Isolated: The Skinhead scene in Sardinia – part 2
Second part of the special on the skinhead scene in Sardinia with an interview with Marco Rocca (SS20/The Claptrap)
Telling the story of a movement, or of a historical moment localised in a specific urban context, is never easy. Moreover, if we’re talking about the Skinhead movement, and the period is the 1980s, there is a risk of entering into a vortex of gossip and misunderstandings, of stories distorted by time and misunderstandings. Cagliari was the first city in Sardinia to know the Skinheads phenomenon and its pioneers can be found in a double musical experience that still today remains one of the most talked about in the city: SS20 and The Claptrap.
Starting from the first part of the special report on the skinhead scene in Sardinia, which you can find here, today we continue the story by publishing the full interview with one of its protagonists: Marco Rocca, musician and multifaceted artist from Cagliari.
What was your first approach to the punk universe and later to skinhead culture?
1977-79
I’ve always been a music lover and had been playing for a few years before punk broke out… but it’s better to remember the context of that period. The internet came along 20 years later. It wasn’t easy to keep up to date, music magazines were few and far between and they mainly dealt with mainstream pop and rock. Out of the chorus there were only Gong and Muzak but unfortunately they were short-lived and you had to wait some more time for the diffusion of magazines dealing with other musical genres and new trends like Rockerilla, Blow Up or Mucchio Selvaggio.
News about what was happening in the rest of the world was few and far between. Older friends returning from London or other European capitals were literally assaulted. We would get them to tell us what they had seen and listen avidly to the records they could bring back. Later on, we also started to do some trips to the continent, but travelling from Sardinia was expensive – low-cost flights didn’t exist – as well as problematic.
You had to concentrate in a few days the purchase of records, of virgin tapes in stock and with a bit of luck see some interesting concerts in the clubs where, between one beer and another, sometimes you managed to exchange a few contacts. Then on the way back to the island you were always subjected to an exaggerated amount of customs checks that weren’t even at Check Point Charlie. It didn’t matter if you were arriving from Civitavecchia. So much for territorial continuity.
Everything else was done by mail. We used to order records blindly from bands, unknown at the time, that we had heard of or whose name only intrigued us. The statistics were often unfavourable and if out of 10 records 3 were decent you were lucky. We would agree on purchases and then the best albums would be redistributed amongst us and put on the tapes. Meeting up just to listen to the incoming records was a ritual that, looking back, would be impractical today.
Then the interchange of offset fanzines began: if I had to point to a fundamental tool of that period, it was definitely the photocopier. The fanzines gave us the opportunity to discover and deepen many other realities ignored by the big media but, above all, brought back on the same level of direct communication those who played and those who listened. We too had tried to make some.
A special mention goes to radio Alter in Cagliari which, with its sketchy schedule and live telephone calls to listeners, was more like a fanzine than a radio station. Many fans of the most diverse musical genres spent entire nights talking about and playing their favourite records.
1980-82
In the specific case of Sardinia there was a further gap of delay that created some confusion about the chronology of events, which often overlapped asynchronously. When punk 77 started to spread in Sardinia, it was actually over in the UK, and was part of an already postpunk or even new wave reality. While the last London punks were having their colourful mohawks photographed in Piccadilly, it was from the USA that a more interesting declination of that attitude was coming.
It had already happened to me in the past to go back in time to reconstruct the genesis of a musical production: for example, I had discovered the universe of root blues starting from Jimi Hendrix. But at that time, while Devo and TalkingHeads were already around, we were discovering Discharge, the Sex Pistols and Exploited, but also the B52’s. While Should I Stay Or Should I Go decreed the end of The Clash, we listened to Career Opportunities or their version of Police & Thieves by Lee Perry and Junior Murvin.
While GBH’s new album came out – they sounded more heavy metal than punk since they had switched to a major label – we were overwhelmed by the American bay area punk/hardcore sound. Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, Fugazi. Someone came back from New York and told us about the live shows of Ramones and Television in a small club that was born for country music and became the temple of punk. It was the legendary CBGB’s, but we didn’t know it at the time.
