A sleeper cell reawakened: CCCP in DDDR

Discussing and trying to process what may have been one of the best concerts I have ever had the chance to attend

Founded at the dawn of the 1980s in Berlin-Kreuzberg, CCCP - Fedeli Alla Linea stood out right from the get go. Unlike many bands that came out of the Italian Hardcore scene of the time, paying tribute to the then-burgeoning British Hardcore sound of bands like Discharge and GBH and the Anarchist route paved by Crass, the sound of CCCP was rooted in Post Punk and Neue Deutsche Welle specifically. Pair that with their fascination with the Soviet Union, Communist China, the DDR, the Middle East and basically every other state on the other side of the iron curtain and you’ll get the very first example of “pro-Soviet Punk”. Espousing Communist ideas wasn’t exactly uncommon at the time, especially in a place like Reggio Emilia, which is were the band’s members are from.

The band would go on to release four essential albums in the second half of the 80s and split up on October 3rd 1990, the day of the German reuinification. A number of other musical projects have since rose from its ashes, most notably CSI (an acronym for “Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti”) which rose to mainstream fame after topping the Independent Music charts in Italy within a week of the release day of their album Tabula Rasa Elettrificata. None of them ever managed to reach the same cult status that CCCP had attained. On top of that, any talks of a reunion of the band or one-off concerts had been out of discussion since the members decided to call it quits on the day the DDR ceased to exist… until very recently.

“We are pro-Soviet because we are from Reggio Emilia, the most pro-Soviet province of the American empire. […] We’d like to go on with our musical activity without turning into a parody of any American group, any British group or any Eastern European group.”

October 12th 2023 saw the grand inauguration of the Felicitazioni! CCCP - Fedeli Alla Linea 1984-2024 exhibition, hosted at Saint Peter’s Cloisters in Reggio Emilia as a way to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of their very first EP, Ortodossia.

Needless to say, fans from all over the country flocked to the citya to see what the band had worked on (myself included). The unexpected success of the initiative is even more impressive when you consider what kind of band CCCP ultimately are. This is no radio-friendly pop group we’re talking about. Despite being signed to Virgin Records for most of the time they were around, CCCP never achieved mainstream fame. Sure, their 1990 single Amandoti has been covered by countless artists since its release, but that’s as close as they’ve ever gotten to reaching that level of recognition. For the most part, they’ve always been considered an insanely consistent cult band able to churn out one underground classic after the other within the span of only a handful of years. They were ahead of their time, and perhaps that’s the reason why they enjoy so much success and recognition nowadays.

Felicitazioni! lead to the online discourse around the band skyrocketing, but it was not enough. The reissues of the albums were not enough either, but so far there had been no way of telling whether this exhibition was meant to be interpreted as an anticipation for something bigger. Fans were left hungering for a return of the band to the stage and hoped for something to be actually brewing in the CCCP camp, but none of them were ready for what was to come.

“Is it a matter of quality or a formality? I don’t remember too well. I feel good, I feel bad, I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. I feel good, I feel bad, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t study, I don’t work, I don’t watch the TV, I don’t go to the movies, I don’t do sports.”

Between February 24th and February 26th, CCCP played a series of three gigs, aptly named CCCP in DDDR (the extra D is intentional, it stands for “dismantled”) at the Astra Kulturhaus in Berlin-Friedrichshain. I was only of the lucky few who had the chance to attend, mostly because the tickets for all three dates sold out fast, maybe way too fast.

Before I get to the actual gig, I’d like to spend a few words about the place where the gigs took place: Friedrichshain.

Personally, I don’t think they could’ve chosen a better place to play in. Back when the city of Berlin was still divided by the eponymous wall, the whole neighbourhood belonged to the DDR and that’s something you can still notice to this day: just take a walk down Karl-Marx-Allee and look around you. However, the place seems to have been going under heavy gentrification process for some time. As soon as I walked down Warschauer Straße and reached the banks of the river Spree, I gradually started to notice an abrupt change in the city’s landscape. The grey apartment blocks made way for the East Side Mall, the Mercedes-Benz Arena and an unhealthy amount of glass condos. As I got closer to the city centre, I could see the city changing before my eyes, a change which I think culminated when I reached Köpernicker Straße. That street is mostly known for this place called Köpi, a self-managed housing project that’s been standing at the same location, a building dating back to the early 1900s, since the very early 1990. A few meters from there stood an apartment block with a handful of mostly lackluster graffiti spray-painted over one of its walls. I could make out only two words out of that bunch: “Köpi bleibt”, at the very top of the building. Every other building in the area had been either torn down or rebuilt into one of these modern, faux-minimalist blocks that landlords usually rent out to companies in need of office space. That’s what I perceived to be a sign of the times changing before my eyes. The old was making way for the new, but the idea of letting go of the old doesn’t necessarily imply people will get something better in return. Judging by the amount of graffiti over the freshly-painted blocks of flats around the area, complete with anarchist symbols and slogans, some people there were having none of it.

