Luca Ferrari’s research on musicians on the edge of mainstream success

Transmission 105: Interview with Luca Ferrari

An Italian writer, poet, and archivist, Luca Ferrari is known for his extensive research and writing on avant-garde and fringe musical artists. He has authored numerous books exploring the lives and works of figures such as Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart, and Mike Taylor, often focusing on artists who existed on the margins of the mainstream music industry.

Ferrari’s work is characterized by a meticulous approach to biographical research, drawing on personal interviews and archival materials to craft detailed accounts of his subjects’ artistic and personal trajectories. His books, including “Tatuato sul Muro” (Tattooed on the Wall) on Syd Barrett and “Out of Nowhere” on Mike Taylor, have been praised for their insights into the creative processes and challenges faced by these unconventional musicians.

In addition to his literary work, Ferrari has been involved in preserving and promoting the legacy of the experimental group Third Ear Band, curating the Ghettoraga Archive, which houses a extensive collection of the band’s recordings, interviews, and other materials. He has also collaborated with avant-garde composer Francesco Paolo Paladino and singer Dorothy Moskowitz on musical projects that explore themes of madness, spirituality, and the human condition.

What inspired your early interest in music? Was there a defining moment that led you toward writing and lyrics?

I grew up in a middle-class family in a small town in northern Italy where culture was a normal thing. My parents were militants of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and adhered to the CGIL (left-wing trade union), and my father, according to the party organization, delivered L’Unità (the official newspaper) door-to-door to ‘comrades’ on Sunday mornings, and from time to time I accompanied him. I must have been about ten years old, it was the beginning of the 1970s. Newspapers, magazines, books, and encyclopedias were a natural thing at home. Newsstands on the street, a colourful merry-go-round full of stimulation. Also, on the radio, returning from school I would eat while listening to “Alto Gradimento” by Arbore and Boncompagni. My grandmothers, to whom we were often entrusted, would read stories and fairy tales to my sister and me, entertaining us with songs and nursery rhymes. One of the first independent reading experiences was Dante’s Comedy illustrated by Gustave Dorè in the 1957 Sonzogno edition. Another stimulating book, sold in handouts at newsstands, was the Bible, also illustrated by Dorè…. I remember being quite impressed by the details of the illustrations, true masterpieces of engraving art.

Then, as a teenager, as is natural came music. At first Battisti, De Gregori, Guccini, Tenco and Lolli; then, towards the end of Middle School, a friend who played drums and regularly bought records made me listen to some rock bands – Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Genesis, ELP… generally English bands of the so-called Progressive Rock. Pink Floyd immediately became my favorite because it gave off an irresistible aura of mystery and intellectualism. My parents gave me the Olivetti Letter 22 typewriter (which I still have) and, almost as a joke, I began to try my hand at writing short stories inspired by Kafka, one of my first loves. At the time, among my readings, I remember a collection of Yiddish short stories by Isaac B. Singer and one by Maupassant. Then would come the Surrealists and Dadaists, Apollinaire, De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, especially the irresistible poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, true detonators for my young mind…

How would you describe the Italian underground scene in the late ’70s and its impact on your work in music and writing?

I always had few friends, I was a guy who tended to be a loner, inclined to keep for reading, writing, listening to music alone – and rarely experienced moments of aggregation typical of the youth movements of the period. Rather than go to a concert, I preferred to sit in my room and listen to the latest King Crimson record I bought with my weekly pocket money, sacrificing anything else. It should be considered, however, that I lived in Cremona, a provincial town with a vocation for violin making and early music, and although it was about eighty kilometres from Milan, in those years it seemed a world apart – provincial, sleepy, really uninspiring.

I remember that an Area concert with Demetrio Stratos in 1977 opened my mind: I was only 14 years old, but it was a crucial moment because I understood that music could be other than what I generally listened to in my daily life. It was then thanks to the anthology “Picnic. A breath of fresh air,” which collected musicians from Harvest, which I bought on offer in a record store in Cremona just because it contained Pink Floyd’s unreleased “Embryo,” that I came across Third Ear Band and was thunderstruck: were sounds that had never been heard before, classical instrumentation used in an alternative way, an atmosphere of esotericism, symbolism emanated from the record’s grooves … how much better to experience a real daydream trip, between a Marvel comic strip magazine and “A Season in Hell.”

