Stratos used to explain La mela di Odessa from the stage. It comes from something that happened in 1920: a dadaist artist called Apple hijacked a German ship and made a present of it to the Russians, who had just had their revolution. He sailed it to Odessa, the Russians threw an enormous party, and neither the ship nor the Germans survived the celebration. That is the kind of story this band told, and Crac! is the album where they told them to a much larger audience than before — the record that made Area popular without making them safe.

The short version

Crac! is Area’s third album, released in August 1975 on Cramps and produced by the band. Thirty-eight minutes, seven tracks. The line-up is unchanged from Caution Radiation Area: Demetrio Stratos on vocals, Hammond organ, harpsichord and steel drums; Paolo Tofani on guitar and ARP synthesiser; Patrizio Fariselli on pianos, bass clarinet and ARP Odyssey; Ares Tavolazzi on bass and trombone; Giulio Capiozzo on drums. Fariselli, Tavolazzi and Tofani wrote all the music except Area 5, which is by Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti; Gianni Sassi wrote the words as Frankenstein. Recorded at Fono-Roma in Milan, mixed in London. The tour took them to Paris and Lisbon.

La mela di Odessa

Three songs from this record became permanent fixtures of the live set and made the band genuinely popular in Italy: L’elefante bianco, La mela di Odessa and Gioia e rivoluzione. It is worth noticing what that means. The first is a piece whose melodic material is openly Turkish and southern Mediterranean, cousin to Cometa rossa on the previous album. The second is a funk-stuttering account of an anarchist dadaist giving a stolen ship to the Bolsheviks. The third is a gentle acoustic protest song about freedom recovered after a dictatorship falls — and in 1975, with Portugal and Greece a year out from their own, it did not need footnotes. None of these are compromises. Area got popular by writing better versions of what they already were, and the touring documents from that year, Are(A)zione and Parigi-Lisbona, show how hard they pushed it live.

The sound

A mix of fusion and Italian progressive rock so thorough that people have given up deciding which one it is, and the most approachable thing they made without being the most extreme. The rhythm section has a heavier feel than on Caution — Tavolazzi sounds entirely at home now — and Tofani has gone further than ever into synthesised enhancement of his guitar, producing phrases on Megalopoli that are weird beyond description. Fariselli’s electric piano leads more often. Stratos does everything: the instrument-voice on the long pieces, a genuinely powerful lead vocal on the short ones, and Tarzan-like interventions on the last chorus of Gioia e rivoluzione that add colour rather than disturbance, which for this band counts as restraint. The received view is that it is not their most successful record and is by far the best place to start.

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The songs

L’elefante bianco opens with voice and piano in unison on a playful, exciting motif full of Turkish colour. La mela di Odessa runs six and a half minutes on funk stutters good enough that hip hop listeners have claimed it. Megalopoli is the longest at nearly eight minutes and the rhythm section’s showcase, with Stratos’s voice used purely as an instrument and Tofani at his strangest. Nervi scoperti opens the second side on acid, tense notes — Fariselli takes an amazing electric piano solo first, then Tofani arrives with McLaughlin-meets-Fripp flourishes, using the guitar to supply tension and unease, and Capiozzo is the star. Gioia e rivoluzione is the folkish one, with Yes-isms that are probably meant to be ironic and are beautiful anyway. Implosion relaxes into something almost liquid. Area 5 closes, two minutes, for the committed experimentalists only.

Reception and legacy

For a large constituency this is the Area masterpiece: magnificently played by a phenomenal group, conscious from the first note to the last, extraordinarily arranged, and evidence for the claim that they were the finest Italian band of any genre. Others say, just as seriously, that it is not their most successful work — and then immediately add that it is the one to hand to a newcomer. Both are right. The three famous songs are legendary in Italy and still overwhelming; the two long instrumentals are where the band are actually operating at their limit. The tour that followed took them out of the country, and the live records from 1975 and 1976 caught a band who were, by every account, lethal on a stage.

The verdict

The place to start with Area, and essential regardless. L’elefante bianco first, because it is the door. Then La mela di Odessa, and listen to the bass. Then Gioia e rivoluzione, and remember what year it is. Then Megalopoli and Nervi scoperti back to back, which is the band with nothing held back. Arbeit macht frei is the shock and Caution Radiation Area is the test; this is the one that shows you what all that machinery was for. A band this uncompromising should not have had hits. They had three, and did not give up a single thing to get them.

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