Klasse Kriminale Box Special: Interview with Marco Balestrino

A chat with Marco Balestrino of Klasse Kriminale about the Box “Restored, Remixed and Remastered” released by Flamingo Records and Demons Run Amok

With Marco Balestrino (Klasse Kriminale singer) it is difficult to get bored, since we started talking about “Box Restored, Remixed and Remastered” we have had dozens of chats both by phone and in person. Talks and ideas that led to the birth of this mammoth box set. We thought that sitting in front of a stereo, with the box in front of us, and bringing one of these chats back to Radio Punk readers, might be an interesting way to tell the behind-the-scenes story of our work. Imagine it like a ‘making of’ on the menu of a good DVD movie!

Alberto Flamingo: Where did the need come from to create a work like this, not just anthological but much more structured?

Marco Balestrino: I wanted to create a sound document that captured those years, those sounds, those moments. However, I wanted to give our audience something exclusive. We could have done a box set with the albums, the singles and some unreleased live stuff, but since I had the reels of the old work I wanted to go on a new journey and pull out of those old recordings what for a number of reasons I hadn’t been able to do in the studio at the time. In this box set there are not only 5 CDs full to the brim with music, but the history of many guys is encapsulated and it was only right to make it sound its best, restoring sonic dignity to what were the various Klasse Kriminale line-ups during those troubled early years, all with the Punk spirit of the time. So the idea was to create something that would stick and also be beautiful to listen to. We created a cross-section that photographed from the first half of the 80s to the late 90s, basically the analogue era of our recordings. As I said when we recorded, the studios were what they were, the experience of Rock’n’Roll in Italy still far behind, so we thought of remixing and remastering without correcting anything. Nowadays we could have grilled some things, overdubbed and made adjustments, but we didn’t do that.

Alberto Flamingo: I guess it wasn’t an easy job…

Marco Balestrino: The reels had suffered the normal wear and tear of time. The Ampex 456s, of which we faithfully reproduced the box containing the CDs in this anthology, are among those that suffer the most wear and tear. Just think, when I went to England in the late 90s to record ‘Electric Caravanas’ with Jimmy Pursey as producer, I saw that work was already being done in that studio, many English Pop tapes were being digitised. The reel was heated in a special oven to a certain temperature so that it would come off and then digitised with special machines. The prices for that procedure in those days were prohibitive, and even today to be honest it was not a cheap operation. But the idea was already there in my head at the time. It must also be said that that period of the transition of music from analogue to digital also corresponded with a particular moment of Klasse Kriminale, it changed a bit the history of the Oi! Skin movement not only in Italy, but also worldwide. Our mission up to that moment had coincided in an indissoluble way with the rebirth and diffusion of that movement, while in those days I was looking elsewhere and developing other projects, so a different chapter would open that is not part of this box set.

Returning to the reels, about a year ago I was contacted by a German collector who wanted to buy the digital tapes. I took the opportunity to realise the idea from almost 25 years earlier and recover all the material. Obviously it was a fool’s errand, ten years of recordings constituted a considerable amount of material and consequently a big basic expense. The work was done at Analogplanet in Pavia, and all the tracks were entrusted to Giulio Farinelli, who had done an excellent job on ‘Vico dei Ragazzi’ (Klasse Kriminale’s last album, ed.) and who had the merit of making everything sound homogeneous.

Alberto Flamingo: A throwback for you…

Marco Balestrino: What’s interesting about such a mammoth mix job is that you have to approach it in a completely different way to an album, where you have to split hairs; times and costs are different and you have to strike a blow to the circle and a blow to the barrel to get a good sound; also because as I said, we didn’t make any corrections. Then another step to make a professional master together with Giovanni Nebbia of Imperia. In short, we worked to get the most out of this music and in the end I think it was right to capture the last era of analogue music, I personally believe that with the advent of digital, art has lost something. Without being nostalgic, it used to be more complex, more expensive and there was a kind of gavetta to get to recording. You could make corrections for goodness sake, but it was much less immediate, you had to get to the studio and play. So was the graphic art, made of photos, cut-outs, films to be superimposed. Anyway, I think it made for an interesting journey, the years go by fast and I had never stopped to listen to all my stuff like that.

Alberto Flamingo: One thing I have noticed is that the sound of the era is not distorted, they sound better, but the productions of the era have been respected. There is often an attempt to ‘pump it up’ to make everything sound more modern.

