Delta V: Music has flattened. And freedoms are thinning

Scroll through the charts, burn the charts "...and, at the limit, shoot that deejay". In the new single "Nazis of Illinois" Delta V make fun of the present with a nod to the Blues Brothers while waiting to land in Milan in concert next Thursday on the stage of Arci Bellezza. Talking about it is Carlo Bertotti, founder thirty years ago of the band together with his former classmate Flavio Ferri, joined today by Marina "Marti" Albertini, voice, Nicola Manzan, guitar and violin, Simone Filippi, drums.

Let's start with "Nazis of Illinois", what did the poor DJ do to you?

"It is, obviously, a metaphor that uses the figure of the deejay as a medium to tell the vision of a music that in recent years, rather than enriching us, has taken something away from us, flattening itself in an embarrassing way. And deejays are those who play that music, on the radio or in their evenings".

Since your latest album remains “Heimat”, looking at things with a cinephile’s eye, how was the transition from Edgar Reitz to John Landis?

"Our music has a lot of references to cinematic imagery and the opportunity to bring up those farcical, grotesque, silly, but also dangerous Nazis depicted in Landis' film with Aykroyd and Belushi was too good to pass up. So we said to ourselves: why not use a figure like that to tell our sense of lack of belonging?".

If the Nazis of Illinois make him smile, the partisan stories told in “Gli ultimi”, the three documentaries on the Resistance that he made in 2018 together with Marti and Lorenzo Bertotti, had decidedly different connotations.

"We made 'Gli ultime' during the making of 'Heimat' in a small village in the Imperia hinterland where we came into contact with some former partisans; the story of Silvio Bonfante, known as "Cion", told in one of the documentaries emerged from their testimonies. In the same days we happened to meet some survivors of the Nazi-fascist massacres of Testico and Torre Paponi and we also collected their memories. Whether due to age or Covid, almost all of them passed away within a few years and this increases the value of the work done. After all, my father was a partisan in the Clavesana Division 'Giustizia e Libertà', and the events of the Social Republic have always been very much alive in my house; now Martina and I are editing the interviews that we still have aside with the intention of making a new documentary driven by the belief that if memory is not continuously fed it ends up getting lost".

Perceptible risk these days. And not just in Italy.

"Today, as of today, I cannot imagine someone in a coarse woolen suit, with a fez, marching on Rome, nor a return of fascism as described in the theater by Massimo Popolizio; what worries me is the excess of authoritarianism that exists in our democracy. We do not realize that day after day individual freedoms are becoming thinner and thinner due to the absence of a real political debate".

He said that preparing this show was like recording a record. Why?

"To get back on the road we didn't want to wait for the release of the album that we have in the works and we plan to publish in the fall, so we thought we'd tell those who come to listen to us what we were and what we've become through our listening; this by rewriting the songs to underline in the arrangements the imprint of the greats who inspired us".