And then Minor Threat, promoters of the DIY and straight edge ethos: it was their shaved heads that reconnected us to the British Oi!/skinhead movement that we had already discovered through fanzines and records. 4 Skins, Cockney Rejects, Cock Sparrer, Partisans, Infa Riot, Business and many others: a real return to the direct and essential roots of original punk.
In the meantime, the Ska/RockSteady revival also arrived. Trojan Records reissued the old skinhead bands of the 60s influenced by Jamaican music. TwoTones were born – the omen name symbolised by the famous black and white chessboard – with Specials, Selecter, Bad Manners, Bodysnatcher and Madness. One step Beyond became so popular that there were even clumsy attempts to incorporate ska into Italian pop. It is mainly the ska revival groups that help us better focus on the history and cultural background of the skinhead scene.
In the previous decade, much of the music had become very complex, with long pieces sometimes aimed exclusively at the virtuoso performance of musicians who often had an academic, and therefore elitist, background. With punk, all this was reversed.
Musically: the structures were simple, short and immediate. Socially: anyone could play without needing a professional musical background. Also, and above all, because playing punk was only one aspect of a life choice that was not limited to music.
I must say that this attitude, even if I did many other things, has never left me since then. Together with the passion for boots.
Tell us a bit about SS20. How were they born, who were the members and how did the first concerts come about?
1983-84
Throughout the history of SS20 and Claptrap there have been many people and countless line-up changes. First of all the voices. It’s impossible to explain to someone how to sing punk Oi! or hardcore. You can’t learn it. But if you are, if you have the motivation to be, you’ll probably come up with the right voice. But in Sardinia there were still very few people who were into the genre. I remember the particular difficulty of finding drummers capable of sustaining the classic TU TA’ – TU TU TA’ snare drum without adding useless squiggles of toms and cymbals, a legacy of the always hated heavy metal. If the BPM was over 200 it was a total disaster.
Apart from me, who I’ve been brought in to replace the previous guitarist of SS20, the only one who was always present in the band from the beginning to the end was Raffaele Cuomo on bass. Before I arrived, SS20 had already existed for at least a year and had participated in the first Oi! music gathering in Certaldo, Tuscany.
I liked the name of the group: it was the US/NATO classification used to name the RSD10, which were the Soviet ballistic missiles set up against the American Pershin. Somebody wanted to give other meanings to this acronym, but it seemed to me effective that a European punk band would use as a metaphor the name of missiles that were aimed right at Europe. One of our songs, which we played on a local TV channel, started with the sound of a missile.
In Sardinia, there were few venues dedicated to live music, and open-air concerts were largely reserved for so-called ‘square’ groups with a repertoire of traditional music, ballroom or pop at most. Apart from festivals with international guests, in which local bands such as ours were not allowed to participate, a few years passed before rock music festivals became popular, in the full sense of the word, and even later regular live shows began to be held in clubs.
In the meantime there were very few opportunities to play in public. You could try to crash high school music assemblies or take part in events organised at the student centre. Or you could take up a collection and rent one of the many parish halls. To this day I still don’t understand, or perhaps I do, why priests were so willing to let the most diverse groups perform in those halls.
Discotheques were another possibility. In fact, looking back on it today, it was a feature of that period. The discotheque managers, in an effort to broaden their clientele, were in the habit of having live bands open the evenings without worrying too much about what or how they played. For the bands and their followers it was a chance to take over a space for one night.
In reality this soon proved to be a failure, as those interested in the band left at the end of the concert, while those interested in the disco arrived when the concert was about to end. In that short overlapping situations of ‘tension’ were frequent, to put it mildly, generated by the forced mixing of such different people.
It was only later, with the collapse of the influx of traditional discos, that some of the smaller ones were converted into places where mainly live music was played. The larger ones, on the other hand, have now become shopping centres. But that’s another story.
Today, the compilation ‘Quelli che urlano ancora…’ has become a cult object. For you it was an important step, but it also determined the last act as SS20. How did this step come about?
1985
Although still embryonic, the exchange of contacts was beginning to bear fruit. “Quelli Che Urlano Ancora” was the brainchild of Steno (Stefano Cimato) of Nabat, an Oi! group from Bologna and one of the main promoters of the Italian skinhead scene. Nabat had already released records on their own CAS records label. This time, however, it was no coincidence that they decided to make a compilation involving Oi! bands from all over Italy that they already knew thanks to the musical gatherings they organised. It was an opportunity to compare notes and expand the network of contacts.
