IL SOGNO DI ALICE

I've been very surprised to see ATM added to PA. It's a band that I love and has had a special place in my youthness, but I've never thought of it as "prog". Last summer I went back to a town I was not going since 25 years before, I have met there two old friends used to play as a duo and we have improvised two gigs in a week which included covers of almost the whole album. I've been surprised also to realize that I was still remembering all the lyrics.

The band's mastermind, at least at the time of this release, was the singer-songwriter Gian Piero Alloisio, who has collaborations, between the others, with Giorgio Gaber, Fabrizio De Andre' and if I'm not wrong, with the nobel-prize winner for literature Dario Fo.

The band's songs have strong left-winged political contents (more than Roger Waters) and deeply inserted in the actual political instability of Italy in the late 70s: terrorism from Red Brigades and fascists groups plus massacrees organized and piloted by sectors of the intelligence and the state hepled by mafia, not a very safe place. More or less the same arguments that can be found in the early albums of Stormy Six.

"Venezia"(Venice) is with Lager one of the two songs which were recorded also by the singer-songwriter Francesco Guccini on his album "Metropolis" the same year. The sweet and melodic piano intro gives already an idea of decadence against which the anger behind the warm voice of Gian Piero Alloisio can't do anything. It's a very sad song about a girl dying while giving birth to a child, with Venice in the background, seen as a decadent and dying city after the tourists have gone.

"Mimi'" is more funny, thankfully. It's about the "Weimar Republik" and the advent of Nazis, but full of anacronisms to compare that political and social situation to the actual one.

"Ma Che Cazzo Vuoi?"(What the hell you want? - but "cazzo" is a raw word for "penis") is in my opinion the best song about heroin ever written. Whoever has seen friends, especially in the 70s and 80s, dying of heroin knows what I'm writing about. Alloisio speaks to a friend he lives with, but this is mainly an invective.There's no hope of recover, just a description of what his friend and their friendship has become and the anger for something that's too late to change. Musically it's just a ballad with some folk flavor, lyrically it's a masterpiece.

Side A is closed by "I Fiascheggiatori". Not easy to translate, it's a word between "Fiasco" (Bottle of Wine) and "Fiancheggiatori"(terrorist's supporters), but it's mainly about Genoa and the every day life in that period which appeared to be the end of an era. It's jazzy and from a musical point of view, the prog song of the album. About the lyrics, I just want to mention the sentence which opens and closes it: "in sto merda di mare non c'e' un pesce che riesca a nuotare" which can be translated as "in this [&*!#]ty sea neither a fish is able to swim"

Side B is opened by "Lager". Apart of the quite good lead guitar work there's few to say about it. It's what the title says: a song about Nazi's lagers. Probably Guccini decided to include it in his album also because his very first success in 1966 was a single entitled "Auschwitz".

The title track "Alice's Dream" is grotesque and somewhat funny. Thinking of "prog" I think it can be compared to some Canterbury easy songs, like Caravan's "In The Land Of Grey And Pink" (the song, not the album) or Kevin Ayer's "Caribbean Moon". Less prog than them, but similar in the mood. It takes "Alice in Wonderland" as an allegory to the actual political behaviour of the left winged italians.

"La Fattoria Degli Animali" (Animal's Farm") Is a song about George Orwell's masterpiece. That novel is already an allegory, so there are no hidden or cryptic messages in the lyrics, it's a synthesys of the novel. Another ballad, nice, I like it, but if you are not italian speaker and just listen to the music it can be boring.

Finally "Non Fateci Conto"(Don't count on us) is a grotesque conclusion. I remember the band playing it with all the members wearing a Groucho Marx mask, proggy, isn't it? Not the same as Peter Gabriel but.... To understand the song I think translating one sentence is enough:

My sister doesn't stay neither with the State nor the Red Brigades. It doesn't mean she doesn't have a "position". She doesn't give a [&*!#] to both, and she's right".

I don't know how many stars "good but non prog" should deserve. It has somequite good music and some just listenable but it has excellent lyrics and I really like Alloisio's vocals, very theatrical. It's not a case that "Teatrale" is part of the band's name.

Three stars only for one of my most beloved albums, one of the few that I have reviewed without needing to relisten while writing.