Number 180 on the Billboard 200, for one week, in November 1973. It sounds like nothing. It was the door coming off its hinges: no Italian rock group had ever appeared on an American chart, and none had been anywhere near one. The record that did it was not a new album at all. It was Per un amico with its Italian words removed and replaced — not translated, replaced — by a former King Crimson lyricist who also produced the thing. Every Italian band that got heard abroad afterwards was walking through the gap this made.

The short version

Released in October 1973 on Manticore, Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s label, and at home on Numero Uno. Seven tracks, forty minutes. Franco Mussida plays guitar and sings; Flavio Premoli plays keyboards and sings; Mauro Pagani plays violin and woodwinds; Giorgio Piazza plays bass; Franz Di Cioccio plays drums and sings. Peter Sinfield wrote the English words and produced the album, and remixed the English vocals himself. Five of the seven tracks are the whole of Per un amico. One is a song from the debut, re-recorded. One is new. The band sang the English phonetically.

Greg Lake, Rome, December 1972

The story that gets told, and it holds up: Greg Lake was in Italy while ELP were touring, watched PFM present their new album live in Rome at the end of 1972, and could not believe what he was seeing. Manticore was ELP’s own imprint and Lake ran it, so the signing was straightforward. The clever part was who he brought in. Lake and Peter Sinfield had been together since the first King Crimson album and Sinfield had just worked on Brain Salad Surgery at Lake’s invitation; introduced to the Italians, he did not treat the job as a commission. He wrote entirely new lyrics rather than translating, produced the record, engineered two tracks and mixed the vocals. Whether that makes Photos of Ghosts a PFM album or a Sinfield album is an argument you can still start in an Italian record shop.

The sound

Airy, open and sensuous, which is exactly what the British competition was not. Set this beside ELP or Yes from the same year and the difference is immediate: no thick, heavy, Germanic textures, no sense of a band trying to be a cathedral. Premoli’s keyboards dominate, the time changes never stop, the instrumental sections run long, and there are still loud echoes of psychedelia in the corners that the English bands had scrubbed out years earlier. Pagani’s flute and violin do the Italian work. And Sinfield’s words, surreal and slightly overripe, read like an extension of what he had been doing on Lizard and Islands — which for some listeners is the album’s finest touch and for others its worst mistake. It can stand next to Genesis and Yes. That was the entire point of it.

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The songs

The map is worth having. River of Life is Appena un po’ with English vocals over it. Celebration is E festa from the debut, re-recorded rather than overdubbed, and it was nearly a hit — jumping synthesizers, a hook you cannot shake, and by a distance the most commercial thing PFM had done. The title track is Per un amico itself. Old Rain is the only genuinely new piece, a languid acoustic instrumental by Premoli where Pagani’s jazzy flute and violin take the front. Il Banchetto keeps its Italian name and is a remix of the original, complete with the improvised piano section that does a startlingly good Keith Emerson. Mr. 9 ’Til 5 is Generale, which was an instrumental until Sinfield gave it words. And Promenade the Puzzle is Geranio.

Reception and legacy

It worked. America charted it, Britain noticed, and PFM spent the next four years touring the world as the one Italian progressive band anybody abroad could name — a distinction they still hold. The cynical reading has been around since 1973 and deserves an airing: that this was a straightforward grab for a bigger market, that re-cutting your own album in a foreign language is not art, and that the Italian lyrics were expendable enough for nobody to mind losing them. All of that is arguable and none of it changes what happened. Three more Manticore albums followed. And for a generation of listeners outside Italy, this — not Storia di un minuto — is the PFM album they met first and never quite got over.

The verdict

Essential, with an asterisk: if you can read this sentence and you have never heard PFM, start with Storia di un minuto and Per un amico, because that is the music and this is the packaging. But do come here, because the packaging is beautiful and Old Rain and Celebration exist nowhere else. Play Celebration and Il Banchetto. Then The World Became the World for Sinfield’s second pass, and Banco’s English-language album for the rival attempt at the same trick. Number 180, for one week, in 1973. Every Italian band that came after owes something to that week.

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