For us it was also the first opportunity to make a decent recording in a studio, apart from the unlistenable ones made with the big radio in the rehearsal room. The repertoire already had only songs sung in English, but since the compilation was aimed mainly at the Italian scene, we recorded a song in Italian. “Non staremo più a sentire” was an opportunity to try and arrange a song with a little more accuracy. It was the last act of SS20 and somehow induced the birth of Claptrap.
We had arrived at the recording studio in the aftermath of yet another line-up change. After I joined the band we had played a few gigs and the repertoire didn’t seem so satisfactory. With Raffaele we tried to rearrange some of the old tracks but many, in the light of a more accurate analysis, were eliminated. The set list was reduced, so I wrote and proposed new songs to be integrated into the repertoire. In short: the line-up had changed again, the repertoire had been renewed and the sound of the band was also different. No longer just punk/Oi! but a mix of American hardcore on the one hand and influences from ska/rocksteady skinhead culture on the other. SS20 as it had been no longer existed and so a new name had to be given to the project.
Thus The Claptrap was born. In the sense of a spokesman for a voiceless class who, like us, lived the same situations all over the world. That’s why the lyrics were in English: an international language for international problems. We always thought that even what might seem to be peculiarities of Sardinia were in fact secondary declinations of wider, common problems.
I remember the long theoretical discussions at the end of the concert about independence with Renzo Saporito, who later founded Kenze Neke in 1989, a Sardinian ethno-punk band, as they called themselves. At that time he ran a club where he organised live shows. He supported the idea of solidarity between minorities fighting for independence. In my opinion, however, the problems were upstream and it was therefore in a broader context that solidarity should be sought. Focusing on the local level, on the contrary, ran the risk of creating a breeding ground for nationalist drifts. The same ones that today are called, with a cryptic neologism, sovereignism.
At that time, however, we were in the midst of post-reflex Reagan hedonism, there was still the Cold War, the constant fear of nuclear escalation and the Berlin Wall was still standing. It is no coincidence that the mainstream music of the eighties, with its acolytes, reached one of the lowest levels in history.
It is probably also thanks to this that DIY and self-publishing began to spread. Independent labels multiplied with the intention of creating an alternative music network for both production and distribution of bands that would otherwise have no chance. Some of them, now almost all disappeared, actually succeeded for a while in creating independent networks. Others, however, over time, have turned out to be just a pretext to support the top bands to enter the mainstream. But that’s another story.
With the start of The Claptrap project, in addition to a new sound comes a first LP. What was it like recording an album at the time, what feedback did you get, and how did you promote it live?
1986-87
In the wake of the many self-productions, we also tried to undertake one and so the “Crossed Hammers” label was born. With a shoestring budget and a lot of craftsmanship we managed to produce an LP by The Claptrap: “This Is The Italian Sound” which, years later, we discovered was classified as the first self-produced LP in Sardinia.
The previous experience of recording the track for the CAS records compilation had not been the best. There weren’t many studios in Cagliari, they were expensive and in any case they mainly produced pop or Sardinian music. So we had to leave the island for the nearest place: Rome. After a bit of searching we found a small, damp studio underground near the Tiber that didn’t cost much and that, at least in general, had an idea of how to record a punk record.
We had to hurry to avoid exceeding the micro-budget but, fortunately, we had clear ideas. After a few days we went back to Sardinia with an 8-track reel on half inch. The mix was done on the way back to Cagliari and I wasn’t too convinced but, after so many years, I’m used to hearing it sound like that.
For the mastering and the printing we used Toast Records in Turin. Only the first copies also had an inner envelope with photos and lyrics: we couldn’t afford to do that for all of them. With Toast we had also agreed on a non-exclusive national distribution of the record, to be free to contact, through the circuit of fanzines, other labels and distributors in Europe and the USA.
