In queste pagine trovate un po' tutto quello che riguarda Davide e che non rientra al 100% nella musica, come ad esempio racconti e poesie.
It was May 11th, 1965 when Davide Bernasconi, i.e.
Van De Sfroos, came to life. But his fans were still unaware of
this. A new village, Mezzegra, and new eyes. He was more or less 4 years old when his parents decided to move to the tiny village on the lake Como, where Davide would learn stories of people and secrets of fishes, where he would nourish a sort of well-meant curiosity to be used as a fish-hook to fill his memory bag with events, anecdotes, legends and merry-go-rounds of imagination by all those poets – unaware of being such – who daily peopled the tiny square on the lake in front of the balcony of his house. And a song as a box where everything could be guarded, once he gave up his elastic gun to take up his guitar.
Passion for music shook him in his youth. It often happened to young people with fedina musicale un po’ sporca: they used to go about with a portable radio of 25 kilos on their shoulders, letting all sorts of musical contamination go beyond the boundaries of the “already heard” and intentionally opposing them to the rhythmic basis of the occasional musical obsessions of that time, which tried to capture every dancing mind. So it was that the Ramones overlapped a Mino Reitano and from a mazurka you slipped to Bob Marley and Johnny Rotten always had something to shout as you were coming out of a beat mass. A wonderful confusion that convinced Davide to join the Potage, a definitely original post-punk band with which he spent most of the 80s while developing a chaotic-ironic potential which would later give good results. A lizard bitten some years before, Creuza de ma by De Andrè and an unintentional funny remark by Ghezzi, the local barber: three key points that convinced David Action of the Potage to put an end to a punk-like chapter and start writing what would later be defined as the folk-rock by Davide Van De Sfroos. De Andrè: admiration, inspiration and a question: why not? The dialect spoken on the Lake Como is tight but not impenetrable, it is rough but not less poetic than others, it is colourful, lively and still used to think, pray, laugh, curse and cry. Creuza de ma and the sounds of the Sardinian dialect enthralled Davide so much as to convince him that in order to tell the story of a lake, of the lake in front of him, nothing was more suitable than the sounds of the dialect that had combined its water and its people from time out of mind, the dialect of Tremezzo. “We have given life to a new band: we play and sing tales of the village, tales of desperate people, tales of smuggling” – said Davide to Ghezzi. “Ah… Sònuff de sfroos" – the barber answered between a scissor cut and a comb brush. De Sfroos, that is “illegally”, like the illegal trade of smugglers. Razor cut, perfect, precise, that was the name to be used to label the new project. The taste of a lizard once marked his palate and his sleep: new consciousness would follow.
Stones, roots, waves, moons, glasses, boats and windows are bricks of human life on which the profile of the third phantom-shadow could be drawn. The third shadow is the one you bring inside of you, the one that goes through your body and calls everything with names chosen by the wind. The third shadow. Davide may have tried to put it onto the country bus to Como one day, so that it could complete his studies in his place: clearly someone did not understand this. The poetic vein springing from this anomalous blood red lake wave would brighten the oil paint with which the artist would colour his songs, right from the start. Ciulandari (1992), Viif (1994), Manicomi (1995) were the first three boxes in which Davide, by then Van De Sfroos, arranged stories, laughter and daily tragedies in suitable confusion, describing them with the musicality typical of the language that had seen them arising. New memories set in motion by using an almost disappearing vehicle and music as fuel. At first you laugh because you find the exploits of mysterious Aunt Luisa and of an Obscene outside but not inside really amusing and almost epic, then you are astonished when a Curiera (= country bus) takes your 4-year-old son’s head and your mother’s grey one around for a trip. Finally you realise that your relatives are not the only ones who are affected by the cheerful fever of this lake wave. Then, one day, in a newspaper you read about the participation of De Sfroos as a supporting band at a concert of Sting in Como and you couldn’t believe it! As a matter of fact, not a word of this was true: the newspaper was dated April 1st. The fact that many had believed it, however, did mean something! De Sfroos band saw its popularity gradually increase at each concert and Manicòmi sold briskly and easily. After that, the band broke up, just like the Police. Davide’s desire to communicate, however, did not decrease. In the meantime his book of poems Forgiven by lizards (1997) was published. In each page the artist lets the reader understand his nature. Lake water as ink, each recollection as a pen by which travel notes can be written down in the silent music of the words that are only thought of. Other stories, therefore, told in a more intimist tone than the one we were used to hear at concerts. The latter, moreover, were now replaced by rare performances on his own. Following the arrow and not the target, as a good guru of his emotions, Davide went through a period of not so favourable winds, but, as it often occurs, discouragement can turn out to be humus for the creative development of an artist. That’s how gloomy thoughts and an open window gave life to Ventanas, one of his most touchy poem-songs recorded only later, full of sad colours but also of the soft and warm colours of hope. It would be worth giving him a hammer as a present, if such wonderful curses come out each time he smashes his finger… I’m just joking!
