The title is a joke and a thesis. Say passepartout the French way, let it collide with Re Artu, and you get Passpartu: a key that opens every door, and King Arthur, whose knights turn up on the record sitting at a cubic table. After four years of aeroplanes, English lyrics and an American violinist, PFM came home in January 1978, went into a Milan studio, sang in Italian, hired a songwriter to write the words and a young cartoonist to draw the cover, and stopped being a progressive rock band. Almost nobody liked it at the time. A year later it turned out to have been the right decision.

The short version

Recorded at Studio Ricordi in Milan in January 1978, mixed at Stone Castle in Carimate, mastered in London, and released that year on Zoo, the band’s own label. Eight tracks. Bernardo Lanzetti sings; Franco Mussida plays guitar and wrote nearly all the music; Flavio Premoli plays keyboards and wrote the rest; Patrick Djivas plays bass; Franz Di Cioccio plays drums. Claudio Fabi produced, as he had at the beginning. Every word is by the songwriter Gianfranco Manfredi except one, which is Lanzetti’s — and it is the last thing he did with PFM before leaving. The guests brought saxophone, congas and cello into a band that had never needed them.

Coming home

Jet Lag had failed to break America and Manticore had folded, so PFM did something no other Italian band of their stature managed: they built their own label, Zoo, intended as a laboratory for whatever came next in Italian music, and then made the least international album of their career on it. Italian lyrics, and not their own — Manfredi is a cantautore, and handing him the words is the sound of a band deciding it wants to be a different kind of band. The sleeve makes the same point. The illustration of the five of them is by Andrea Pazienza, then a rising name in Italian comics and making his first appearance on a record; he drew the inner sleeve too. The front carries only three letters and the title. On the back, in small type, the full name. This is not a group looking for an American audience.

The sound

Lighter, more acoustic, more Mediterranean than Jet Lag, and openly in transit. The fusion has not gone — it is still a jazz-leaning record and the playing is still absurdly good — but the long structures have, and what replaces them is songs: shorter, warmer, with Manfredi’s words carrying weight the band’s own lyrics never had to. Saxophone, congas and cello give it a texture PFM had never gone for. Lanzetti, in his last outing, sings better than he ever had. If you want the one-line description, this is the bridge between the progressive rock of everything before and the rock-flavoured songwriting PFM would live on through the whole of the eighties. Bridges are rarely anyone’s favourite building.

The songs

Viene il santo opens side one and Svita la vita follows. Se fossi cosa is the one the old guard reaches for — the most symphonic thing here and the closest to classic PFM, and the reason the album has defenders. La trama blu closes the side. Then the title track, which does what the title does: French, Arthurian, and pleased with itself. I cavalieri del tavolo cubico is the highlight and the joke made flesh — the knights of the cubic table, Arthur’s legend bent out of round, and the piece most people take away. Su una mosca e sui dolci is exactly what it says. And Fantalita closes the record with the only lyric Lanzetti wrote for it, which is also the last thing he sang with this band.

Reception and legacy

The prog audience turned its nose up and largely still does; among PFM albums this is the one most often skipped, filed as the moment the band gave up. It deserves better, and its defenders have been saying so for decades. What it definitely was is a hinge. Lanzetti left immediately afterwards for a solo career. The violinist Lucio Fabbri came in. And in January 1979, from an idea of Di Cioccio’s, PFM went into a tent theatre in Florence as Fabrizio De Andre’s backing band and made one of the most loved live albums in Italian history — a thing that would have been unimaginable for the group that recorded Jet Lag in Burbank, and entirely natural for the group that recorded this.

The verdict

For people who already know this band. Do not come here for progressive rock; come for the last time PFM sounded like five friends in a room in Milan. Play I cavalieri del tavolo cubico and Se fossi cosa. Then the De Andre live album, which is where all of this was going, and Manfredi’s own records if you want to know who was writing the words. A skeleton key and a dead king in a made-up word, drawn by a cartoonist nobody had heard of yet. It is the least fashionable PFM album and one of the most likeable.

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