I don’t know how many letters were sent everywhere to so many labels that in the meantime had disappeared or changed address. Every day I was terrified to find in the mailbox the envelope with the stamp depicting a pointing hand and the words “back to sender”. With others, however, we managed to establish contacts and some of them went on to become important production or distribution companies, such as WeBiteRecords and Rock_o_Rama in Germany, Roadrunner in Holland, Oi!/SkaRecords in the UK, Mordam Records and Dischord, but above all Alternative Tentacles in the USA.
I still remember the autographed letter of appreciation for our album from Jello Biafra (in person) who, as well as sending me a list of all the distributors they used in the USA and Canada, also sent me Dead Kennedys and Alternative Tentacles T-shirts in return, which I still keep as relics. It’s a hard emotion to explain the idea that in Jello Biafra’s personal record collection there is also Claptrap’s ‘This Is The Italian Sound’.
We had also sent a promotional copy of the record to many of the free radio stations now widespread throughout Italy. “Pacchetto Postale’ was the cheapest way to send a record: you had to wrap it in that brown paper for parcels and then tie it up with string.
About ten years later, a friend of mine came back from Berlin and told me he had found “This Is The Italian Sound” in a record shop, but there was something strange about it: the cover was in black and white. We did a bit of investigating and discovered that someone had “bootlegged“, that is, reissued our record without our knowledge. To this day I don’t know who it was or how many copies were pressed, but I have seen that it still appears on vinyl buying and selling sites, albeit at a lower price than the original.
The distribution went well and now we were able to find some dates outside Sardinia. The line up changed again and I went back to being the guitarist/singer as in my previous bands: Claptrap was now a power trio. We loaded the instruments on an old Ford Taunus, faced the endless ferry trip from Cagliari to Genoa and then crossed central Europe: Switzerland, Germany until Amsterdam. But most of the contacts offered us the chance to play in the network of CSOAs like El Paso in Turin, L’Indiano in Florence or Forte Prenestino in Rome.That year Claptrap was one of the 10 finalists in a selection of over 1100 bands from all over Italy in the Indipendenti 87 competition “le nuove leve del rock italiano”. Organised by Fare Musica magazine and RaiStereoUno, the evening was broadcast live on national radio from the Rai auditorium in Turin.
We felt a little out of place but also proud, even though we felt the pressure, to have the opportunity to represent the Italian skinhead scene in such a vast broadcast. Actually, the real problem was another: we were again without a drummer… I called our friend from Rome, Luca Mariani, with whom we had recorded the tracks for the album. We met again for rehearsals and left for Turin with a setlist in perfect Ska/Rocksteady style. Great tension. As if that wasn’t enough, we were also the band that had to open the gig. But the unexpected roar of the auditorium at the end of the first song untied all the knots and in a moment we were already at the end of the setlist. “…Ska/Reggae of the most corrosive kind!…” comments Luca de Gennaro during the live radio broadcast, who compares our sound to that of Ruts and Stiff Little Fingers. I only found out later that this extensive exposure of Claptrap would also be one of the reasons why someone would try to exploit our band.
Back to the ‘cult’. What did it mean in those years to be a skinhead in a city like Cagliari? And what were your meeting places?
1980-87
At that time in Sardinia there were all kinds of bands. It’s not that they were all really interested in playing music, it was partly a trend of the moment like that of graphic designers or video makers. The scene was populated by many ‘poseurs’, to quote a term used then. But you have to consider that there was no social media and that playing or going to concerts was a way, for better or worse, to meet each other. For better or worse, to play or go to concerts was a way to meet each other.
In Cagliari there were a couple of clubs that everyone frequented and then there was Piazza Repubblica, which was a sort of open-air showroom. I hadn’t always lived in Cagliari, I’d only just arrived on the island and I couldn’t rely on previous friendships. As in previous years, when I had lived for a short time in different cities, I could only try to assess people for what they were. While playing, I began to know the Cagliari environment a little. I noticed almost immediately that there were preclusions and inclusions based not so much on what you did or what you were, but on the circle you belonged to.
It was something I found hard to understand. It went beyond the normal closure in a model that serves to protect the construction of an identity in the adolescent phase. They were real mechanisms of familism similar to those I had only seen in the deep south of Italy and which seemed really strange to find in a land known for individualism.