Could you take us through the early days of your fanzines, “Octopus” and “Dark Globe”? What was the energy like during that time?

An experience that started solo, like almost everything I’ve done, and then opened up to some collaborations. I began with the idea of writing about Pink Floyd, and Octopus was born: a fanzine entirely typed, photocopied and distributed by me almost for fun and for the love of writing. Keep in mind that at the time, it was 1981, very little information was still circulating about the band: there was a book in French, written by Jean Marie Leduc and published by Albin Michel editions in 1973, which was followed by Rick Sanders’ first English biography the following year, then Miles’ fabulous photo book in 1980.

In Italy, a haphazard collection of unauthorized lyrics had been circulating in record stores since ’77, and the following year Arcana published the infamous collection of translated lyrics edited by Walter Binaghi. “Infamous” because it was based on lyrics inferred by ear from the records, thus largely wrong. So the idea of writing a fanzine was born out of a desire to offer alternative information to that found in the music magazines I used to buy, such as “Ciao 2001”: it should be said for honesty that for a few months there had also been circulating a fanzine called “Pinky,” edited by Edoardo Bertoletti (a guy from Parma), which was truly pioneering and innovative: Edo had direct contacts with Barrett’s fan club in London and published news and materials that were unpublished at least here in Italy. He certainly gave me the impetus to start, trying to offer something alternative, more analytical, trying to get to the bottom of the many obscure aspects of the group’s biography and activity, starting with the discography and precisely the lyrics, on which I started an in-depth revision work. It was from there that sprang a real obsession with Syd Barrett and the idea, after 19 issues of Octopus, of dedicating a fanzine entirely to him… a short-lived experience, because the chance meeting in Cambridge with the musician, represented another turning point in my experience as a writer.…

How did your 1985 meeting with Syd Barrett come about, and how did it influence your work afterward?

I have recounted many times the chance meeting with Barrett in Cambridge that July 16, 1985, on the doorstep of his mother’s house in St. Margaret Square. At the end of an interview in London with Storm Torgherson, Syd’s friend and founder of Hipgnosis, I managed to get the address of the house in Cambridge where Barrett’s mother lived. Storm wrote on a slip of paper “181, Hills Road,” and I don’t know how deliberately wrong he was because the correct house number was 183. I took the train and rushed to Cambridge to interview Mrs Barrett, aware that Syd was said to be living somewhere in London, perhaps at the Hilton Hotel. My idea was to interview her mother and try to find out where Syd lived so I could go and look for him. Except that, having arrived in Hills Road, thanks to Storm’s mistake I discovered that Mrs. Barrett had moved to a new house: the lanky young man who opened up to me had been a childhood friend of Syd’s and accompanied me to Winifred Barrett’s new home in the Cherry Hinton area.

After ringing the door, very unexpectedly I found myself in front of Syd, in good physical shape, balding, beard not done for days, and strange chalk marks on his face and shirt. He gently shook my hand, and I stammered something explaining that I had arrived from Italy and intended to write a book about him, that I would like to ask him some questions. He replied very agitatedly that he had nothing to say, that his mother was not home and that he was sorry but could not say anything. I did not insist because it was obvious that he did not want to talk to me. I thanked him anyway, and we shook hands again.

He quickly re-entered the house and that was it. But from that encounter, from the lively look, attitude and bearing I understood, more likely intuited, that Barrett was himself, present in the world, frightened certainly by my presence (it must be said that there had not been many encounters with strangers up to that time), but aware. A few months passed, and I became convinced that what was being told about him was based on fantasy and scandalous exaggeration, and I decided that this had to be written down, I had to right this wrong and tell the truth, at least what I believed it to be. “Tatuato sul muro” (“Tattooed on the Wall”) was my first book, and the good sales success (three editions in a few years for 8,000 copies sold) convinced me that writing professionally could be my ideal dimension.

