L‘being born at the end of 1979 represented an undisputed privilege for those who, like me, were lucky enough – it seems – to be conceived after the Reggio Calabria stop of a Lucio Dalla toura few months before he and De Gregori left for the Banana Repubblic tour.
Of course, the placement in the twentieth century calendar is in a sort of borderland, in which you don’t know whether to call yourself Generation X or Millennial, in which you were formally enrolled in the Seventies but without ever actually being one. But, and here comes the beauty, the 1979 newborn was able to sleep between two pillows, squeezed between Lucio Dalla (1978) e From the (1980)the two records that changed Italian music forever.
Under the sign of Dalla and Pink Floyd
I who, for example, I was born just four days before Pink Floyd gave the world a gift The Wall, a few weeks before Edoardo Bennato became the first artist in the world to release two albums in fifteen days (Ugh! Ugh! And They’re just songs) and above all just as Mogol and Lucio Battisti were doing A gloomy day the swan song of their dream factory, I didn’t have the chance to grow up without music becoming some kind of obsession.
There was no escape: the story passed and could only overwhelm you. 1979 is also the last good year of birth to be able to remember what life was like at the time of the last glorious season of 33 rpm (which by the way are coming back into fashion). The cannon woman by Francesco de Gregori is still an unresolved childhood trauma because the record broke, compromising the listening of the first track on both sides; it was a Qdisc, a sort of rarity, in my eyes even today that broken LP represents the most absurd sacrilege that a child could imagine.
From LP to CD
Even the first compact discs caused various disturbances. The plastic hooks behind the front of the very first copies, the ones that held the booklet with the cover and lyrics, tended to break easily. It happened to me with a Best of by Harry Belafonte and with Schizzechea with love by Pino Daniele, which had very fragile plastic.
Then for the tenth birthday it arrived, imported, …But Seriously by Phil Collins; unlike Made in Italy products, the plastic hooks of that Made in UK CD were very solid, despite the booklet with the lyrics being very large. It was written in beautiful cursive, white on a black background. As if he wanted to make you curse for having just finished elementary school without having learned such beautiful handwriting.
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