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My journey in Berlin took me from the Ostbahnhof in Friedrichshain up to the Siegessäule in Tiergarten. That’s about 10 kilometres I spent zig-zagging from one road to the other, deeply immersed in the atmosphere of the city. I started walking back towards Warschauer Straße where the venue was at around the time the sun started to go down, it must have been around 6 in the afternoon or so. As I head towards Engelbecken Park, I gradually notice the number of police cars, journalists and cameras in the area to be increasing: as I learned afterwards, a member of the RAF had been arrested in an apartment block nearby after being on the run for almost 30 years.

Luckily I managed to make it back in about an hour and, with my kneecaps and ankles begging for mercy, I lined up and waited for the gates of th Astra Kulturhaus to open. The place was packed with people of all ages, ranging from the 20-year-olds who discovered the band in the same way that I did up to the 50-year-olds who’ve been around long enough to remember seeing CCCP live in the 80s, back when they were still seen as just a weird Punk band.

The concert started at around 21:00 with Depressione Caspica, followed by Morire. The former can be seen a decidedly more spiritually-oriented piece in which the band’s singer and main lyricist, Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, tells of a man’s struggle with his feelings and his will to live through the meticulous description of the Caspian Depression, a semi-arid desert-like region encompassing the northern shores of the Caspian Sea, while the latter can be interpreted as the band’s way of critiquing modern society as well as consumerism and capitalism. Morire plays at a much higher tempo compared to the opener and it is also fondly remembered by fans because of its lyrics, which bear one of the band’s signature verses: “produci, consuma, crepa”. Up next are Oh! Battagliero, a song CCCP wrote with the intent of poking fun at their original bassist Umberto Negri, who left the band in 1985 to take up a career as a lawyer, Stati di Agitazione, a frantic piece about a man’s search for inner peace, and a revisited version of Libera Me Domine, a traditional Catholic song usually sung during the Office of the Dead. The first part of the set closes with Tu Menti, in which the band pokes fun at the people who’ve given in to conformity and disillusionment and traded their individuality for a place in society, and what is possibly the band’s most well-known song to date: Curami.

“You never do anything bad, nothing you even believe in. You don’t know what you won’t, you wouldn’t able to obtain that anyway”

After a short but heated interlude courtesy of Italian journalist Andrea Scanzi - I highly suggest you look up what happened - a fan favourite kicks in: Emilia Paranoica, which is considered by many to be the summa of CCCP’s work as well as a bona fide generational magnum opus of sorts. The song describes the apathetic sentiments that are synonymous with the 1980s, the kind of feelings best summarized by the Sex Pistol’s slogan "no future". What Emilia Paranoica really is is a de facto terminal diagnosis of an entire generation, a generation seeking destruction to escape boredom (“…consumami, distruggimi, è un po' che non mi annoio…) and waiting for their lives to be shaken up by an ultimate emotion, an emotion they themselves were never able to really define (“…aspetto un’emozione sempre più indefinibile…”).

What follows is a streak of songs which are generally considered to be some of the most iconic within the band’s discography, namely Punk Islam (my personal favourite CCCP song) and Radio Kabul, prime examples of the band’s retelling of their fascination with the Middle East, and Spara Jurij, whose lyrics are based on an incident which saw the Soviet Air Force shooting down a Korean Air Lines passenger flight in 1983 after it deviated off course. They also managed to throw a Cher cover in the setlist while they were at it.

We’re nearing the end of the concert and Annarella kicks in. This song is from the band’s later period when they managed to attain some form of commercial success before splitting up. Unlike many of their previous works, this piece is a far more melancholic affair dealing with the need to come to terms with the death of our loved ones - make sure you check out the live version too. Allarme is next, a laid-back piece sporting what is possibly one of the band’s most iconic bass lines, followed by an unexpected cover of Kebabträume by Neue Deutsche Welle monoliths Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, a bona fide generational piece of art much like Emilia Paranoica that they also cite in the lyrics of the aforementioned Punk Islam. The last song on the setlist is Amandoti, possibly the band’s most commercially successful piece to date.

It’s safe to say this was one of the best concerts I’ve ever had the chance to attend, words can only do so much to communicate what experiencing it was actually like. I strongly suggest everybody to catch these guys live if you have the chance to. I sure will.

“History isn’t over, the world is the same accrual of tensions, new protagonists and obsolete shams. […] Beyond all the noise of entertainment, only a deafening silence and the dim lights of infinity.”