Greg Lake and Keith Emerson signed this band to their own label and the contract was signed in New York. What Manticore wanted was the Banco catalogue in English, and what they got was stranger than a translation: Metamorfosi had run under eleven minutes in 1972, and Metamorphosis here runs nearly fifteen. These are not the same recordings with new words on top. The band went back into a studio in Rome and then into Advision and AIR in London and rebuilt them. It is the album where Italy’s most Italian progressive band tried to stop being Italian.

The short version

Banco is the fourth studio album by Banco del Mutuo Soccorso — billed simply as Banco, which is how they were known abroad — released in 1975 on Manticore, the label ELP had launched. Forty-seven minutes, seven tracks: five reworkings of earlier material in English plus two new pieces. The line-up is the classic one: Francesco Di Giacomo on lead vocals, Vittorio Nocenzi on Hammond, synthesiser and Mellotron, Gianni Nocenzi on grand piano, clarinet and synthesiser, Rodolfo Maltese on guitars and trumpet, Renato D’Angelo on bass, Pierluigi Calderoni on drums. Vittorio Nocenzi produced. Marva Jan Marrow wrote the English words. It reached number 10 in Italy.

Manticore

After three albums the Banco left Ricordi. Warner Brothers were interested; Manticore won, offering better money and better artistic guarantees, and already knowing what to do with an Italian progressive band because they had taken PFM to Britain first. Which brings us to Marva Jan Marrow. She wrote the English lyrics here, she wrote English lyrics for PFM, and she wrote for Acqua Fragile on Mass Media Stars the year before — the same producers, the same rooms, the same address book. Italian writers have occasionally wondered whether Acqua Fragile were a test bed for the export formula. Look at Manticore’s roster and the answer becomes duller and more interesting: there was no conspiracy, because there was a formula, and everybody was using it.

The sound

The Banco’s whole achievement was proposing an Italian way of living progressive rock. Where other bands looked towards England, they contaminated their music with the great Italian tradition — the Nocenzi brothers’ classical training running underneath everything, two keyboard players instead of one, and Di Giacomo, a singer with an operatic weight nobody else in the genre could match. So the joke writes itself. Take that band, translate it, and record it at Advision and AIR, and something has to give. The playing is superb and the expanded arrangements genuinely add: this is a band with two more years of craft revisiting material they had outgrown. But the standard Italian verdict is hard to argue with. The songs still land, and the English singing does not quite fit.

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The songs

Chorale (Traccia’s Theme) opens, two and a half minutes, and is new. L’albero del pane is the other new piece and the one people single out. Then the rebuilt catalogue. Metamorphosis is Metamorfosi from the 1972 debut, expanded from under eleven minutes to nearly fifteen. Outside is R.I.P. (Requiescant in pace), also from the debut, grown from under seven minutes to over seven and a half. Leave Me Alone is Non mi rompete and Nothing’s the Same is Dopo... niente e piu’ lo stesso, both from Io sono nato libero in 1973; the latter gains two minutes. Traccia II closes, instrumental, from the same album. If you know the originals the pleasure here is structural — hearing what an extra four minutes does to a piece these men had been playing live for three years.

Reception and legacy

Number 10 in Italy, which is where the previous album had landed, and the international breakthrough it was designed to produce never quite arrived. History has been polite rather than warm: nothing transcendent, the songs have real impact, the English does not sit right. It has been reissued repeatedly — Japan first on CD, then the Manticore remaster in 2010, then Esoteric in 2011 — which tells you the demand is real even if the affection is qualified. Manticore put out Garofano rosso and Come in un’ultima cena the following year, and that one also got an English version, translated by Angelo Branduardi. The advice Italian fans give has not changed in fifty years: start at the 1972 debut and run to Canto di primavera, and take this one in passing.

The verdict

For people who already know this band, and a curiosity rather than a destination. The 1972 debut, Darwin! and Io sono nato libero are the records, in that order, and they are among the finest things Italy produced in any genre. Start here with L’albero del pane, which exists nowhere else and is beautiful. Then Metamorphosis, for the four extra minutes. Then Leave Me Alone. What you are hearing is a great band being asked to become legible to people who were never going to hear it anyway — and doing the job so well that the only thing wrong with it is the language.

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