Esco dal mio corpo e ho molta paura: Gli inediti 1979–1986

Esco dal mio corpo e ho molta paura: Gli inediti 1979–1986[lower-alpha 1] is the third album by Italian rock band Elio e le Storie Tese.

Esco dal mio corpo e ho molta paura: Gli inediti 1979–1986
Studio album / live album by
Elio e le Storie Tese
ReleasedNovember 1993 (1993-11)[1]
RecordedOctober 1993[2]
StudioRegson Studio, Milan, Italy
GenreRock
Length70:55
Label
ProducerJualin[1]
Elio e le Storie Tese chronology
İtalyan, rum casusu çikti
(1992)		 Esco dal mio corpo e ho molta paura: Gli inediti 1979–1986
(1993)		 Eat the Phikis
(1996)

It is a "fake" live album (actually recorded live, but in a recording studio in Milan with an audience made up of the band's relatives and friends) featuring many songs written and performed by the band during their early pre-fame phase, in the 1980s, which were not included on the previous records.[3]

Track listing
  1. "Ùnanimi" – 1:21
  2. "Noi siamo i giovani (con i blue jeans)" – 3:00
  3. "Catalogna" – 3:06
  4. "Abbecedario" – 3:22
  5. "Cadavere spaziale" – 4:13
  6. "Zelig: la cunesiùn del pulpacc" – 3:35
  7. "La saga di Addolorato" – 9:56
  8. "Cavo" – 3:57
  9. "La ditta" – 2:08
  10. "Ocio ocio" – 4:21
  11. "You" – 2:41
  12. "Aü" – 1:06
  13. "Faro" – 3:48
  14. "(Gomito a gomito con l') Aborto" – 3:58
  15. "Né carne né pesce" – 7:44
  16. "Sono Felice" – 4:41
  17. "Amico uligano" – 4:14
  18. "Ho molta paura" – 3:34

Overview and songs

According to the liner notes in the booklet and to a press release (quoted in its entirety on Elio e le Storie Tese Onlain, "Marok"'s fan website)[3], the album was recorded as a response to demands by early fans of the band: after they had become well-known on the Italian alternative rock scene following the relative chart success of their first two albums, they were constantly being asked by fans to play old songs like "Catalogna" and "Addolorato" when they performed in clubs, but they rarely complied. In the press release, the band essentially stated that the album was a way for them to get rid of a number of old, unreleased songs by actually releasing them, so they could record and release newer ones. However, the booklet explicitly stated that "Alfieri", a common closer of early shows and a fan favourite, is absent from the record. (A recording of it would later feature on Del meglio del nostro meglio Vol. 1.) A number of cover versions with parodied lyrics were also not featured, because of copyright reasons.[3] The album was recorded in the style of a stand-up comedy show, with frontman Elio delivering comedic monologues (in a fairly neutral tone) as spoken intros to songs, as well as within some of the songs - and occasionally giggling at his own jokes.

