He feels like a bourgeois who has gone to live in the countryside, despite coming from the most classic of working-class families. A few years ago Alessandro Spedicati he threw “Diablo” and the microphone away, he put the Sikitikis on standby – who then reunited this summer for a series of event concerts to mark the 25th anniversary of the band’s birth -, taking up trowels and brush cutters, in search of peace and tranquility in the Oristano countryside. His rebirth passes through the account “Una vita quasi country”, where the singer-songwriter recounts the vicissitudes of a citizen of Cagliari who moved with his family to the countryside.
How did this happen?
«The choice came after 20 years of very intense public relations, which I don’t know humanly how healthy it is to have in a life so assiduous and numerous, from the most intense to the most superficial ones, all centered on work. Stopping making music meant finding myself faced with a free and uncultivated field, completely to be redone, Covid then strengthened those beliefs I already had. For a lifetime, I have always been sent against myself: I have always been afraid of definitions of myself, as soon as I reached one, I ran away. I also experienced being an artist as a continuous search. Today I would like to devote myself to writing.”
How have you balanced the public and intimate dimensions of music during your career?
«At the beginning I was very enthusiastic and I made music to be understood, therefore to share. Over time, however, that approach transformed: music and fame led me to expose myself more and more, to the point of feeling completely naked in my intimacy. It was like leaving armored and dismantling myself little by little, leaving on stage, at each performance, a piece of that symbolic cloak that protected me. The best thing, however, was sharing this journey: the songs became those who listened to them, even people I’ve never met. I also experienced the side of notoriety and being “in fashion” well, but the center has always been live, experienced as a ritual, a mass, in which I believe that the artist must give himself totally, body and soul, to his own expression.”
The English call them “guilty pleasure”. In Italian we could say “guilty pleasures”. Do you have any in the musical field?
«I have a pop soul, even if I denied it for a long time. When Madonna’s “Like a prayer” comes on I go crazy, Claudio Baglioni as a songwriter has important peaks for me, as do some of Tiziano Ferro’s lyrics. He then brought those black and R’n’B sounds that are part of my background to Italian pop. Of course, then I’m a boy from the Nineties: Radiohead are the absolute cult for me, but they’re pop, just like the Beatles. Grunge, rock, crossover, punk and English electronic mixes like Chemical brothers and Fat boy slim raised me. But there is so much more.”
What was the most important musical period for you?
«Certainly the one in Turin, when I worked with Subsonica. Max Casacci is a friend to me and I would be less than half of who I am without his influences, his input. As he says, if you lived the 90s well you don’t remember them, but it was the period in which I dug deeper into myself: I had to live up to them, I had to put myself in a position to learn and study.”
How are the Sardinian intellectuals doing?
«There aren’t many, certainly not in Cagliari. Intellectuals shift thinking, they don’t just practice it. Today we can find them in lively and prolific contexts such as Nuoro or Sassari, while Cagliari is a crossroads city, where culture is in the context and the environments become its vehicle. It is a city with a superficial soul, it is a game in itself and in my opinion there is a Sardinia in this city and a Sardinia outside of Cagliari. His unconscious poetry is found in the suburbs and working-class neighborhoods, where I also come from. Today it may be very crowded due to over-tourism issues, but it is still beautiful and for me living there meant bringing an aesthetic to the countryside that I don’t want to give up on and adapt to the bucolic context over time.”
You said you would like to write, what relationship does it have with Sardinian literature?
«Sardinian literature was a transition for me, I loved writers like Satta, Dessì or Atzeni, and I certainly recognize that a twentieth-century school exists. In the modern era I really like the noir line of investigation, which in my opinion finds its great watershed in the pre and post Massimo Carlotto.”
You have traveled a lot, lived in Australia: how do you deal with the fact that your children grow up in Italy and specifically in Sardinia?
«In the privileged West, being in Sardinia is certainly a blessing, for geophysical conditions and beauty, but with the disadvantage of living in a country heavily penalized by the absence of prospects, immersed in fear and weighed down by policies never aimed at the future. In this matryoshka, I hope they cultivate fortunes, but still find the space to travel and open up to the world, a necessary condition for human development regardless of where one is born. And I hope they live to do a job that fulfills them, not that allows them to earn a lot of money.”
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