When the record came out, I went in person to the local newspaper l’Unione Sarda. I asked for the music editor, who was amazed to see that there was a stranger waiting for him in the hallway. He confessed that he had only come down because he thought I was someone else. He also told me the name and surname of someone whom I, in turn, did not know. So I explained to him that I was part of a group in Cagliari that had made a record and that it seemed obvious to me to bring him a copy since he was in charge of the music page. Obvious. Yes: maybe in Sweden. But we were in Cagliari, and I was beginning to understand the mechanism.
Needless to say, not a single line ever came out about the record or the band. Not even a mention that would at least fulfill the mere right to report. Nothing. To get some feedback from the local press we had to wait for the reviews to come out in the specialised magazines.
MaximumRockNRoll: “…the stunning punk sound of this band coming from the Mediterranean island of Sardinia…”. Mucchio Selvaggio (Federico Guglielmi): “…an ability that is anything but negligible in creating an enthralling and well-constructed sound that will not fail to ignite your enthusiasm…”. Fare Musica (Stefano Pistolini): “…a gust of history behind this skinhead band, there is that unfailing energy in their songs that grabs you by the neck and drags you into the ska/punk universe”. Rockerilla (Claudio Sorge): “…their solid punk-rock is definitely exciting, fresh, well played, even cultured: because that Rangeless Infiltration, with its obvious ska/sixties structure, is a little jewel of pre-Beatles British archaeology! With echoes of garage, the solos are excellent: listen to Right to Kill…”.
On the cover of Mucchio Selvaggio there was a picture of Prince, but on the cover of Rockerilla, as a sign of destiny, there was a big picture of Johnny Lydon. In spite of all this, when we played live, the Sardinian press dedicated at most a so-called postage stamp to us: a small square with the news in the show diary. Sometimes. Not even always. To be valued for one’s work is a mode that I have found more widespread abroad. On the contrary, belonging and familism are still discriminating factors that deeply characterise our culture.
Considering that context in Cagliari, today it no longer seems so strange that there has never been a CSOA. The thing that most resembled it, in a broad sense, was what became our rehearsal room for a while. We had managed to establish an agreement with the neighbourhood committee that managed an old, dilapidated villa (Asquer) in Cagliari, where various activities were already taking place.
But after getting used to rehearsing in absurd conditions (once we even rehearsed in a garage with the car parked inside…) and always in different places (because after a rehearsal we were thrown out… sometimes even during it), Villa Asquer, with so much space, no time limits and no neighbours to complain about the volume, seemed like a palace. There was a ritual joke we played on all newcomers. When asked where the bathroom was, we would direct them to the door of the room with no floor. Maybe it was a bit dangerous, but seeing their face with one hand in the handle and one foot in the gap was hilarious.
At our rehearsals there was always a small group of friends/fans. Sometimes we would throw parties and bring records and turntables from home, and our circle would grow.
In the meantime there were also a few other new bands joining us and sharing the space. Our rehearsals were becoming a reference point for those who were really the ‘rejects’, not Cockney, but from Cagliari. Some people just needed a haircut, but they had to have help. Until we got an electric one, the hand-held machine was a hell of a thing that would rip your hair out. I remember a few girls even daring to get a Chelsea cut. But even if not all of us wore the ‘perfect’ skinhead uniform, we shared the music but above all the social discomfort: what had been the original spirit of the movement before it split into political extremes.
Some of us worked, but others could not have afforded even a beer in the supposedly alternative, actually trendy, clubs in Cagliari. I was more at ease with these people than with the catwalk and media circus of Piazza Repubblica. The only two breweries we frequented then no longer exist. In one of them the manager, who understood our tastes, showed video clips of the Specials and Madness. Night Boat to Cairo even had the little ball that jumped over the lyrics to sing in chorus in time. No one had a video recorder and the only sources of music to watch were fairly mainstream: Videomusic more so, Mister Fantasy less so.
At that time in Cagliari, outside our circle, very little was known about what skinhead meant, but at the time it was not in the least associated with nazis as it was later. In this regard I remember a funny and significant episode. Once I was stopped at a roadblock with my Beetle by the Carabinieri. They made me get out of the car and the soldier, seeing my shaved head, asked me: “…but are you a colleague?”. I replied, astonished: “No. Why?”. And he said: “…I can see you’re wearing your jump boots!”. He had taken me for a parachutist! He was actually pointing to my red 14-hole DocMartens.