The songs
  • "Ùnanimi" ["Unanimous", but with a deliberately wrong accent on the first U] is an a cappella performance by the band, where all of them (including drummer Christian Meyer), singing in unison and clapping their hands, state that they agree on everything except swearing; indeed, when they actually arrive to their favourite vulgarities, everyone says his own.[3] The lyrics feature a reference to "Alfieri" in the line "Siam gli alfieri dell'impero Sbor" ["We are the ensigns of the Sbor empire"], where "Sbor" is both the Czech word for "choir" [4] and a pun on the mildly vulgar Italian slang term for cum, which also reappears in the following verse. The ending includes a slight quote from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro. The main melody of "Ùnanimi" would be used (together with a short quote from the prelude, or Marche en rondeau, from Marc-Antoine Charpentier's late 1600s Te Deum - commonly known as "Eurovision Theme" or "Eurovision Hymn", as it is played before every broadcast by the network), as the basis for the band's 2000 single "La gente vuole il gol" (i.e. "People just want goals"), a parody anthem for the UEFA Euro 2000 European association football championship.
  • Taking its cue from the opening line of Catherine Spaak's 1964 song "L'esercito del surf", "Noi siamo i giovani" ["We are the young ones"] is a 1960s parody concerning youth culture - one of the band's favourite themes - and specifically about boys getting orchitis as a result of wearing their jeans too tight. According to Elio's spoken intro, this song featured a gezz lyric (a pun on the Italian phonetic spelling of jazz), i.e. completely improvised.
  • "Catalogna" is a rock/hard rock song, vaguely in the style of Deep Purple, featuring keyboardist Sergio Conforti (a.k.a. Rocco Tanica) on Hammond organ and synth; the lyrics are about puntarelle intended as the actual vegetable, but also as a sex enhancer and sex toy. The concluding lines are set to a waltz beat and include a vague musical reference to the theme from Popeye the Sailor.[3] Mike Francis guests on backing vocals.
  • "Abbecedario" ["Alphabet schoolbook"] is the band's first officially released song, on a 1985 compilation entitled Musica metropolitana [Metropolitan music].[5] It is a reggae song (but with unexpected forays into off-beat bars), which starts with Elio singing a typical reggae-like "Uh yeah yeah yeah", followed by a strictly nonsense line which has been interpreted by fans in several and occasionally absurd ways.[3] The rest of the lyrics, although they are superficially about a salesman of laminated plastic materials (and introduced by Elio as such), are mostly nonsense as well, including a number of malapropisms and unconnected sentences.
  • "Cadavere spaziale" ["Space corpse"] is the first of the band's recurring live performances of cover versions played very straight and with virtually no changes from the original versions. In this case, it is a cover of the same-titled novelty song from 1964, performed here by its original singer Riz Samaritano.[6] The song, which has nothing to do with space, is about a man who, after a heavy meal in a restaurant, dreams about a horribly disfigured criminal who was killed with two gunshots in his heart and seven nails hammered into his hand; the narrator also tells about pushing the murdered man into a coffin, where he did not fit, and refers to him as a "space corpse".[7]
  • "Zelig: la cunesiùn del pulpacc" ["The linking of the calf muscle" in Milanese], is a mock-folk song, sung in the dialect of Milan and dedicated to Giancarlo Bozzo, founder and co-owner of the historical Zelig comedy club, where the band had its debut; Bozzo is nicknamed "link" and "calf muscle" because of the apparently abnormal dimensions of his sex organs.[3]. The song, whose lyrics are about the club (ironically mentioning drug addicts, gays and people with AIDS as perpetual outcasts from it), was originally conceived as a theme tune for the club itself, but the band was out-voted for it against Bruno Lauzi. All of the band members are featured on this track on different instruments than their usual ones: Tanica plays acoustic guitar, guitarist Davide Civaschi (a.k.a Cesàreo) plays the transverse flute (normally Elio's instrument), bassist Nicola Fasani (a.k.a. Faso) plays the alto saxophone. Elio himself forgets some of the words.[3]
  • "La saga di Addolorato" ["Addolorato's saga"], consistently with its title, is a long [lower-alpha 2] 3-part song, with two nearly identical rock/prog rock sections framing a standard 12-bar blues, most of which is a parody of James Taylor's "Steamroller Blues".[3] In the spoken intro, Elio describes the lyrics to the song as another example of a gezz lyric, but the only actually improvised parts are the lyrics to the blues section and the lengthy spoken sections. The lyrics to the rock section, written in a very taut, calculated style, tell the "sad" story of a ten-brothers family whose youngest offspring, named Addolorato (literally "sorrowful" and normally used in Italy in its feminine form (addolorata) as a reference to Our Lady of Sorrows), is bullied and ostracized by his nine brothers - all with names ending in "-ino" - whose idea of fun is ass-fucking him regularly. In the third and last section, Addolorato takes revenge on his family by copulating with girls on the beach, while his brothers, who have been playing among themselves all the time and systematically ignoring him, end up masturbating.[8]
  • "Cavo" ["Cable"] is a parody of a love song, sung passionately in the style of a serenade, where a wannabe electric guitarist (Elio) would like to pursue a girl by playing his guitar for her, but he is frustrated by the defective cable on his guitar, which keeps getting unwelded; in the chorus, he implores the cable itself not to come undone and he ironically states that he is as good as 1970s Israelite illusionist/impostor Uri Geller, were it not for the cable. The song is introduced by Elio as "Cavo della mia chitarra" ["Cable of my guitar"] - a parody of Claudio Villa's 1957 romantic song "Corde della mia chitarra" ["Strings on my guitar"].[3]
