Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

April is the cruellest month - always has been, and always will be, just like tuesdays never come out right; but there is hope at the end of the tunnel, glimpsed briefly through the showers. In those long northern winters, when you’re cooped up, it seems natural to think ahead, to dream - more often than not about getting things that will make you happy, a new laptop, i-phone, gadget bullshit. But you know, really, that the heat of the sun on your face is what you need/want.

Get yourself ready, then, for that first moment when you can sit in the gaze of the returned sun. And there’s no better companion (or presager of the moment) than this song by one-time Man-at-Work Colin Hay. A simple guitar, strumming purposefully and naturally as a wave, and a voice that’s like warmth itself.

“My, my, my it’s a beautiful world, I like swimming in the sea” - banal, beautiful, and perfectly structured. It doesn’t mess about, and with authority lets you know that cynicism, irony, and smart-arsed back-watching have no-place in this particular three-minutes. This is a song where you can check thousands of years of evolutionary defence mechanisms at the door, and relax in the moment.

There’s no need for me to single out the lines that made me smile, that made me sing-along - they’re all clear to the ear, out in the open. All you have to do is listen, and be grateful that Hay is brave / wise enough to have brought these sentiments out into the open. Sit back and relax. “Perhaps this is as good as it gets”.

Wailing “God Bless America…” is not the selling point on which you can convince someone of a song’s cathartic merits, even if this song magnifies in grace over one of the most astounding cinematic closing sequences ever, James Guercio’s wirey, disillusioned, Electra Glide In Blue. Tell Me, also written by Guercio, and delivered as a stinging heartbroken lament for the common man by Chicago’s Terry Kath, swings on a pendulum that the furstrated U.S.A 1973 is bitterly laid bare. You’ve heard it all before, here’s a cop just trying to do his job, coming up against the Volkswagen mini-buses jammed with the bummed-out who can’t swim anymore through the bullshit equally the fault of Democrats as it is of Republicans. Something is going to give on the windy highway while Nixon and McGovern find time for a round or two of golf.

Tell Me swings that pendulum in its favour on two things, firstly, the recognition of the bullshit, and how the “everyday Joe” is being alienated from their own national sense of belonging on a daily basis, and secondly, it is quite frankly one of the most beautiful songs ever. The “America” that Guercio writes of, stunningly captured in all of its naked horror and beauty by Kath’s downtrodden raspiness is not the jingoisitc flag waving utopia, it is one of moustached middle-aged men watching the sun go down with a few beers, wondering if they will have a job in a few weeks time. It is the America of the cop knowing he’s always going to be a pig no matter how many helpless kids he will plough through bone-chilling water for in a blacker than black lake on a murky December night.

Officer John Wintergreen and Terry Kath are inseperable, as the cruelty of America’s million and one ironies rip them down in the quick fire way classic cinema is grounded upon. One a pre-cursor of the other’s tragedy, the other an angel of death trying to grasp his own emotional wreckage and sing for the souls of the highway, the rocky peaks, and the alienated Americans who sweep through it everyday. These are the Americans in one of the ultimate people songs, an America lost and alone, not of the shitty politicians for whom blasphemy goes hand in hand with saluting a tattered flag. Tell Me will break your heart, with or without Wintergreen’s demise or Kath’s spectre moaning through the gospel choir who keep him standing up straight, it’s a broken heart worth having though. If you want the real State of the Union address, go ask Messers Guercio, Kath, and Wintergreen. Then you’ll know just how important that blessing really is.

Serafino Murru passed away in 1994. It would be difficult though to accept the terminal shockwaves of this roughly sketched street balladeer after the scraping acoustic spears of Lo Scudetto In Sardegna rip through any dustclouds gathered in the decades since Luigi Riva and the Rossoblu last ran rings around mainland hierarchies. Murru is the archetypal everyman, a sage of Cagliari’s back alleys, mews, and streets only mopeds dare to venture. Football is in the right hands (and feet naturally), one of the purest tribal expressions of cultural pride and a definitive sense of liminal defiance. In stepped Murru the musical poet in 1970, to frame with a jaunty Meditteranean cantu everything Cagliari’s only Serie A title to date meant not just to the city itself, what it meant to the whole of Sardinia too. With Sunday morning sunlight glancing across the piazza, and plump genial priests a few minutes late for kicking off mass as they bestoy a little more grace than usual on Boninsegna and co., Lo Scudetto In Sardegna is officially declared the thinking man and woman’s perscription for years of Vindaloo sickness and salt of the earth types whose only grasp of Romantic languages is Olé Olé Olé. Murru, the Cardinal, and the kid kicking a soggy tennis ball off a sandstone wall would also agree, that it really is a beautiful game when everything falls into place with delicate ease of Angelo Domenghini leaving another libero lying flat out on his arse. Bellissimo Serafino, bellissimo.

St. Vitus Dance - what does it conjure up in your musical mind? Probably visions of doom-metal bands, either the original gloom merchants Black Sabbath, or various Scandinavian cardboard copycats. Maybe it’s the medieval buzz, and visions of Brueghel, but the title always brought to mind frigid northern metal more than anything else.

How wrong can you be, though. The St. Vitus Dance - il ballo di San Vito - is hot, hot, hot, and belongs , as this song puts it ‘in southern soil, the land where the land finishes’ (’terra di sud,  terra dov’e finisce la terra’). 

Stick on the song, and let’s wander back in time to the middle ages in Southern Italy, to a time when horizons were limited and where suspicions were always high. In a number of cities small outbursts of ‘hysterical’ dancing were observed unkindly by the clerics - hipshakes have always been frowned upon by Mother Church.

Different theories abounded as to the cause of the mania - the theory that gave the dance its local name, the tarantella, was based on the idea that it was as a type of poisoning caused by the bite of the tarantula. Others presumed that the dance in fact developed as a way to avoid being bitten by a tarantula. Either way, it got your mojo working.

Against the idea that the collective dance was caused by a spider was the fact that in a number of German cities the same thing occured - and, God knows, it would take more than a spider-bite to get your average Teuton to dance feverishly.  The Devil’s work then - so prayers to St. Vitus, patron saint of dance, were required.

The one thing that was obvious to all, though, was that this was an infectious thing. If you witnessed someone dancing this hot-coals and hair unfurled dance, you were bound to get caught up in its sway. A little like this rhythmic masterpiece from Italy’s answer to Tom Waits, Vinicio Capossela.

The Tom Waits tag is slightly unfair, given that this Jazz & Blues gypsy troubadour has his own distinctive sound and style, honed out over years of extensive touring in Italy and now throughout Europe. What the hell though, if it’s a way to get you to drop your provincial bias and give him a listen, then it’s worth the tag.

So, without further ado, turn on the song, step back and picture in front of your eyes men and women dancing as if possesed, as if bitten by something you can’t see, and then join the dance.