I used to order them from a Glasgow hardware shop where I had discovered they were cheap because they were regarded for what they were: safety work shoes. Then in the 90s DocMartens became fashionable with exorbitant prices and variations of all kinds compared to the original ones that by now I think are not even produced anymore if not in the version with 8 holes.
Actually, even in our period there had already been attempts to commercialise the scene. The historic Last Resort in London, which already sold “punk clothing”, had recycled itself and now circulated a catalogue like the postal market where there were, according to them, all the “right” clothes to dress like skinheads. Like BlueMoon in Berlin, they had become a kind of trendy boutique. I had the distinct impression of the beginning of the end in a musical instrument shop. Among the guitar effects, next to one that was already called ‘heavy metal’, there was a new one that said ‘punk’. No more overdrive, distortion or fuzzbox.
If you look up SS20 and The Claptrap on the web today, you’ll find forums where you’re called Nazis, others where it’s said you were apolitical. How much truth is there in that on either side? And how much weight did politicisation have in those years in your background?
1977-87
In the history of punk, the Sex Pistols were the creators not only of the notorious Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle but also of a Great Rock’n’Roll “misunderstanding”. Sid Vicious’s T-shirt, the song Belsen was a gas or the Nazi headbands worn by Malcolm McLaren and Siouxie of the Banshees were obviously devices to scandalize the political class (then led by Margaret Thatcher) who had lived through the Second World War and were held responsible for the disaster the UK was in at the time. It becomes even more evident when the Pistols themselves attribute the condition of ‘no future’ to that very same ruling class defined as a ‘fascist regime’ in their most famous song God Save The Queen.
All this, which today seems so obvious as to border on banality, was not so obvious at the time. Someone had misunderstood and someone else, taking advantage of the misunderstanding, had started to ride it. The song Nazi Punks Fuck Off, written by Jello Biafra in 1981, indicates that a fringe of this sign already existed within the punk movement.
Globalisation was looming and even the Berlin Wall was about to fall. In a world that was about to become increasingly complex and difficult to interpret, the Great Rock’n’Roll “misunderstanding” was once again finding its place with seemingly simple solutions. It is what today is called, with another cryptic neologism, populism.
We never paid much attention to this aspect, which at first seemed to be a legacy above all of countries that, like the UK or Germany, culturally and historically had always had nationalist inclinations. Later, even in Italy, some fanzines began to give space to these aspects, and newspapers reported some actions or demonstrations of neo-Nazi groups of ‘skinheads’. The first time the big media used the term skinhead they immediately associated it with neo-Nazism. Before long, by the end of the 1980s, skinheads and Naziskin were seen as synonyms.
Of course, this was not the case for us. Although we had some affinity with skinhead culture, we had always thought of ourselves as mavericks. To now even be assimilated with the Nazis was really intolerable. We had even prepared and circulated in fanzines and newspapers a leaflet in which we explicitly distanced ourselves from all this. But it was of little use. Looking back today at the events of that period, it is clear that sticking that label on us was a functional way that someone used to try to cut us out of the scene. A way of quickly dismissing and ignoring the feedback that, despite everything, Claptrap had managed to win even outside the island.
It may have been by chance, but it was precisely at that time that we were called one day by representatives of the neighbourhood committee that ran Villa Asquer. They explained that we would no longer be able to use the premises because Nazi symbols had appeared on the walls of the villa, for which they held us responsible. It was no use trying to explain that we couldn’t be the ones responsible, since this would have damaged us even more than them. And so we had to leave our rehearsal room/ruin, which then, as fate would have it, was requisitioned by the municipality and remained closed for at least 10 years before being restored and reopened.
I don’t know exactly what started to circulate about us from then on. I had other things to deal with and I had stopped reading the fanzines, which had become a means of political propaganda. But I imagine that a lot of nonsense was written and said, since even after 40 years the chatter among empty chairs continues to have weight, to the detriment of concrete facts that can be easily verified by overcoming the crust of gossip. Another complicit factor is the Internet, where not only anyone can publish anything, but any capacity for even minimal analysis is cancelled out by the dopaminergic addiction of the ‘like’.