  • "La ditta" ["The firm"] is a jazz parody, where a very relaxed swing mood is completely overturned by a deliberately vulgar, scurrilous lyric about shit, also including several amusing but somewhat disturbing references to coprophagia, associating it with the band members. The lyrics have been interpreted by fans as a harsh critique of the music industry - with the titular "firm" referring to the industry itself - but such an interpretation has never been confirmed (or, for that matter, denied) by the band.[3]
  • "Ocio ocio" ["Beware beware" in Milanese, literally "eye eye"] is a punk rock song with reggae interludes, partly based on the riff from "Burn" by Deep Purple.[3]. Its lyrics, a general warning against the dangers of excessive wealth, quote the well-known parable about the rich man and Lazarus, as well as a paraphrase of "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," from the Gospel of Matthew; they are written in a slightly lightweight tone, despite their serious subject matter, with a few nonsense lines (both in Italian and in English) inserted throughout.[9]
  • "You" is another ballad parody, sung as a duet by Elio and Tanica and featuring two verses in simplified English and two more in Italian, degenerating into nonsense at the end[10] with a mention of the following song on the album, "Aü". According to Elio's spoken intro to the song, it was inspired by his and Tanica's shared belief, during their first meeting, that both of them were gay (whereas none of them were); the singer also states that their extremely short-lived "romantic relationship" lasted only one day, after which they wrote the song.[11]
  • "Aü" is a very short[lower-alpha 3] Dixieland song, based on a repeated vocoded sample of the titular nonsense word, after which Elio and Cesàreo, using an exaggerated and fake American accent, sing a reference to "Mandingo, the secret of porn stars", a 1970s ointment sold as a sex enhancer, but later revealed to be fake - as it consisted of a chili pepper-based pomade.[3]
  • "Faro" ["Lighthouse"] juxtaposes romantic verses in 6
    8     time, about two people falling in love on a beach near a lighthouse, with a vulgar punk rock chorus, only consisting in the repeated lyric "Ma vaffanculo" [i.e. "Just fuck you"]. It is freely paraphrased from Daniele Pace's 1979 song "Vaffanculo", which featured a very similar structure.[3]
  • "(Gomito a gomito con l') Aborto" ["Shoulder-to-shoulder with) Abortion", literally "Elbow-to-elbow"] is a sentimental ballad in the style of late 1960s-1970s pop band I Camaleonti, whose singer Antonio "Tonino" Cripezzi duets with Elio on this track. The lyrics, freely referencing the 1981 Italian anti-abortion referendum (which resulted in a failure to abolish an anti-abortion law, thus keeping abortion practices fully legal) are about a personification of abortion, seen as a friend rather than somebody/something to be scared of. The song includes overt quotes from Armando Trovajoli's 1962 song "Roma, nun fa' la stupida stasera" ["Rome, don't be silly tonight"] (from the musical Rugantino) and from Antonello Venditti's 1972 song "Roma capoccia" ["Rome, the boss"] (also about Rome and sung in dialect), as well as a passing reference to "Amico" (1978) by Renato Zero.[3]
  • "Né carne né pesce" ["Neither flesh not fish"] is a complex prog song, with several time signature changes, about a very apprehensive shoe seller who ignores all of his customers because of his recurring bursts of anxiety. The title is a reference to the British idiom "neither fish nor flesh", used as a metaphor for an indecisive person. In the song, multi-instrumentalist Paolo Panigada (a.k.a. Feiez or Mu Fogliasch), who passed away in 1998, sings a verse in English - mostly a literal translation of Elio's lyrics.
  • "Sono Felice" ["I am Felice", but literally "I am happy"] is a parody of Milva's same-titled song from 1990, written by Ron, which is about an unhappy lovelorn woman, despised by her partner, who ironically declares she is very happy. Elio's lyrics, instead, are about bicycle racer Felice Gimondi, described as being tired and frustrated by his long-standing rivalry with Eddy Merckx.[3]
  • "Amico uligano" ["Hooligan friend", in Italian phonetic spelling], the very first theme tune (1992) produced by the band for Gialappa's Band's soccer-themed satire TV show Mai dire Gol, is a cheerful-sounding dance-pop song featuring sweet but simultaneously serious lyrics about hooligans; Elio addresses a young hooligan (defined as a "man-child") and invites him to change his violent ways before incurring in something bad - namely, death or imprisonment. The song includes a number of musical quotes: a tune from "Firenze Santa Maria Novella" by Pupo, a brass passage mirroring the theme tune from 90° minuto, a line from "Eppur mi son scordato di te" by Lucio Battisti and a lyrical quote from the Italian theme tune to the cartoon series Dennis the Menace, sung in Italy by voice actress Paola Tovaglia - a frequent guest of the band's before her untimely death in 1994.[3] Soul singer Alex Baroni, who also passed away tragically before his time, guests here on backing vocals.
  • The album closer "Ho molta paura" ["I am very scared"] is a medley, devised by Elio, of extremely short excerps of various old songs (mostly consisting in the very start of a song, the title line and its very end), either ones included on the album or absent from it. The song ends with two different voicemails, played simultaneously on the two stereo channels, received on an answering machine by keyboard player Sergio Conforti (a.k.a. Rocco Tanica). In the messages, an anonymous elderly lady from Milan, apparently mistaking Tanica for the band's lead singer, angrily insults him for the profane content of the band's songs, accusing him (among other things) of having mentally corrupted her son. Tanica, who nicknamed the lady "Nasty Sciura" ("Sciura" being Milanese for "madam"), originally played the messages during various episodes of the band's early comedy show Telekommando, on the Italian MTV-analogue TV channel Videomusic.[12]

