Two guitarists play on this album and only one of them is in the band. Marcello Todaro is still the official member and his folk-inflected playing carries the pastoral side of the record; Rodolfo Maltese is credited as a guest and handles the crucial transitions. In practice Maltese had already joined and would replace Todaro within months. So this is the hinge: the last Banco album with the man who made the first two, and the first with the man who made everything after. Rolling Stone put it at number 35 among the greatest progressive albums ever made.

The short version

Io sono nato libero is the third Banco del Mutuo Soccorso album, recorded in October 1973 at Studi Fonorama in Milan, released that December on Ricordi, produced by Sandro Colombini. Forty-one minutes, five tracks, opening with the sixteen-minute Canto nomade per un prigioniero politico. Vittorio Nocenzi wrote the music, he and Di Giacomo the words. Both Nocenzis play clarinet as well as keyboards; Todaro is on guitars, D’Angelo on bass, Calderoni on drums, with Maltese guesting on acoustic and Silvana Aliotta and Bruno Perosa adding percussion. It reached number 10. Non mi rompete and La città sottile came out as singles. The original sleeve is die-cut and dome-shaped, with an eight-page booklet.

Todaro e Maltese

A year after Darwin! and the band are doing something slightly different: same vein as the first two records, but with more synthesiser and much sharper contrasts inside and between the pieces. It is, without much argument, their most experimental album. The strange passages of synth and Eminent on the opening track tell you that inside the first minutes. What holds it together is not a story. The band chose to work by episodes, with the thread running almost under the skin, and it takes attention during and after listening to catch what the record is actually saying — which is the same structural method they would use three years later on Come in un’ultima cena. Underneath it all, Mediterranean textures deepen the acoustic passages and make a difficult record feel like somewhere you live.

The sound

The keyboard journeys of the Nocenzi brothers are pure orchestration — continuous passages and feints, swerving between straight classicism and something else entirely — and over them is a voice that people who care about this music will tell you is one of only two that ever mattered in Italian rock, the other being Demetrio Stratos. Di Giacomo sings the political material on the verge of breaking, from emotional participation rather than technique, and it is one of the great vocal performances anywhere in the genre. Calderoni ranges from aggressive to bouncy with remarkable versatility; D’Angelo anchors it; Todaro’s folk guitar does the pastoral work. It is a fundamental progressive record, Italian or otherwise, and it stands level with the best English ones.

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The songs

Canto nomade per un prigioniero politico runs sixteen minutes and is among the best things the band ever wrote: a suite absorbing rock, blues, classical, folk and jazz into a mixture of weeping, hope, defeat and rebirth, describing what is done to a man imprisoned for what he thinks, and arriving at a melancholy hymn to freedom of thought. Non mi rompete follows deliberately — a bucolic, almost Ariostean ballad on one of the simplest melodies here, sung in an almost operatic voice, and its job is to cool the room after what precedes it. La città sottile is the dream, subtly unsettling and nocturnal, and it is Gianni’s composition. Dopo... niente è più lo stesso is nearly ten cinematic minutes, and it quietly reprises the musical theme of the opener — pairing the two most political pieces. Traccia II closes in a whirl.

Reception and legacy

For a great many Italians this is the masterpiece: the complexity of the debut placed at the service of a vivid, vibrating inspiration, and one of the most important works the genre produced here. Number 10 in Italy, number 35 in the world according to Rolling Stone forty years later. The dissent is narrow and worth recording: some find Non mi rompete the least convincing thing on it, simple and not very personal — and it is also the best-known Banco song and the one collectors name as their favourite. Both positions have been argued in public for fifty years. Todaro left after these sessions. Maltese stayed until 2015.

The verdict

Essential, and the third side of a triangle with the 1972 debut and Darwin! that has no equal in Italian music. Canto nomade first, all sixteen minutes, with the lyrics if you can find them. Then Non mi rompete, and notice how much lighter the room gets. Then La città sottile. Then Dopo... niente è più lo stesso, listening for the theme that comes back. Three albums in nineteen months, each one better than the last, made by six men in their twenties. Then their guitarist left, England came calling, and it was never quite like this again.

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