VEP - Femina Ridens

Continuing with coversongs from the previous post...

One of the many coversongs that VEP played was an oddity from a little known and rather bizarre Italian movie from 1969, called Femina Ridens (aka The Frightend Woman aka The Laughing Woman), written by Stelvio Cipriani. A wonderful popsong, played by a typical italian-movie orchestra from that era, the original features complex drumming, strings and brass, and the thickest accent heard in any language outside a Banana Airlines song. We had a hard time trying to decipher the lyrics, which grammatically are very offbeat - probably a result of word-by-word translation, and we ended up guessing wildly a couple of places. After having played the song a while, I was able to secure it on CD. This version had a different mix, with the vocal mixed louder than the version featured in the movie itself, which we had used. The CD-version enabled us to fill out some of the missing parts, but not all, the accent and grammar were still just too weird. (Also, the "scrappala"-guitar in the intro/outro was mixed quieter, but as you can hear in our version, we didn't care to follow that...) . Although the song was quite hard to play, we played it rather well at rehearsals, and it was a fun song to play.

I spent many hours programming the drums for this recording, and although still not quite satisfactory, they do the job. The goal was to mimic the original, just as much to test the programming abilities of both me and the gear as for musical reasons. The bouncy bass is also very close to the original, and Aud Sissel spent a great deal of time finding out how to play it. There is very little guitar on the original, though, so I wrote new parts for the verse and chorus, trying to compensate for the the lack of strings and brass.

In contrast to the other recorded songs by VEP, the bass on this recording is played by Aud Sissel. However, she only played the first verse and chorus before aborting the recording session. For the rest of the song, I have cut-and-pasteed basslines from the parts she played (and added the odd note myself). The song features a couple of guests, Per F. from Softcocks / Fastened Bulbous is buried deep in the intro/outro chorus, and PG, also from Fastened, plays organ.

This movie, btw, is recommended wholeheartedly to those that are curious about late 60s/early 70s European cinema in the intersection of art and sleaze. It is available on DVD. The opening credits might wet your appetite (note, the youtube-clip is taken from a VHS-source, the DVD looks much better). We also tried to cover another tune from a 70s Italian movie (also written by Cipriani). I think we played it only a couple of times at rehearsals; not having keyboard made it difficult to get it sound right, though, so we abandoned it pretty quickly.