Album artwork

The front cover of the album is a reference to the band's early days, when Tanica promoted the band's gigs through self-made posters - where he replaced the band members' heads with porn stars. Here, the band members' then-current faces (including, for the first time, drummer Christian Meyer) were pasted in the same way (but by means of CGI) over the bodies of Tanica's family in a very old (1970s) family photo shot in their garden - except for Feiez, whose adult face was pasted over an ugly-looking childhood photo of him.[3]

Personnel
  • Stefano Belisari as Elio – vocals
  • Sergio Conforti as Rocco Tanica – piano, keyboards
  • Davide Civaschi as Cesàreo – electric guitar
  • Nicola Fasani as Faso – bass
  • Paolo Panigada as Feiez – sax, guitar, keyboards, vocals
  • Christian Meyer as Tupi "Turtello Christianmeyer" Hermannmeyer – drums

Guest musicians

  • Riz Samaritano – vocals on track 5
  • Antonio Cripezzi – vocals on track 14
  • Amedeo "Demo" Morselli – trumpet on tracks 7, 9, 14 and 15
  • Daniele Comoglio & Davide Ghidoni – sax and trumpet on tracks 9 and 17
  • Letizia Hermann – sax on track 9
  • Roberto Vernetti – keyboards
  • Mike Francis – backing vocals on track 3
  • Alex Baroni – backing vocals on tracks 4 and 17

Footnotes
  1. The title can be translated as "I come out of my body and I am very scared: The unreleased songs 1979–1986". It is a jocular reference to an out-of-body experience, as often quoted in the 1970s–early 1980s Italian astrology magazine Astra.[3]
  2. The stated duration in the booklet is 9:58, but the recorded performance actually clocks in at 10:05.
  3. Stated to have a duration of 1:06 on the booklet, the actual recording is even shorter, clocking in at 0:56.

References
  1. "Esco dal mio corpo e ho molta paura (Gli inediti 1979-1986)". Discografia Nazionale della Canzone Italiana (in Italian). Retrieved 22 August 2015.
  2. "Elio E Le Storie Tese – Esco Dal Mio Corpo E Ho Molta Paura: Notes". Discogs. Retrieved 27 September 2019.
  3. "Esco dal mio corpo e ho molta paura". Marok. Retrieved 27 November 2019.
  4. Definition of Czech sbor on WordReference
  5. Musica metropolitana on Discogs
  6. Riz Samaritano's "Cadavere spaziale" on YouTube
  7. https://elioelestorietese.it/canzoni/cadavere-spaziale/ Song lyrics on the band's official website]
  8. Song lyrics on the band's official website
  9. Song lyrics on the band's official website
  10. Song lyrics on the band's official website
  11. Elio introducing the song on the CD before the actual performance.
  12. Telekommando featuring Rocco Tanica and Nasty Sciura, on YouTube.


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