Bréva e Tivan (1999) was the effort with which he closed the uncertain chapter of the previous years. To hold the audience spellbound from the stage was then Davide Van De Sfroos Band, composed of skilful musicians, professionally without fixed abode. The image of story- teller minstrel just hinted at before got more defined. What was new in this album was the introduction of more introspective songs, of whose coming unpopularity he was himself the first one to be aware. This was the case with La Balada del Genesio, Pulenta e galèna fregia or even Bréva e Tivan. The astonishment was great when, instead, he noticed the audience’s participation, praise and, last but not least, sincere emotion. Even Sanremo and Tenco Prize noticed him and in the 1999 edition of Sanremo the band was called for a performance at Ariston. The award was called SIAE-Best Emerging Artist and the winner was called Davide Van De Sfroos. It was supposedly a good evening, the right evening for kicking some grey shadows away. I do not think I am too daring if I state that it was exactly this wave of emotional potential that gave birth to a group of “mutants” fascinated and fond of that mixture of words and music. One day Davide himself called them Cauboi, like the wandering characters of one of his songs. And so they are now because they have never given up following him everywhere. The only difference is that now they are more. . "I was in bed with ‘flu
and I was thinking of strange stories…” this is the
first line of the preview to Capitan
Slaff (2000), … but I won’t say anything about the
above-mentioned hammer… Capitan Slaff is an epic poem in dialect
written with the conviction that imagination is a mighty power that
can satisfy even more than reality. The sacredness of good and evil
fight against each other and plot together till they mix, drenched
on the bank of the lake Lario (alternative name of the lake Como)
at an indefinite time. It is evident the interest in reviving epic
legends and characters of great and unknown fame. Both in the song-writer
Van de Sfroos and in the poet Bernasconi there is a strong desire
to look at events from a different point of view, which can save
surprises or make things less tragic, if necessary. Cain
and Abel, Adam
and Eve, Noah
himself, as they are told in the mini-album “La
Poma”, lose much of their biblical-tragic strictness and
acquire comic-awkward shades. The unconventional personality that
characterizes them turns them into entities that could be detached
from the Holy Book and thrown amid everyday people, who are busy
with nothing and caught only by what happened yesterday, like a
Sügamara
knight on his stolen moped. Sügamara is one of the many souls travelling in E semm partii (2001), the album of restlessness, of the desire of something else or something beyond. In any case it was for Davide a vehicle used to travel and to communicate his creativity beyond the usual boundaries, accepting the challenge of a path made more difficult by the harshness of dialect, but armed with his own curiosity and trust in other people’s curiosity. He reveals a world of his own, made not so much of prejudices or attempt at understanding, but of tales and stories and it would have been a pity to keep them inside, especially when one has a talent for telling stories. After attending many of his “distant” concerts as one of the caubois and after listening to the impressions of those attending even “more distant” concerts, I can say that the tour has been following a good track. Assessment parameters: decibels sul lollorollo , number of legs hopping in each square metre and frequency of emotional beats scattered about among music notes, when that guy sets about it.
All the noises and the moods of the several concerts following this album have been recorded on a double CD, “Laiv” (2002). Among the tracks there are also 4 unpublished songs, one of which is an exhilarating remake of Frank's Wild Years by Tom Waits in dialect, which was sung during his second participation in Tenco Prize in 2002 After that, he started talking about fishes, or, better, about what fishes can suggest to human memory. "Le parole sognate dai pesci” (= The words dreamt by fishes) is a short book, which you can read again and again, if you read it a first time and you like it, just as it happens with a good record. It is organized just like a fish, with a head, a fish-bone and a tail. Within the fish there are different stories bound each to each by the thread of memory. Recollections create important and strong roots, anchored to and often hidden among the thoughts of a “mentally unstable” personality, to mention the typical words used in a clinic, or “foeu de sentiméent" (=out of his senses), to mention the words that would be used in a bar. Within the fish there are shadows, strongboxes with freedom to be guarded and found again after the folds of life have confused you. Within the fish there are words charged with all the meanings that can be given to them: “matters that only mosquitoes can understand” . Out of the fish, out of the lake, there is Davide, who can’t give up watching the sheet of water in front of him to steal in his own way the stories reflected in it and later tell them to us. Because keeping them inside is a great pity and he is really good at telling them.
Diego Spinola
Translated by Rosi
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