For example, twenty years later in the year 2000, I found by chance on Discogs, one of the many online platforms for buying and selling vinyl, the photo of a self-styled interview, in a disarming broken English, that would have been made to our group by an unidentified fanzine. One doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that it’s a gross forgery in which a series of idiotic questions are written as a function of a series of equally idiotic answers. But probably the audience to which this forgery referred was just as crass as its author.
The release of the bootleg is also mysterious. We never found out whether the production was aimed at making a small business out of some fan or whether it was an attempt to exploit the work of our band in a Nazi-skin context. But I find it really hard to believe that a record with a triple TwoTones checkerboard stripe and Desmond Dekker, Simaryp, Clancy Eccles, Laurel Aitken, Baba Brooks and Smith Slim in the credits – the Trojan Records elite – could be distributed in such an environment. All this just by looking at the record, because after listening to the songs and reading the lyrics it is impossible to have any doubts.
After the album, the tours and the various live experiences, how does the Claptrap project end?
1987-89
I don’t know to what extent, but no longer having our point of reference at villa Asquer contributed in some way to losing sight of our group of friends/fans and the opportunities to meet up thinned out. In the meantime, some of them had been forced to emigrate abroad to find work: I heard nothing more about the others. Moreover, none of us had ever been football fans, so there was no chance of meeting at the stadium. In a short time our old circle had practically dissolved.
In the meantime, Claptrap had another couple of line-up changes, and we tried to put a singer back in, but it didn’t work. So we decided to go back to the power trio, but we were still missing a drummer. One day I got a call from Alberto Sanna, who also had problems with his band: that’s how I proposed him to come and play drums with us. I knew it was the instrument he had started with. We had managed to find and set up a new rehearsal room in a former industrial complex that was out of the way, almost like a studio: we had set out to rearrange the whole repertoire. We worked a lot in that period, spending entire days rehearsing, arranging and recording in endless sessions.
Every now and then we heard rumours, or news appeared in the Sardinian newspapers, of some action by new formations of self-styled skinheads groups that we didn’t know who they were, but since then, however, for several years, they have always been of Nazi-motivated. Because of this, it happened, in spite of ourselves, that we were periodically visited by the Digos investigators for whom, as for everyone else, there was no difference between skinheads and Naziskins: they didn’t realise that these were different times and different people. We had even once suffered a pathetic ‘attack on the stage’ by one of these groups during one of our concerts.
All this contributed to our distancing from the skinhead scene: none of us wanted to have to explain ourselves all the time anymore. And anyway, the original roots of the movement had been completely erased by these new groups in favour of total political exploitation. Later, towards the end of the 90s, a SHARP faction was also formed in Italy. In Sardinia, on the other hand, I discovered on Facebook that in 2015 a community of skinheads had been formed that declared itself anti-fascist and anti-racist. But we were not interested in that for a long time.
We were focused on our music. Claptrap’s sound had shifted to American hardcore: in addition to me, Alberto and Raffaele now sang backing vocals inspired by the Canadian D.O.A. sound. Another operation of that last period was to rearrange and distort a selection of rock’n’roll classics. We would double or even triple the BPM of the original version and turn it into fast/hardcore. It was similar to the way Trojan bands used to rearrange songs from other genres into ska versions. With this line-up we played in many clubs, which now finally had almost all live music programming, and took part in various music festivals now widespread in Sardinia, such as RockArea or IsolaRock. Thanks to the last few ‘healthy’ contacts we had kept, we had also managed to play outside the island.
That moment, finally with a tried and trusted band, which should have been a new starting point, actually marked the end of Claptrap. Alberto and Raffaele got involved in one of those bands that were affiliated with labels only to support the front group to enter the mainstream and then be forgotten. For me, however, all things considered, retracing the path of R’n’R was a path that I had already crossed many years before going back to the blues. What attracted me most at that time was to go in the direction of ska/reggae and rocksteadybeat: to expand the band in order to build more articulate arrangements, adding voices, keyboards and above all a wind section. A desire that I was able to fulfill with my subsequent bands… but that’s another story.
Article by Roberto Lai
Claptrap live photos and album covers courtesy of Marco Rocca’s archive
