It’s foggy and cold outside.

A long and cramped bar, beyond a room with some wood pallet. At the bottom of the stairs, a hundred of people under the hole low roof. It’s Pluto’s, our Cavern.

The Beat Machine, from Genoa, are opening the show on the wait for the Group: the Four By Art from Milan. We are all there, packed like sardines, being in the mood to start all over again breathing rock’ n ’roll after the last years spent on the post-punk dullness.

I read about the single self-produced debut of the Four by Art – My Mind in Four Sights – on the Rockerilla columns, I wrote immediately to the Band and I bought the disc. That scrap of vinyl was the classic leak in the dam. Not overdoing, something changed in my honest career of music user: henceforth, for 3-4 years, I embraced the cause of the new sixties-sound with a total devotion.

The Four By Art were classified as mod, but their sound was globally stretching over the sixties: northern soul, beat, R&B, garage, psychedelic music, pure air. That night, the Pluto’s walls fell down. Every ten minutes it was necessary to get out taking a breath of air before a new dive in that sweat pit and good vibrations. A fantastic event.

Now, 23 years after that concert celebrating a new season start up of the independent Italian stage, I spoke about the Four By Art with an unchanged pleasure. After My Mind in Four Sights it followed the participation to the manifest-collection Eighties Colours and, still on the 85’s , the first homonymous album on Electric Eye, followed by Everybody’s An Artist With Four By Art, again with the Claudio Sorge trade label.

After that the spotlights were addressed to other different sounds, the neo-sixties naturally died down and its protagonists were replaced by the new groups focused to the Stooges, not anymore to the Small Faces.

Today Area Pirata opens again the memories casket with an anthological cd memories collecting all the Four By Art recordings of the 82’s and 86’s period (single and two albums with unreleased tracks). Asking me to write these notes, I grabbed the chance to thank the Band for opening my eyes that night of 23 years ago, for a new beginning able to better entertain my life, if not improving.

The Four By Art sounded as the world, inside the Pluto’s, was stopped on the 66’s years.

Outside there were Craxi, ‘Drive In’, and the first symptoms of the negative yuppieism of which many people remember the mid years of the eighties.

On the contrary in the Pluto’s underground heart, they were celebrating the beat return.

For those not present in that cellar, or for the unborn of that November 84’s, it could help this cd: 25 tracks hanging among the regret, the longing and the vibrant energy of the rock’ n ’roll of the sixties also for who was twenty during that 84’s and today is over forty, but fortunately still there

as centre of our talks.

I forgot to tell you before, but I now make up for it : thanks Four By Art

LUCA FREZZI, Rumore