Contemporaries of the Rokes (the group that recorded “È la pioggia che va” and “Che colpa abbiamo noi”), they vied against Shel Shapiro’s excellent band for the title of standard-bearers of Italian beat music. I only chanced to see them on one occasion (I think it might have been in 1976), during a festival in the piazza of a small town outside Salerno. By this point they were at the tail end of their career, and yet, as soon as they got up on the stage, they took possession of it with such ease and class that all of us, down below and looking up, began to behave like a sophisticated audience out of sheer empathy, as if associating with longhaired hippies who played a different kind of music and traveled around with beautiful girls in short skirts were the most natural thing in the world. I can still remember the wiry physique of the front man, Maurizio Vandelli, also known as the Prince (in absolute terms, one of the most original voices of Italian music), who played an imposing double-neck electric guitar (perhaps a Gibson EDS-1275 Double Neck Guitar like the one that Jimmy Page used to play, who can say; back then I didn’t know much about guitars), which along with his bush of curly and gravity-defying hair gave him the allure of an international rock star.
What do You think about My Mother-in-Law Drinks (2014)?
