It is never useless to talk about Paolo Benvegnù. Now more than ever

Article by Marzia Picciano | Archive photo

Among the things we expected to bring from the old year to the new one we had not in any way counted the premature death of Paolo Benvegnù.

The news arrived like a bolt from the blue in the early afternoon of New Year's Eve, leaving our editorial staff speechless and beyond. The manifestations of affection, even if only platonic, from all people touch (cit.) from Paolo's vertical sea, they spread like multitudes across all the media in which we recognized what rarely happens in these cases: sorrow, true, not only for the person, but for what it meant for the music and with his words.

Paolo Benvegnùmusician, guitarist and singer of Schismthen alone in 9 solo albums, a singer-songwriter of the highest artistic level, had appeared two days earlier in the studio of Via dei Matti n.0 with Stefano Bollani And Valentina Cennithe last appearance on TV and the last confirmation of a success that he himself has defined on many occasions and also with us as a “caress” to all the musicians of “his” scene.

His sudden exit from the scene leaves a void that resonates very heavily today and which we want, in this short commemorative note, to take as an opportunity to carry forward a message, or rather, to carry forward his caress..

RockOn has followed Benvegnù on many occasions over the years, and in this last one we were very happy to do so and support him in what was the year of revenge and justice: the Tenco license plate for best album, It's useless to talk about loveand 20 years of what was certainly an enormous contribution to Italian songwriting, Small Fragile Filmsrediscovered for the occasion as has happened for many authors this year, but here with greater emphasis, with the pleasure of recognizing ourselves after so many years in that enormous, very fine tormented poetry that Benvegnù gave us.

We therefore dedicate space with even more justified conviction to his figure, rather than to the earthly fact of his passing, republishing photos, articles and interviews with him. Paolo Benvegn with his desperate poetics needs to be remembered especially now especially after this golden year, in 2025 and in the years to come. Especially in music, by those who make it and those who listen to it.

Making poetry in the music industry today, whether in Italy or abroad, often means being physiologically put aside, where the public searches for the motif, the refrain, the “thought-buster” to cling to. Benvegnù knew this but never took a step back.

Instead, he felt the need to address the issue with his own Bad Songs, obviously a final piece not of the poetic level he has accustomed us to or exudes in The Oceanduetted with Brunorialways on the same Tenco award-winning album, but meaningful in wanting to have its say also on how much an artist necessarily finds himself denying his own ideas. And he confessed without mincing words that he spent every penny on this latest job.

We don't know how much he really believed in the arrival of this award, but we believe the gratitude in his words when the recognition arrived. I interviewed Benvegnù twice this year, at the beginning and towards the end, as well as seeing him in the live show in Milan of Piccoli Fragilissimi Film a month or something ago (among the best and most intense of the year): what is a magma of words and I imagine in the production of music he was also the man.

Paolo Benvegnù in concert at the Hiroshima Mon Amour in Turin photo by Luca Moschini for www.rockon.it

Not an uncertainty, a perfect coherence between saying and doing, the idea of not interviewing him, but philosophizing with him, facing every question like a blank table at the center of which was an unparalleled ability to question everything and still make things add up. always everything in that constant poetry that accompanied him. He had the incredible ability to crystallize syllogisms of imposing existential import into sentences or questions and share them in any exchange or comparison.

This need to always be the same as himself is an urgency that he has placed in his musical career from the 90s to today. It's something that in the independent Italian universe (to be honest, we no longer know how independent and alternative it is, having been cleared into pop and rock) needs to be kept alive like a small Olympic flame. Like his attention to every artistic endeavor, his empathy for all those who want to make music.

The rewriting of Small Fragile Films with an extreme variety of new, young and more mature artists (you don't forget the admiration in his eyes as he talked about The lover And FASKor the happiness of playing that particular piece with Boxwood) marked a desire to connect to a world that for too long did not recognize what today was its greatest value. To always burn with the same flame. And burning, he lived: “burning it (life), burned, still burning it, never in fire but always in the fire, there is no other possibility than to go to the bottom and burn in the fire”.