Marco Balestrino: The work has logically had to make compromises, recordings on 16-tracks, others on 24-tracks, different musicians and studios have meant making middle choices in order not to make the whole thing sound too unglued. You can always do better, but I think naturalness and homogeneity were the primary goal. The 24-track recordings could have been even more defined, but then they would have drowned out the 16-track one from which we instead made the most of.

Alberto Flamingo: Another thing we can notice as we browse and listen is that over the years you have re-released certain tracks with different musicians and sometimes with changes in arrangement, are these changes dictated simply by the need to have the track played by different people or over time did you feel the need to ‘refresh’ them to suit new contexts?

Marco Balestrino: I’ve always tried to improve what we had, now as then I’m always looking for a better sound, the Prole Rock sound. Who knows, maybe I’ll get there sooner or later! Then anyway it was a forced process, you’d record a demo tape as an amateur off the top of your head and then go and redo the same tracks on an LP trying to improve them. If you look back at Rock or Punk itself, that was always the process, demo, single and then album with the songs played more professionally. Even though we weren’t professionals and there was no record company we always approached it as professionally as possible. We were kids, but so was The Clash, you know “White Riot” is in the 76′ demo, then the single and finally the album.

Alberto Flamingo: I take your last point about the Clash as a starting point to get onto another subject: a song like Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ in a demo version was rockin’ and then was turned into the hit record we all know, but there is management work behind it, producers and record companies giving input. You always acted as independents and without outside help or someone telling you how to arrange the songs to get more success.

Marco Balestrino: Yes, they were on the other side of the world, at the right time, with other budgets and a producer by their side. We always did the production of our songs with the help of the sound engineer on duty and to make him understand where I wanted to go I would let him listen to the sounds of the bands that had influenced me, even today I show up in the studio with a suitcase of CDs. Then it didn’t always work out… if you listen to the demo ‘Odiati & Fieri’ it sounds better to me than the album ‘Ci Incontreremo Ancora Un Giorno’. In that case I had a bad time in the studio, the recording had gone wrong: microphones, gates on the instruments, guitar sounds. We tried changing studios for mixing, but the sound was already compromised, plus the dominant sound at the time was that of The Cult or worse CCCP. There were fashionable sounds that could literally kill a Punk song.

Then again, sometimes the moment was decisive, ‘Costruito in italia’ was almost a summer experience, a moment caught on the fly. I met a Punk guy from Milan called Luca who played guitar (and he played bass with us, today he’s a professional bass player) and we got to talking and came up with the idea of recording the single. Also the drummer (Maurizio) and the second guitarist (Fabio) practically got caught by chance wandering around and wasting time on benches on summer evenings; think that line-up never even played live. But also the album ‘Ci Incontreremo Ancora Un Giorno’ was born almost by chance, we were no longer playing, no gigs, no line -up, but there was some expectation, some demand from fanzines and kids around the world. You know, we were getting at least two or three letters a day, communication in those days was cool, on the single was the home address and in those days we were visited without even a notice by Italian, French, German skinheads… Everything was so spontaneous, so simple, we all felt part of something that was really ours. The need for the album was there, so Antonella and I put an ad in a record shop, Franco came in, a guy who played bass, and we boarded Ringo, a metal kid who played Thrash, on drums, and after a few rehearsals we recorded the album. For Punk and even more so for Oi! those were pretty dark years but with an ad or a review the records sold.

Alberto Flamingo: I guess it wasn’t easy for you to play live…

Marco Balestrino: We were an Oi! band, for the press, institutions and concert organisers we were public enemy number one, us and everyone who followed us.

Alberto Flamingo: You had the ability to keep your old audience but always involve the new generation. Today’s kids have taken ‘Vico dei Ragazzi’ and made it the banner of these years, others are perhaps linked to the middle or early period; over the years not only the music has evolved but also the lyrics and themes.

