages have almost disappeared from the songs, and their concerts went from free zones where anything could happen to live concerts costing sixty euros per ticket, with at most a few student protests outside, like in Bologna, where they fenced off Piazza Maggiore, a public place, to make them play. The CCCP, which since they existed have made the contradiction a belief, they don't seem uncomfortable in such a context, on the contrary. And we arrived too late, fascinated more by the emotions submerged in the pieces than by an aesthetic and values ​​that no longer speak to us at all, for once, well, we feel like we have understood them, and that we are at the center of this story we too.