“I want to seek refuge under the Warsaw Pact, I seek a five-year plan/stability”: in the sublime monasteries of San Pietro, here in Reggio, this old and haunting punk saying echoes from a seemingly distant past. And not only that: There are the paranoid Emilias, the bombers over Beirut, the psychotropic drugs, including flags of the former GDR and small busts of Lenin. In short, the images (and of course the music) of the most important Italian rock band of the 80s, CCCP. And which we believed had finally gone down in the history books of sound. Because the CCCP, which then became the CSI and then the PGR and finally nothing, seemed like a closed chapter like the old Soviet Union, whose symbolic ballast they relied heavily on in their irreverent and situationist way. By the will of its own inventors: not so much the guitarist Massimo Zamboni, who has always maintained this militancy, but the brilliant and humorous singer Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, who has retreated for years to the Apennines, not far from here, but in reality very far away, impressed by his spiritual zeal (not without neoconservative influences).
Well, 70-year-old Lindo came down from the mountains and reconciled with his old friend Max as well as with Annarella Giudici and Danilo Fatur, the two main actors in the band’s turbulent concerts. Not for a traditional reunion, but to put together a beautiful and large exhibition. “Felicitazioni”, for the 40th anniversary of the band’s first EP “Ortodossia”. With hundreds of photos, installations, videos and sculptures that, always with their typical situationist and aesthetic approach, tell the adventure that began from West Berlin (where Lindo and Max met in 1982) to return to Reggio and Italy and Europe to conquer. “I made peace with the past – reveals Ferretti – and I realized that our history is a story that needs to be told: my anti-communism of today goes through my communism of yesterday.” And Zamboni: “We have with that “We thought a better world awaited us, but with increasing poverty and widespread terror, I don’t think things have improved. In addition to the exhibition and reprint of all their records, the reunion also includes a kind of re-performance in Reggio on October 21st and 22nd, “Gran galà punkettone”. Will they sing? “Who knows,” they answer in unison. But as they say today, it’s a lot to see them together again.