Nobody Translated a Word: How PFM Rebuilt Two Italian Albums in English and Reached the Billboard Chart

In October 1973 an album called Photos of Ghosts entered the American market and did something no Italian rock record had done before. It reached the Billboard 200, peaking at number 180 in November. That is a modest number until you look at what was inside the sleeve. The record was not a new album. It was two existing Italian albums, taken apart and rebuilt for an audience that would never hear the originals.

Premiata Forneria Marconi, five session veterans from Milan who had spent the late sixties as Italy’s answer to the Wrecking Crew, had already released Storia di un minuto and Per un amico in 1972 on the RCA offshoot Numero Uno. Both were domestic successes. Both were sung in Italian. Neither had any obvious route out of the country.

A cassette, a phone call, and a rehearsal room in West London

The route arrived by accident. Greg Lake was handed a cassette during an Emerson, Lake & Palmer tour of Italy, listened to it back home, and phoned the band’s manager Franco Mamone in disbelief. In December 1972 he flew to Rome for the launch party of Per un amico at the PalaEUR and joined the band onstage for the encore. A few months later he arranged a showcase at the ABC Theatre, ELP’s own rehearsal space in West London, and offered PFM a place on Manticore, the label ELP had just started.

Drummer and singer Franz Di Cioccio has been clear about what the British press could not process at the time. Italy meant opera and Verdi. The idea that a band from Milan might play progressive rock at that level did not fit the available categories. Being unclassifiable is precisely what got them signed.

The lyricist who did not translate

Manticore paired them with Peter Sinfield, the former King Crimson lyricist, then fresh from producing the Roxy Music debut. Sinfield produced and mixed the new recordings at Command Studios in London. He also wrote the English words, and this is the detail that makes the record strange. He did not translate the Italian lyrics. He wrote new ones from scratch, five of the seven tracks, on top of music that had already been finished, released and understood by an entire country.

Photos of Ghosts contains the whole of Per un amico, four of its five recordings carrying different words in a different language. “Celebration” is “È festa” from the debut, with a new English text. “Mr. 9 ’til 5” is stranger still. Its Italian ancestor, “Generale”, was an instrumental, so Sinfield did not replace anything, he added a voice to a piece that never had one. A new instrumental, “Old Rain”, was written to complete the running order. And one track, “Il Banchetto”, was left in Italian and simply remixed, a single window back into the record’s first life.

What survived the crossing

The words changed. The music did not, and the music was the part that carried the passport. Di Cioccio has pointed out that “Celebration” comes from the tarantella, and that the band’s improvising vocabulary was not built on the blues the way American rock was. Their reference points were classical training and southern Italian melody, which is why the record sounded misplaced on American FM radio in exactly the way that made programmers curious. Add Flavio Premoli’s Mellotron and Minimoog, Mauro Pagani’s violin and flute, and Franco Mussida moving between electric guitar, twelve string, theorbo and mandocello, and the instrumentation alone announced that this was not a British prog band.

The synthesiser had arrived by a similar piece of nerve. For “Impressioni di Settembre”, the first commercially successful Italian record to feature one, the band talked the Italian Moog distributor into lending them a Minimoog by promising it would sell fifty units. Di Cioccio says he eventually sold two thousand.

The method, and the moment it stopped working

John Peel and Bob Harris championed the record. PFM played Reading in 1973 on a bill with Genesis, The Faces and Rory Gallagher. The formula was repeated: L’Isola di Niente got an English companion, The World Became the World, with Sinfield again. By 1975 the band skipped the Italian original entirely and released Chocolate Kings in English only, its sleeve a torn chocolate wrapper printed with the American flag. It made the UK top twenty and cost them ground in the States.

Then the mechanism turned on them. Making records their Italian audience could no longer follow produced what Di Cioccio called cultural jet lag, which is where the 1977 album Jet Lag took its name. It was the last PFM album with English lyrics. They went home.

The interesting part is that the idea never died. When PFM returned with Emotional Tattoos in 2017, it arrived as two separate albums, one Italian and one English, the export version restored to equal status rather than treated as a compromise. Fifty years on, plenty of European bands still make the same calculation about which language travels. PFM’s answer was the most honest and the most extreme available: do not translate the song, write a different one on top of it, and let the playing do the arguing.