Marco Balestrino: Yes, we were an Oi! band that was part of a movement and we were in the early years very attached to that scene, carrying it forward was a mission. We were talking about what was going on in the movement. ‘I Ragazzi Sono Innocenti’ was a strong denunciation against newspapers and journalists. It was born after the events in Rostock, when the world became aware of the Nazi-skin phenomenon. From there a strange attention towards me, newspapers were asking for interviews. Even the Digos opened an investigation and came to my house, the newspapers were likening us to the Nazis. Panorama, Espresso, no mention of fanzines. It even happened that a journalist came with us to Germany to write a detailed article on King and the European, complete with photos. We at the time therefore tried to make positive contact, unfortunately also on that occasion our hopes and trust were misplaced, the article was not what we expected although the journalist in question was treated very well. The headlines and speeches were all sensationalistic, portraying us as a dull and violent scene. I even had to do a spaghetti western-style skit in the editorial office of La Stampa, after which they wrote nothing more about Klasse Kriminale.

Talking about lyrics, when we started, it was only a few years after the explosion of the Oi! In the UK, in London you still met the skinheads you saw in the pictures of fanzines and they were still young, everything was fresh and yet in my lyrics it already seemed very old. Maybe it was because we were here in the suburbs, far away from everything, but the feeling was almost that the train had passed, even if in reality it was all in parallel, I’m talking about us but also about Nabat, we were quite in line with the times but maybe the physical distance and isolation also exacerbated that short time gap. To give you an example, Angelic’s ‘2,000,000 Voices’, one of my favourite records, was only a few months old when I listened to it, yet it seemed to me to have been out much longer. I would say that the lyrics of the first two albums were imbued with a certain melancholy. In general the lyrics told what was going on around me, maybe that’s why every generation is connected to a certain KK record, because it was about their time.

Alberto Flamingo: Besides the tapes there is also a lot of other material in this box, live, rarities and unreleased, would you like to tell us about it?

Marco Balestrino: Yes, I’ve always recorded everything, even in the rehearsal room, think that the first room was here where we are now, (in the warehouse of wonders Oi! at Marco’s house ed.) of course it was soundproofed with egg cartons and styrofoam. Having this place also made it easier for me, you could meet someone and organise rehearsals straight away, which for the lack of equipment at the time was a big thing. I still have our old drum kit here somewhere. Back to the question, I always recorded, both for documentation and for practicality, I could give the tracks to new/new musicians to listen to. So I had this box of tapes and thanks to a friend who digitised them for me, we were able to reconstruct this further cross-section. There was a complex job of listening to and selecting the most interesting material. Then listening to the concerts I was able to recall friends, anecdotes and situations that I had somewhat lost in my memory. This already came up in the first reviews, people almost more talked about moments and memories related to us and our concerts than about the music, which is also an interesting aspect of this box.

CD 1 

is the CD of the origins. It contains the first demo ‘Odiati & Fieri’ which was released in 1988 in a few hundred cassettes packaged with a photocopied booklet with lyrics and photos, the single ‘Costruito In Italia’ and a few live pieces which testify to our beginning with keyboard and sax. Among the cassettes I found the unreleased ‘Dure Scelte’ and a live performance of Warhead by UK Subs sung by MGZ

CD 2 

Contains the debut album ‘Ci Incontreremo Ancora Un giorno’, a couple of sessions that would end up on the second album ‘Faccia A Faccia’ of which unfortunately a reel has been lost. The live shows include a date in London and the gig supporting the Angelic Upstarts for the first time in Italy, at a difficult time for them and the Oi! movement held under siege by Nazi assaults.

CD 3 

“That’a Promise” and a 4-piece demo, the first work without Antonella and with Manlio switched to guitar was the basis for “I Ragazzi Sono Innocenti” of which we find the entire session. Rarities include the recording of the songs played for Indies on Video Music and a live radio concert in the Milan studios of Radio Popolare and some live performances from a mini-tour in Germany together with Red Alert.

CD 4 

It encompasses the whole period with Riccardo, Betty and Castel from Reazione, studio recordings with Paul Chain and some live performances from the ‘Planet Punk Tour’, ‘Tiziano Ansaldi Benefit Tour’ and on other stages. It is the CD that recounts the rebirth of Oi! which culminates with the concerts at Leonkavallo together with Nabat and Ghetto 84 for the ‘Tiziano Ansaldi Benefit Tour’.

CD 5

The single ‘Mind Invaders’ with the hand of Luther Blisset and the demo that prepared the album ‘Electric Carovanas’. Among the rarities taken from cassettes and DATs are tracks from the ‘Boys’ Own’ demo and live performances in Germany and Italy, including one at Inmensa in Genoa. From here on it was a different story for many reasons, but those who follow us already know…

Credit photo: Fabrizio Barile

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