After meeting Barrett, you mentioned feeling that his music career had truly ended. How did that realization influence the direction of your book Tatuato sul Muro? In your view, why did Syd Barrett decide to completely retreat from the music world? Do you believe it was a conscious choice or more of a gradual withdrawal?

As I said, meeting him I sensed that things were not as they had been told up to that point. There was something about the man that did not fit the portrait of the drug-crazed zombie out of his mind. Interviews with Blackhill managers, above all, confirmed that much of the musician’s negative reputation was the result of journalistic manipulation. I felt, too, that those involved in Barrett’s human and artistic story had not done all they could to prevent it from happening.

The realization that followed was that first and foremost Barrett would never return to playing music, that the radical rejection of that part of his life was final. He had suffered too much during the months in which he had found himself as a painter composing and playing music as if for fun, becoming an underground legend, and the pressures of the environment, combined with other factors (LSD use, constitutive frailty, anarchic ideality…), had made him irreconcilable with that life. Several times in the interviews that followed his exit from Pink Floyd these realizations emerged clearly, and his next two solo albums were all too emblematic of this attempt to reprocess that suffering. I also thought that Pink Floyd had played a decisive part, so much so that I titled the biography “Tatuato sul Muro” (“Tattooed on the Wall”): Barrett’s story was as if tattooed on Pink Floyd’s, indelibly etched. So it was, so much so that after he passed away in 2006 the band missed no opportunity to pay tribute to his genius, after years in which the four former colleagues had not hesitated to ignore his fate and downplay his importance.

Your biography of Barrett was the first of its kind. What were the challenges in writing about such an enigmatic figure, especially in the 1980s when less information was available?

In a pre-digital era such as the one in which I began writing, the job consisted of setting off by train with a cassette recorder, block notes, camera, the “London Streetfinder” and pushing my luck. Contacts in London with managers, friends, and musicians I found simply by consulting the phone book, and with still immature English I managed to conduct a series of interviews that were crucial for the biographical reconstruction of Syd’s life. Consider that only a few articles worthy of consideration had been published up to that point: certainly Nick Kent’s controversial pieces in the “New Musical Express” (1974-1975), Kris di Lorenzo’s lengthy article in Trouser Press (1978), the French reportage of the fortunate meeting with Syd by two “Actuel” journalists (1982), and little else, much of it included in a book I had edited for Arcana Editrice in 1985 in the successful “I Manuali Rock” series. Add to that the fact that most of the witnesses to the affair (I am thinking of family members, girlfriends, Pink Floyd themselves, Bryan Morrison…) were tight-lipped and unwilling to talk. Also, at that time, in Italy and England no one seemed interested in publishing a biography on him because I was told, Barrett is not a marketable subject. In my latest book on Barrett, which came out a few months ago, titled “Scritto sui Rovi” (“Written on the Brambles”), I wanted to collect much of the material I wrote from the beginning of my research to offer insights into what journalistic work was in those years. A way of working that is inconceivable today….

What motivated you to create the Ghettoraga archive in 2009, and how important has it been in preserving the legacy of the Third Ear Band? How did you go about collecting the material for the Third Ear Band archive, Ghettoraga? Were there any rare or surprising finds during the process of gathering and preserving their legacy?

