Marco, how and when did the whole Figli Di Madre Ignota story start?
Marco 'Pampa' Pampaluna (guitar & backing vocals): "We started about fifteen years ago. Our idea was to create a mix of the music of Mano Negra and Tom Waits. We experimented with that style for a while until we discovered 'Get Of The Cross...', an album by an American band called Firewater. Their sound really opened our minds. That path of discovery continued over the following years and gradually we also discovered styles like klezmer and Balkan music. We're not a world music band per se, we still consider ourselves to be a rock band, but we do mix all these influences into our music. What we do is very similar to what Renato Carosone did back in the sixties. He used to mix Mediterranean sounds with traditional Neapolitan music."
Apart from him there's also Fred Buscaglione. These names will probably not ring a bell with most people. Tell us a bit more about them and the music they played.
Marco Pampaluna: "Their music is Italian, international, very serious and playful at the same time. Renato Carosone spiced up traditional Neapolitan music with a lot of self-irony. His music was filled with snapshots of typical characters from Italian daily life. Fred Buscaglione loved to play the fake gangster. He was like an Italian music version of Mike Hammer (Mike Hammer is a no-holds barred Battle of Guadalcanal veteran private investigator that carries a .45 Colt M1911 named "Betsy" in a shoulder harness under his left arm. The fictional character was created by the American author Mickey Spillane in the 1947 book "I, the Jury", red.)."
When you mix that many genres, how do you start to work on a new song? Do you know in advance it's going to be in a certain style or is that an organic process?
Marco Pampaluna: "We always start our songs from what we call "ideas without reason"; in this world driven by economic revenue and egoism, we like to do things just because we can. If we want to mix cumbia with klezmer just to hear what it sounds like, we do it! And if the result is intriguing enough, the experiment was worth doing."
I just heard you use an excerpt of a piece by Ennio Morricone on stage. Is he a big influence as well?
Marco Pampaluna: "Absolutely! You can't think of movies without thinking of the music of Ennio Morricone. He's best known for the scores he wrote for several spaghetti westerns, but in reality he's done much more than that. His music is very versatile and we try to emulate his experimentation with different styles. A great example of his capacity of mixing different styles in one composition is the opening theme of "Uccellacci E Uccellini" ("The Hawks And The Sparrows", 1966, red.), a movie by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The song is performed by Domenico Modugno and every 10 to 15 seconds you hear the style of the song change."
The music business hasn't been doing all that well recently, album sales dropping everywhere. Is the fact that you guys don't really pin yourselves down on one style something that has made things more difficult businesswise?
Marco Pampaluna: "Well, we never got an offer from a major label, but we did manage to get a distribution deal from the Berlin based Eastblok Music label. In any case things in Italy are quite difficult, so we're kind of forced to go looking abroad."
Right now you're still often being catalogued as a Balkan band. Are you comfortable with that?
Marco Pampaluna: "We're not a Balkan band, but labelling us that way can be an easy way to introduce our music to a certain audience."
There's a lot of humour in the music you guys do, on stage it sometimes almost resembles slapstick, so is there still a serious side to Figli Di Madre Ignota?
Marco Pampaluna: "Doing the comedy style cabaret numbers is just a way for us not to take ourselves too seriously. We're just a bunch of idiots who like to have fun preferably together with the audience. We look at things with a lot of self-irony. All these artists taking themselves super-serious on stage are just boring to us. Not every musician is a messiah and in the old tradition of the commedia dell'arte, we're like the harlequins of the music scene, Italians you know!"