PFM spent 1974 conquering America. They toured it opening for Santana and the Beach Boys and ZZ Top, they came home with a live album, and then they hired a singer with perfect American pronunciation, wrote an entire album in English, and used it to explain to America precisely what they thought of America. The Italian sleeve made the point without words: a bar of chocolate wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. It was, commercially, one of the least sensible decisions any Italian band ever took. It also produced their hardest and most serious record.

The short version

Recorded in June and July 1975 and released that October — on Numero Uno at home, on Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Manticore in Britain and on Asylum in America, with different artwork abroad. Five tracks, thirty-six minutes, produced by Claudio Fabi with the band. Bernardo Lanzetti sings and plays second guitar; Franco Mussida plays guitars; Flavio Premoli plays keyboards; Mauro Pagani plays violin and woodwinds; Patrick Djivas plays bass; Franz Di Cioccio plays drums. Everyone sings. The words are by Pagani, Lanzetti, and an American, Marva Jan Marrow. Italy got national distribution and nothing else; the rest of the world was somebody else’s job.

The singer they did not hire

For four years PFM had run on a system where everybody sang and nobody was the singer, and by 1975, with America in play, that had to end. The first approach was to Ivan Graziani, and it did not take — his voice suited ballads and the album they were planning was neither soft nor romantic. So they called Bernardo Lanzetti out of Acqua Fragile, who had the range, the drama and, decisively, had lived in the States and could pronounce the language. Graziani did not vanish entirely: he is a co-writer on the opening track, which is a strange consolation prize. Marva Jan Marrow was already inside the operation — an American songwriter living in Italy, signed to the same label, Djivas’s partner, and busy elsewhere on records by Guccini, Battisti and Finardi. An Italian band, an American lyricist, an English-language album about American power. Nobody has ever accused this record of being simple.

The sound

Hard, direct, and stripped of almost everything dreamy. The pastoral romance of Storia di un minuto is gone; what is left is the interplay — Premoli’s keyboards and Mussida’s guitar working against each other at speed, Djivas and Di Cioccio driving underneath, Pagani’s violin cutting across — and it is as good as this band ever played. It is also, by common consent, difficult: few melodic handholds, long structures, and the most uncompromisingly progressive album PFM made. Then there is Lanzetti, who divides everybody. His voice is theatrical and raw and lands somewhere near Peter Gabriel, and it is the single most common complaint about this album and the single most common reason people love it. There is no middle position available.

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The songs

From Under opens at seven and a half minutes, the one with Graziani’s name on it, and establishes the terms immediately: no fade-in, no pastoral. Harlequin follows and is the closest thing here to a tune you can carry away. The title track is the reason the album is famous — the American soldiers who came to liberate Italy from fascism and drove into the towns handing chocolate to the children, turned into an argument about what arrived with them and never left. It does not demonise; it accuses. Out of the Roundabout is the eight-minute centrepiece and the finest musicianship on the record, winding up into a closing sprint that most listeners rate the peak of PFM’s whole catalogue. Paper Charms ends it.

Reception and legacy

America ignored it, which is not surprising. Japan did not: the album went over well there, PFM toured the country that November, and Japanese affection for Italian progressive rock has never faded since. At home the reception was worse than indifferent — the band were accused of going commercial and of betraying the language, which was a peculiar charge to level at a record attacking the American way of life, and Lanzetti has been pointing out the irony ever since. Italy saw less and less of them: a scatter of summer dates in resort towns, and a proper tour that amounted to six nights in December. Lanzetti stayed until 1978 and then left. The reappraisal has been long and it is now more or less complete: this is the PFM album that serious listeners argue for.

The verdict

Essential, and not the place to start. Storia di un minuto first, then Per un amico, then this — because Chocolate Kings only makes sense as the record where PFM stopped being charming. Play Out of the Roundabout and then the title track, in that order, so the politics arrive after the playing has already convinced you. Then Banco’s Darwin for the other summit, Acqua Fragile for where Lanzetti came from, and Stormy Six for the other Italian band with something to say about the liberation. A chocolate bar in an American flag, sold to America. They knew exactly what they were doing.

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