Actually, Ghettoraga Archive was born many years after my first encounter with the Third Ear Band. As I said, I discovered Third Ear Band in the late 1970s through the Harvest anthology. At that point, charmed by that music, I tried to find the few records available and figure out what had happened to the band. While researching Syd Barrett in London, I interviewed Anthony Moore, a musician-composer whom I have always appreciated, and a few years earlier had released a fabulous album, “World Service.” On that occasion, Moore passed me the contact with Peter Jenner, whom I interviewed a few days later. During an interview with the founder of Blackhill, Pink Floyd’s management agency in 1966 and 1967, focusing on the Syd Barrett story, I could not help but ask him if he knew where the Third Ear Band had gone. With extreme simplicity, Peter told me, “They’ve been disbanded for years but with Glen Sweeney, we still talk. I’ll give you his phone number if you want.” So I started calling him to offer him an interview, but that summer was not an easy thing because Glen turned out to be wary of me. I would only find out sometime later that his first impression of me was that of a bootlegger looking for tapes to release bootlegs! However, I wrote to him throughout the following winter, and the following year, it was 1986, I could meet him at his home in Sheperd’s Bush where he lived with his partner, Carolyn Looker. He seemed to me at first glance to be a washed-up musician, disillusioned, in a state of deep depression, disinterested in getting back into music. I interviewed him (without knowing where to publish the interview!–it would be out later on Vinile, a monthly music publication of Stampa Alternativa) and thus won his trust enough to convince him to reconstitute the band and return to playing.

In Italy, a promoter friend of mine, Gigi Bresciani, who at the time owned the agency Music On (now GeoMusic), and the organizers of Rockin’ Umbria, a festival quite well attended in those years, were interested. From those first two concerts, came four tours in Italy and three new albums, produced by Materiali Sonori of S. Giovanni Valdarno, and a live cassette produced by A.D.N. of Milan. After the band disbanded in 1992 and the subsequent death of Paul Minns, in 1997 I published for Stampa Alternativa the first book on the band as a tribute to their extraordinary and still veiled in mystery history. I realized that it would not be enough to keep the memory and interest in the band alive and, once again on my own, stimulated by a Facebook fans page run by a friend of mine, Mirco Delfino, in 2009 I had the idea of launching the Archive to reconstruct the history and retrieve materials, to circulate them free of charge among fans and insiders. Year by year, the Archive has grown and now offers more than 560 files free of charge, including exclusive interviews, rare photos, flyers and posters, tour programs, analysis articles, reviews, etc. A mighty corpus that in 2020 prompted me to publish a volume collection published by Chris Cutler’s November Books (Recommended Records), “Glen Sweeney’s Book of Alchemies”.

Among the most significant finds, I certainly like to mention the soundtrack to “Abelard & Heloise,” attached to my first book, and the third record recorded in 1970/1971 and never released, “The Dragon Wakes,” which guitarist Denim Bridges has kept in his archive all these years…

Your work spans many unique artists, including Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart, and Mike Taylor. What connects you to musicians on the fringe of the mainstream?

Since my dazzling encounter with Barrett’s story, I have always been attracted to artistic experiences not aligned with the mainstream and the recording industry. Even more than in the past, today I am even annoyed by the success stories with which Western propaganda is fed and attracted to those who, for the most diverse reasons, have decided not to participate in the banquet of cultural consumerism that makes everything a product, an object to be sold and consumed. That is why I consider all my work above all “political” and my books “political,” although as was obvious music journalism has only ever wanted to see them as mere tributes to music.

Musicians like Nick Drake, Tim Buckley, Captain Beefheart, Mike Taylor, and the Third Ear Band… were authentic, pure artists in the sense that they put self-expression before any other reason, starting with the commercial one. Lives considered ‘losers’ from the point of view of the mortifying logic of the market (which still today assesses the value of a work by its sales success) but which for me have paradigmatic, exemplary value because they took alternative paths to those imposed by the record industry, cracking in irreversible terms the logics of profit and the star system.”

Out of all the books and projects you’ve completed, which one do you feel the most connection with, and why?

I generally tend not to look back on what I’ve written all these years. I live time here and now and am always looking for new topics to challenge myself on. So I am proud of all the work I have done so far and at the same time … dissatisfied, because I am convinced that I could certainly have done much better. Like other authors, I generally do not reread my books and leave it to readers or journalists eventually to judge.

However, I must say, among my works, I am most attached to “Tatuato sul Muro”, for the reasons I expressed earlier, and to the biography of Mike Taylor, “Out Of Nowhere”, what I consider ‘the impossible biography,’ because I started from very little information and dared to reconstruct an entire life (albeit only thirty years old) revealing for the first time many aspects of the story of a genuine jazz talent who unfortunately slipped into mental illness and died prematurely under circumstances never clarified.

