Kissing Gorbaciov by Andrea Paco Mariani and Luigi D’Alife, Milano, Cinema Beltrade, 12/03/2023

Post Punk is one of the most long lasting musical genre in the alternative rock world. The main characters of that era starting from 1978 until 1984 are mostly still with us – net of some losses like that of Mark Stewart from Pop Group – and a new generation of musicians are setting on fire the world of independent music. In the last months I reported what Idles and other bands have done in this last years. Now’s the time to take a closer look at the past, thanks to the documentary Kissing Gorbaciov.

It was in Italy during the end of the 1980s, in Melpignano, a small town in Salento, that some young guys belonging to the Italian Communist Party took power thanks to the elections in that municipality. It was the same period in which in the USSR Michail Gorbaciov took power and we started hearing those words – like ‘perestroika’ or ‘glasnost’ – that sounded like a promise for a better world. The guys in Melpignano organised a concert of young rock bands, inviting also musicians coming from the far away Russia.

The concert took place and if some bands coming from the land of Lenin and Dostoevskij were some interesting, some less, this event prepared for another, historical one, in which four Italian bands were asked to play in Moscow and Leningrad in 1989. The most famous of these were the New Wave band Litfiba and the Post Punk band CCCP Fedeli alla Linea. The documentary by Mariani and D’Alife we’re referring to is a long interview to the members of the latter. And it’s very interesting.

First of all CCCP Fedeli alla Linea was a band openly and extensively reported also in Symon Reynold’s famous book Rip It Up and Start Again, and that means they were at least for a period of time internationally known or that at least they had an international scope. And in listening to their first E.P.s like Ortodossia II (1985) and Compagni Cittadini Fratelli Partigiani (1985), and their first complete album Affinità/Divergenze tra il Compagno Togliatti e Noi (1986) one can admire how their distorted riffs are perfectly matching with a singular singing/screaming helding always the same note and the drum machine, like in the music of Suicide.

But CCCP Fedeli alla Linea were not only a non derivative and original Post Punk band held by singer Giovanni Ferretti and guitarist Massimo Zamboni. Thanks to the help of a ‘soubrette’ (Annarella Giudici) and of a ‘people artist’ (Fatur) they were able to immerse folks at their concerts in a decadent middle-European atmosphere. So, as an example, on the song Curami (‘Heal me’) Annarella was wearing a nurse coat and a helmet for electro-shock.

Just before the Russian concerts, the theatrical part of CCCP was explored greatly thanks to a show in which Annarella and Fatur, onboard because the violence of the music and the quality of the lyrics was freezing the audience, had the majority of the space in detriment of the music itself. But reality is that CCCP wasn’t a mere musical act. They were a (Punk) vision, in which music and theatrical elements could mix themselves or become the one preeminent on the other based on circumstances or will of the performers.

The interesting part of the documentary is that the repertoire images and films are usually used as a reverse shot for the recollections of the musicians, creating a strange nihilistic effect more than nostalgia. Ferretti and friends are recollecting memories while seeing the images under our gaze, becoming newly performers through their own impressions. Sometimes they laugh genuinely in remembering this or that particular aspect of a night or of their creative process, but mostly we see older people and hearing them, younger, singing Produci Consuma Crepa (‘Produce, Consume, Die’) means being put in front of the time that passes inexorably.

The documentary, created through a crowdfunding campaign, is release at the same time in which in Reggio Emilia an exhibition with memorabilia, photos, dresses and other material is available for the first time to the public, and after a ‘Gran Galà Punkettone’, a concert by the re-formed band. Unluckily I was unable to attend at the night in which the two movie directors were present, but anyway the atmosphere was the opposite of a nostalgic event, and this is truly remarkable.

Notes on how some tracks were written – like Curami starting from a guitar riff and a bass line that for the singer were remembering The Cure, so in the end he started to sing ‘curami’, or Emilia Paranoica emerging from a night of pure despair and fog – are interspersed with archive images and recollections from the Communist era of USSR and from the concerts of the other musicians involved, creating a collective narration of a period lost forever, not necessarily worst than the one we’re living in nowadays but destined to oblivion as everything.