| "Amongst the cognoscenti, Picchio dal Pozzo is regarded as one of the most original, impressive and highly respected of all the experimental groups to have come out of Italy in the 1970s. They share their original label with Henry Cow's 'Concerts', also reissued this month, and were early invitees to the canonical 'Recommended Sampler'.
Aldo De Scalzi, Andrea Beccari, Giorgio Karaghiosoff and Paulo Griguolo all met at infant school and began playing Teleman, Corelli, Bach and Mozart together in their school orchestra. In 1969, Aldo's brother, one of the locally hailed 'New Trolls', founded his own recording studio, and the proto-Picchios, then about 12 years old, began hanging out there, messing around with the instruments and studio equipment. In 1974 the studio asked them to record an LP for its label, obliging them to come up with a name. They chose Picchio dal Pozzo (see below) from the nonsense lyric that ends one of their songs. They didn't have a drummer, so they invited Aldo Di Marco. Later Claudio Lugo (sax) and Roberto Romani (sax) also joined, and by 1975, the group was doing concerts and attracting attention. They were invited by the local council to set up a music school in 1977, and at the same time they started to make music in a psychiatric hospital. These activities introduced them to Area's ex-singer Demetrio Stratos, with whom they then collaborated until his premature death in 1979. 'Abbiamo' was originally released by l'Orchestra Cooperativa in 1980, after which the group officially wound up. Four of them, the two Aldos, Claudio Lugo and Paulo Griguolo continued to work together on various disparate projects, recently recording a new CD using saved audio material from Demetrio Stratos. It was released in 2004 as 'Pic_nic@Valdapozzo'. Currently this group is working on a DVD with interviews and a collection of old and unreleased pieces. An opera is planned for 2007, based on texts written across 300 feet of walls around the asylum by a man who spent his entire life in a Tuscan asylum because of a bureaucratic mistake. This re-mastered reissue commemorates PdP's 30th anniversary. See www.picchiodalpozzo.com.
Note: all PdP lyrics are untranslatable since they are based on nonsense or linguistic jokes. They are all Mel Brooks fans. Picchio is a woodpecker; Pozzo means Well and the particle Dal means of, so the name roughly renders as The Woodpecker of the Well. Abbiamo tutti I suoi problemi is a grammatical error and translates as 'We all have his problems' (intending to mean everyone has their own problems)."-Chris Cutler, ReR Megacorp |