Also, the short “tribute to Tim Buckley’s demon” is something I’m proud of: the basic idea was to tell the story of the tougher Buckley, not the angel-faced folk minstrel so beloved of the rock journalistic tradition. The musician who had gone too far in his search for sounds and vocals and repaid at the end of his career the public’s and the market’s misunderstanding with provocatively conventional records between blues and soul…”

As for extra-publishing projects, I am certainly very proud of all the work in curating the numerous musical ‘finds’ of the Third Ear Band, starting with the recent remastering of the full Harvest catalogue. Also, very important for me is the collaboration with Paladino and Moskowitz as Dorothy Moskowitz & The United States Of Alchemy, because it has allowed me to express a creative (poetic and literary) dimension that until now had not fully satisfied me, offering me a more transfigured and spiritual vision of reality than the more politically direct and vindictive one of my books with a musical subject.

After writing about folk music in Folk Geneticamente Modificato, what are your thoughts on the current state of Italian folk music?

With “Folk Geneticamente Modificato” (“Genetically Modified Folk”) it was a matter of photographing the existing, of documenting a phenomenon that I found fascinating and significant for our national history. I was collaborating with “Folk Bulletin,” one of the few trade magazines published in those years, and with a friend I was organizing an annual festival of ‘Celtic’ music in the province; I was sincerely interested in understanding more and representing in popular terms this new folk revival, after the hangover of the 1970s that had launched such extraordinary groups as Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino and Musicanova. After reading a great deal of ethnomusicological research, the studies of Lomax, Carpitella, De Martino, Leydi and Bosio, I set out again to recount the energy of this micro-universe in a book that could attract the rock audience and also become a working tool for those in the field.

Today I think our country is going through a long period of crisis, and folk, after that period, partly because of the pandemic blackout, have kind of retreated. I don’t say disappeared, but it seems to me much less present in contemporary culture and the market. It’s a feeling, more than anything else, because today I can’t say I actively deal with it. Further study and analysis based on precise indicators would certainly be needed, but I am convinced that this residual dimension of the musical experience has paid more than others for the epochal transformations of the systems of cultural production and dissemination. The identity crisis of this nation, after all, in which I have always felt exiled, betrayed, and deeply disappointed, has caused the loss of what little musical roots it had, at least until the 2000s. There are still a lot of self-publishing experiences, especially local ones, those will always be there, but it is hard for me to believe that they can succeed in gaining international attention, at least as interesting groups like Lankum or Sirom have managed to do recently…

Can you describe the process of forming His Majesty The Baby with Francesco Paolo Paladino? How did the collaboration evolve?

The experience was born by chance. Dario Antonetti, musician of the duo La Forma delle Nuvole and promoter of the Vegetable Man project record folly, was curating a tribute to Syd Barrett with journalist Nino Gatti. He asked me if I would agree to write a piece to include in the booklet, and I willingly agreed. In the meantime, the record, intended to cover Syd’s entire output, was almost complete but no band involved had chosen to play “Feel,” one of my favourite songs. Because of those crazy impulses that sometimes take us, I proposed to play and sing it myself, although I am not a singer nor can I play an instrument. So I talked about it with the non-musician avant-garde composer Francesco Paolo Paladino, a friend for at least 30 years, and came up with an avant-garde remake in which I sang to music composed by him.

When the “Love You” CD was released, the piece even had some positive reviews from bloggers and magazines such as Shindig!, which surprised us not a little. From this impromptu collaboration came the idea of recording a proper album, a tribute to the unruliness of the senses and madness, with lyrics written by me and music by him. Most of my lyrics, either poems or prose, were already written, and the involvement of some English underground and avant-garde performers-such as Martyn Bates, Edward Ka-spel, In Gowan Ring…-turned out to be a fascinating challenge. In some cases, however, it was a matter of writing something on purpose, as always in loose verse, without too much regard for metrics and conventions of the 4/4 pop/rock type, as with “DadaRaga,” my favourite piece on the album, a true masterpiece of art song especially for the extraordinary performance of In Gowan Ring.

