Enrico Gabrielli: «Me, the Forrest Gump of rock between PJ Harvey and the Afterhours»

«And to think that as a child I didn’t want to be a musician, I wanted to draw. But loser and rough-mannered as I was, at 12 my parents enrolled me in the village band. The maestro gave me the clarinet. My father had the trombone and my mother the flute. There has never been love with the clarinet. If you study it a lot — and I did it at Chigiana — you’ll get a thousand respiratory problems. It’s frustrating, you see more flaws than sounds. It quickly becomes too competitive. Classical music is a den of teaching neurosis. Teaching jazz is even more mysterious since it was born out of opposition, contrast. Conceptually the opposite of the academy».

What was the Valdarno like in the seventies?

«I was born in Ambra, a fraction of a thousand souls that recalls Benigni’s song Villagealmost caricatured. I grew up between the old man who listened to Fiorentina on the radio in the square even when he wasn’t playing, and the bartender Pierone with long nails who stuck his finger inside him to indicate which pasta you wanted. In fact they all had a hole. I remember the smell of smoke in the phone booths, I liked putting coins in them and I don’t even know if I really called anyone. I remember the 1982 World Cup seen at the bar in the square, the festival, the beating, the poor theater of Monticchiello. The philharmonic, the band, the cinema in front of the house. All my memories from the age of 9 start from the cinema, there wasn’t the parental controls but a red lamp — it’s still there — that they lit for risqué films and I knew that when it was lit I couldn’t go.’

«Not at all. A mixture of asbestos and waste from the dryer, in full decline with dry rivers and barren fields. But you continued to bathe in the river with an industrial drain next to it. If I think about what I did as a child, now that I have 4 and 1 year olds… At the age of 3, a stove fell on my foot and severed my big toe. And Lenin too, almost…”

«My father was section secretary of the PC and for his honeymoon in 1975 he went to Moscow. He returned with all the gadgets of the period: balalaikas, brooches, hats, and a cast iron half-bust of Lenin which he put on the biscuit shelf, a high shelf where I climbed. And once he falls to the ground and sticks to the floor a millimeter away from me. I was about to be killed by Lenin. For a communist parent it was unforgivable … he took it and threw it in the dumpster. Instead I would have kept it, as a warning ».

What memories do you have of school?

«A middle school classmate of mine, Gianluca, killed himself at the age of 20 with his father’s hunting rifle. The reason was never known. The drama swept across the country and stuck with me. I was living in Milan and the night before I decided to go and say hello to Professor Carla Romanelli of Montevarchi, to whom I owe many of my curiosities about literature and astronomy. I found Gianluca there. But as soon as I appeared, he had a block, he didn’t utter a word and walked away. I always thought I unintentionally inhibited it. He was one sliding door of my life and I remember well the funeral, heartbreaking, with the whole town present».

In Milan he went to the Conservatory…

“An alien world. Those are real crazy people who don’t need drugs. Contrite, unresolved, wrapped up. There was a character who now raises pit bulls, a pianist of French-Algerian origin with an ambassador father, superlative musician, won international competitions and always played the same piece for 7 months. That alone should make you think. Then a girl who got pregnant by mistake and started inhaling lighter gas and making concoctions with ecstasy pills and her sister’s headache. A mixture of people between incredible mental excellence and hallucinating chasms. So I gave myself to contemporary music and pop where there are drug addicts and alcoholics, yes, but at least they are normal people».

Didn’t anything abnormal happen to you there?

“I was about to fall prey to Scientology. It was a very confusing period at the Conservatory, I was attracted by new age, almost esoteric worlds. I went to a hypnosis course in a hotel in the central station, I was 21 and I was the only boy among so many bizarre people. In that confusion I read Dianetics by Rob Hubbard and was about to go to the Church of Scientology. I was alone, lost in the industrial Milan of the nineties, covered by real smog, by diesel heating, a tough city. But a boy from the Conservatory took the book from my hand and threw it into the Naviglio. “This is shit, they’re dangerous,” he said. I still have to thank him.”

How did he become the Forrest Gump of rock?

«I grew up with the music scene of the early 2000s, hand in hand with what was happening in the slums as well. When Capossela called me to arrange Alone, I was still in the Afterhours and I had just broken up with a girl, I was living a bohemian moment at Casa 139. Not knowing where to go to sleep, Vinicio left me at his house for 10 days in which I had to unwind the material he jotted down on the piano. The night before he had had a dinner with 50 people and had left an immense amount of dishes to wash. It looked like the backstage of a Chinese restaurant and I made him find it as he had left it. For the next record, however, he called me again ».

Why did you leave Afterhours?

«I was with them for three years from 2006 to 2009. But after participating in Sanremo I wrote a letter to the group, the same as the one Peter Gabriel wrote to Genesis. And I said my resignation. For Manuel Agnelli it was a bolt from the blue. We were at a restaurant: he said nothing, got up and went away. But he was nice to call me back for the project The country is real both with the Mariposas and with Caliber 35. We never quarreled».

Let’s talk about your partnership with PJ Harvey.

«He called me in 2015 for The Hope Six Demolition Project in Sydney where I was with Mike Patton for the project Mondocane. He came to see us. I had seen her play in Milan in 2008, one of the concerts of her life. She chose me and Asso Stefana in a formation of 24 elements, at a glance. He did three days of sessions at Somerset House, an absurd project for which he set up a recording studio in a gallery in London, with tinted windows inside but not outside, and people paying to watch us work.’

On her 40th birthday she was in concert with her in Florence: they celebrated her on stage with an incredible ovation.

“And PJ had me find a white chocolate cake in the dressing room. We had been working together for two years and after each concert she always put her feet in a basin of ice to talk about how it went: she has a methodicalness that as an Italian I found tiring, she leaves nothing to chance. You see what the team building sessions were like ».

His most famous creation is Calibro 35, an instrumental formation with great success in revisiting cinema soundtracks. You are now on tour with the record on Morricone.

“We are a working team. Not a family like the Mariposas or the Winstons. The idea came to Tommaso Colliva when we were with Afterhours in Texas in 2007. Tommaso was their sound engineer and at the Austin festival there was a focus on the alternative Japanese scene. We started talking about which was the musical world for which Italy was most recognized in the world in the recent past. The answer was: soundtracks. Just for fun we decided to do some live shows, first in Luxembourg, then in Belgium and in Milan. Revisiting the imagery of the detective story that has always been a right-wing thing and that returns to the American counterculture becoming something urban. Success was immediate.”