La terra dei cachi

The land of persimmons

Autori: Belisari -Conforti- Civaschi-Fasani (Elio e le Storie Tese)

It was this song that brought wide public recognition to Elio e le Storie Tese, thanks to Sanremo where the piece came second in the 1996 edition after having been in the lead until the last evening. There was even talk of irregularities in the voting which ultimately awarded Ron and Tosca. The piece, somewhere between serious and facetious, reveals a long string of vices in contemporary Italy, habits and customs, scandals and clichés, with an amusing play of words against a melody that is immediately catchy, as Pippo Baudo emphasized during the awards ceremony. It is a sum of virtuosity in the lyric writing (with a debt to both Battiato and Rodolfo De Angelis), composition and instrumentation by the most original and technically gifted group in recent decades. With La terra dei cachi, Elio e le Storie Tese reconciled the critics - who have always exalted them - and the public - often disoriented by their sometimes avant-garde, sometimes cabaret style, and therefore not always ready to follow their tightrope antics. However, they made it without losing their irreverent spirit, which led them, on the final evening, to dress as rocket ship aliens and perform the song at a faster tempo, "compressed" into 55 seconds, to circumvent the obligation to keep it within a minute. For another twenty years La terra dei cachi enjoyed television visibility as the theme song for various RAI broadcasts (Italia si, Italia no; La terra dei cuochi; Il grande match) and was re-recorded in a ballroom dance version with the Raoul Casadei Orchestra.