5 Songs I Love w/ Claudio Conti

Every artist has a handful of songs that become part of their DNA, whether they first sparked a love for songwriting, shaped their understanding of melody or stayed with them through different chapters of their creative lives. For Italian singer-songwriter Claudio Conti, those influences reflect a deep affection for baroque pop, jangle pop and the psychedelic songwriting of the 1960s, alongside the distinctive work of artists such as Gene Clark, Ray Davies, Bill Fay and Andy Partridge.

With his new single “Verità” offering the first glimpse into his forthcoming fourth solo album Kierkegaarden, Conti catches up with Flex for 5 Songs I Love. Along the way, he talks through five tracks that have left a lasting impression on him, exploring the songs and artists that shaped his approach to songwriting, the records that have accompanied him throughout his career, and the sounds that continue to inform his musical world.

Cattle and Cane (The Go-Betweens)

One of my favourite bands, the Australian The Go-Betweens, scattered an extraordinary number of gems across the world from 1982 onward. “Cattle and Cane” and its video came out in 1983, and the video has always added to the allure Australia holds in my imagination.

The band plays inside a barn, deliberately isolated to create art, while a sense of scorching heat seems to seep through the shafts of light between the beams. The light creates a mysterious chiaroscuro around the musicians and perfectly embraces the melancholy of the song.

I like to imagine McLennan nostalgically recalling flashes of his adolescence, memories drifting into the darkness of the room, remaining faint and elusive, impossible to grasp with his hands, but still reachable through the heart and mind.

Beds are Burning (Midnight Oil)

More Australia. Peter Garrett’s intense environmental commitment could almost be summed up by the video for Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning”: bare trees, shadows, water, red earth and dust. The towering singer moves and dances almost restlessly, as if caught in convulsions, fully aware of mankind’s guilt toward both the land and its Aboriginal people. At times, it feels as though the band is travelling toward Indigenous communities, if only to show their closeness and solidarity. In the final section, my favorite part, long, reverberating electric-guitar notes spread across the landscape beneath a gigantic sun, while the musicians are reduced to silhouettes against the light, creating a perfectly striking finale.

Beating of Hearts (XTC)

I’ve always loved XTC’s “Beating of Hearts” video because it grows from an openly idealistic idea by Andy Partridge: the human heartbeat as a sound louder than tanks, rifles and bombers. Aware that the concept could seem naïve, he sets it against restless, psychedelic, hypnotic music shaped by the Rickenbacker, miniKORG and the guitars’ strange tuning. The heartbeat becomes almost a primitive drum. In the theatrical video, projections, shadow-play, flowers and images of war overlap across the band’s bodies, placing life and destruction in the same space. Fragile yet persistent, the heart becomes the force resisting the noise of the world.

Balloon Man (Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians)

Shot by his friend Tony Moon, it shows how artistic brilliance can come more from ideas than from budget. I love this video and it will certainly inspire one of my next ones, especially because it was made on Super 8 using stop-motion and object animation. It stages a surreal encounter-clash between Hitchcock and an oversized balloon, possibly embodying a recurring nightmare or something unresolved that keeps returning. Fruit, vegetables, Heinz cans, egg cartons and other objects come alive on the table, with an unsettling strangeness reminiscent of Lynch’s Eraserhead. The light, bouncing jangle guitars contrast with grotesque, absurd lyrics: normality turns into a small surreal universe where everything seems harmless until it explodes.

Fade Into You (Mazzy Star)

I’m choosing this one also because it reminds me so much of a girl I was deeply in love with. “Fade into you / Strange you never knew / Fade into you / I think it’s strange you never knew” is one of those choruses that, if you’ve really lived it, you can never shake off. The film grain and faded colors have an unmistakable ’90s patina: I see My Own Private Idaho, the escape of Thelma & Louise and the sterility of Zabriskie Point in it. Hope Sandoval already seems like a memory, her voice a distant whisper; the acoustic guitars carry the journey forward while David Roback’s desert guitar draws the horizon. In the end, the desert becomes freedom: far from cities, failed relationships and everything that has disappointed us, as if driving away were enough to leave it all behind.

Listen to ‘Verità’