When football meets punk: Sex Pizzul

Football is made of stories, some that must be told, which can never get lost in a forgotten drawer somewhere. Stories generated by characters, men sometimes extraordinary (sometimes less extraordinary) which represent the atom of the most beautiful game in the world. One way these stories can be told, is music.

And that’s what Sex Pizzul, enlightening mashup between two separated worlds, chose to do. Sex Pizzul are first of all Francesco D’Elia and Simone Vassallo, with the addition of Irene Bavecchi, punk attitude and love for football, gave life to a “musician football manifesto”. The chose to tell “their” Fiorentina’s stories: the romance one about Gabriel Batistuta (in the “Irina” song, after the famous “Irina te amo” scream after a gol”), del Tanque, but also the most revolutionary aspect of football, like Leicester’s miracle or Renè Higuita’s art. We contacted them to make us tell how you put two things together, like football and punk, that seem so far, being in fact very close.

Here at nss sports we try to tell the story of football (and, generally speaking, of sport) from a more aesthetical point of view, that is the one that, before everything else, makes fall in love the youngest. How did you get in touch with football?

As everybody, we believe, looking at it in TV and after a lot of knees peeled on the “campetti” of every type, from the tender age until today.

Irene: For me it was thanks to the albums of figurines, I was at middle school and I bought an exaggerated quantity of chewing gum just for complete the album.


You have chosen to unite two very different things: the almost bourgeois calm of Bruno Pizzul, one of the most famous Italian commentators with the punk and revolutionary attitude of the Sex Pistols. Why?

The link, in reality, it is less conceptual than you can think. The phonetic assonance between Pizzul and Pistols seemed serves us on a silver dish and in reality football and punk they are two phenomena from the very strong communicative course, that we have tried "to mix" in this project. And as it often happens, a ludic and surreal mix has unexpectedly brought to more sensible and coherent results of many other projects.

Your aesthetics relies on the myth of the bad guys. On someone, as Renè Higuita, you made up a song, others, as Eric Cantona, are covered in the artwork. What does fascinate you of the "bad boys?"

The impudence, without any doubt, and the fact that the "criminals", in a certain sense, they are more nice person than the good boys. Mark Lenders rather than Oliver Hutton, the Stooges rather than the Rolling Stones. We are speaking of people with some true talent. Cantona, he is also a big actor.


What are your favorites historical kits?

Francesco: the Fiorentina one from 80s, sponsor Opel.
Irene: I like the one from 60s but the only sponsor of whom I have memory it is the “Sammontana” one.
Simone: the one of "Sales" from 70s, that I have picked up at 13 from a store.

The retromania is perhaps the clearest trend of the last years, so in the football and sporting apparel in general, so in the music. Your work, also with clear innovative keys, it unquestionably feeds it some past elements. When it is that the "vintage" becomes an advantage and it can be a problem, according to you?

It is a problem when excessive and it excludes the contamination and the contemporaneity. It is true that our disk draws from the past, also under the musical profile, but the material of departure is definitely “little Italian" and very heterogeneous. Our objective was to avoid the effect "figurine Panini", that would inevitably have marks the everything with a nostalgic halo, that really doesn't belong to us.

How did you have come into contact with Alberto Becherini, the author of the marvelous cover of the album?

Irene has known him the first time in 2013, on the occasion of the show Rumorama organized in Florence near the Glue. Two years later, she has contacted him for a personal show. After this they have remained in contact and, considering that in different occasions he has collaborated with punk rock band, we have thought that could be perfect to realize our cover, thanks to his ability to contaminate the imaginary punk with the pop aesthetics.

The titles of track from your album, “Pedate”, travel in the history of football telling characters, moments and meaningful gestures of it. I assume that you’are fans of the Fiorentina, but how did you have chosen those moments?

To pure instinct, as those moments themselves are verified. However, nobody plan the goal or the save of the life!


Speaking of music: from which musical background Sex Pizzul come from?

We are a piano player with academic formation, a post-hardcore bass-player and an Afro-punk drummer. We’ve played in various formations, and the Sex Pizzul are a beautiful “ammucchiata” of every our experience.


There is not anything more musical in the football than the organized supporters, ultra or hooligans. Are you part of some “curva”? If you had to choose a choir to sing in a hypothetical (or real) “curva”, which would it be?

We don’t go to the arena so much, by now we are bad “couch fans" , but in the one of St. Pauli, in which you always sing even if they are in the last position in the last league, to sing "You'll never walk alone", well, we would gladly go there. 
In Italy I always adored the chaint on Legrottaglie.