The island of nothing. PFM made this record twice in the same sessions — once in Italian and once in English, same running order, different words — and the English one, The World Became the World, is the album most of the world knows. This is the other one, and it is the better one. It is also the album where a bass player arrived from Area and quietly rebuilt the band from the bottom up, and where the most beautiful ten minutes PFM ever recorded happen to open side one.

The short version

Released in March 1974 on Numero Uno, five tracks, thirty-five minutes, in a die-cut sleeve. Franco Mussida plays guitar and sings lead; Flavio Premoli plays keyboards and sings lead; Mauro Pagani plays violin and flute and wrote the words; Patrick Djivas plays bass; Franz Di Cioccio plays drums. The music is Premoli, Mussida and Pagani. Claudio Fabi produced and arranged with the band, at Advision in London and at Fonorama for one track, and there is a Milanese choir on it. Four songs are in Italian. The fifth is in English, with lyrics by Pete Sinfield, on an Italian album. Nobody has ever fully explained that.

Two albums, one session

By 1974 PFM had a British label, a British lyricist and an American tour ahead of them, and the solution to being an Italian band with an international career was simply to make everything twice. The World Became the World came out of these same sessions with the same tracks in the same order, Sinfield’s English words over the top, plus an English version of Impressioni di settembre for good measure. It is not a translation and it was never meant to be; the two records are siblings, not copies. The other change was bigger. Giorgio Piazza left, and in came Jan Patrick Djivas — from Area, which in 1974 was the most uncompromising band in Italy. What he brought was not just a rhythm section: he plays bass as a melodic instrument, and the way it winds around Mussida’s guitar and Premoli’s keyboards is the thing that separates this album from the two before it.

The sound

More complex than Storia di un minuto or Per un amico, and with jazz-rock now openly in the mix rather than hiding in the corners. The symphonic writing is still there and so is the folk, but the pieces are longer, the joins are stranger, and the band is plainly enjoying how good it has become. Pagani’s violin and flute do the Italian work; Premoli has stopped showing off and started building foundations; Di Cioccio and Djivas drive it. And the crucial thing is that the extra complication makes it easier to listen to rather than harder — the technique never becomes the point. If you want the argument for PFM as the most complete band of the RPI era, it is here, not on the more famous debut.

The songs

The title track takes ten and a half minutes and is possibly the strangest thing in the whole PFM repertoire: a sombre choir announcing something bad, then distorted guitar with organ and electric violin piled behind it, then a soft interlude opening into a pastoral section of classical guitar, piano, Mellotron and two flutes doing birds at dawn, then a jazzy electric passage, then the rock returns, and it ends on a Frippian guitar solo over classical arpeggios. Is My Face on Straight is the English one, jazzy and funny and catchy. La luna nuova is the one many people call the best thing here — it starts light and explodes into a Mediterranean shuffle, then hands itself to the band for a wordless section that is close to perfect. Dolcissima Maria is the acoustic ballad and it is still in the live set fifty years later. Via Lumiere closes with a long Djivas bass solo, odd metres, and a flute solo aimed squarely at Ian Anderson.

Reception and legacy

It sold well at home and the English twin carried the band abroad, straight into the first American tour and the live album that came out of it. The standard verdict, and AllMusic’s, is that this is PFM’s last masterpiece — a shade below the first two records but the last time everything was in place. What came next was Chocolate Kings and a lead singer and an argument. La luna nuova and Dolcissima Maria have never left the setlist. And a fair number of listeners, including several who have written about it at length, will tell you flatly that this is the best album the band ever made and that the debut gets the credit only because it came first. That case is stronger than it looks.

The verdict

Essential. Storia di un minuto is the door and this is the room behind it, so take them in order — but if you only ever hear one PFM album after the debut, hear this rather than Per un amico, because it has the range. Play the title track whole and then La luna nuova. Then Area’s Arbeit Macht Frei to hear where Djivas came from, Banco’s Darwin for the rival claim, and The World Became the World if you want Sinfield’s version of the same record. An island of nothing, made twice, in two languages. They were never this good again.

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