I can’t say if and how this project will evolve, but it is possible that sooner or later, something as crazy as “Hope For Madness” will be born. Francesco is an unpredictable personality, an irrepressible geyser of ideas.…

How did your work with Dorothy Moskowitz on Under An Endless Sky begin, and what was the experience like?

Around the time we were about to release “Hope for Madness,” Francesco surprised me by proposing to work on a new album, this time with the legendary singer from the USA. Of course, I couldn’t believe it, partly because I was convinced she was either long dead or no longer active. I was stunned when he let me read the e-mails he had exchanged with Dorothy, and in response to my enthusiastic disbelief, he asked me to get in touch with her and propose some of my lyrics. The result was a dense exchange of emails in which she said she was pleasantly impressed by the kind of philosophical writing I had and was willing to sing my lyrics. We worked on it for months, with a capillary approach that involved, first of all, proposing my text translated into English at the drop of a hat. At that point, in addition to insights regarding the meanings of specific words and concepts, it was a matter of replacing some words with vernacular English equivalents and adapting the end result to the singing. In some rare cases, something slipped through or did not render as much as I would have liked to express. For example, in “My last tears”, Dorothy sings: “My gaze is darkened/I join the black cows/Forced to graze in the blackest of nights/In the blackest of nights,” which translated, in fact, doesn’t make my original reference to the irony with which Hegel polemicized Shelling’s idea of the Absolute, which was judged to be smoky and abstract: “…a suspended time, a blocked gesture/waiting for something to happen, whatever/constrained like black cows grazing in the blackest night.”

For Hegel, Shelling’s ideas lacked concreteness and were, indeed, “black cows grazing in the black night,” and the subject of my poem felt this way, waiting for the muse of inspiration, perhaps gone forever. I recognize that the metaphor was difficult to render ensuring musicality and full meaning…

However, it was a true spiritual partnership of three – Dorothy, Francesco Paladino and me – and for months, we worked on the record as if we were in a trance, in a deep creative ecstasy, probably unrepeatable. We decided never to meet Dorothy de visu, either in person or on video, maintaining that aura of mystery that left to the written word all the power to express the feelings, the esteem, the friendship, the sense of gratitude and creative trepidation between us… And never as in this experience did the term “alchemical” that we had chosen to name our duo prove so adequate and precise: it was a true alchemical process, the transformation of words and sounds into an album that transcends the materiality from which it originated, yet it was a child of that. A track like “Cut the Roots” (particularly the second part), for example, sounds to my ears like a distillation of carnality, blood and sweat… yet it has an ethereal, spiritual, transcendent spirit. With my lyrics I wanted to tell the story of the war from the point of view of the humblest victim, of the man who in History counts for nothing, is reduced to a number for statistics, but is the bearer of an individual story that is the story of all humanity.

Are there any upcoming projects or collaborations that you’re particularly looking forward to working on?

Right now I am trying to promote my latest book on Barrett, “Scritto sui Rovi” (Editrice Zona), which will be just the last one on him and which I am very pleased with. I have a few presentations scheduled until the end of the year, although everything has become very complicated in Italy. Also, the release of a book I wrote four hands with Chris Cutler (Henry Cow, Recommended Records) is imminent, and it will come out for his November Books in English. It’s about a brief history of sonic miniaturization in popular music, a work that has kept me busy for at least three years, and I’m very proud of it because it’s an original study, absolutely unpublished. It will have an accompanying CD with 40 minutes of miniaturized music – 40 tracks under a minute pieces recorded by as many artists (including Paladino, Moskowitz, Antonetti, Monti).

For next year, I plan to publish in English an essay on “Alchemy,” the first Third Ear Band record that I consider the sound version of the “Egyptian Book of the Dead.” Finally, a new album, currently in progress, is planned by Dorothy Moskowitz & the USA for which I have written new lyrics.

Luca Ferrari’s official site and Instragram
Photos courtesy of Luca ‘Chino’ Ferrari

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others