THE WORLD BECAME THE WORLD

As one of Italy's most talented and innovative progressive rock bands of the 1970s, PREMIATA FORNERIA MARCONIA or PFM also proved to be the most successful finding audiences well outside the confines of the Italian scene and wooing receptive audiences in both the USA and England as well as throughout Europe. While releasing a string of albums throughout the 1970s in its native Italian language, the band began to aim for an international audience and released its first English language album "Photos Of Ghosts" in 1973 which compiled various tracks from the band's first two albums and singles only dubbed with new titles and lyrics written by lyricist Peter Sinfield of King Crimson and ELP who decided not to simply translate the original Italian. The album proved to be a major success and therefore when it came time for PFM to record its third Italian language album "L'Isola Di Niente" in 1974, the band decided it would be beneficial to release the same album with completely different English titles and lyrics to present to the rest of the world.

The results yielded the album THE WORLD BECAME THE WORLD which featured all the tracks on "L'Isola Di Niente" only completely reimagined with English lyrics with only three major differences. Firstly the midsection tracks were placed in a different order and secondly a sixth track which would become the title track was rechristened from the band's first single "Impressioni Di Settembre" from the band's debut release "Storia Di Minuto." Unique to these albums, the track "Is My Face On Straight" actually appeared as the first English language track to be heard on an Italian language release and remained identical. Musically the tracks are also identical on both albums. This album followed its Italian counterpart released in March 1974 exactly three months later when it was released in June of the same year. Both releases showcased a stylistic shift in the band's approach by delivering a more diverse palette of musical styles that added more complex elements of avant-prog, jazz fusion and other influences in addition to its classic symphonic prog of its earlier albums.

Both guitarist Franco Mussida and keyboardist Flavio Premoli shared lead vocal duties and both do an excellent job of delivering PFM's music in the English language without sounding stilted or overly accented. In fact they handled the foreign tongue with grace and ease making THE WORLD BECAME THE WORLD just as palatable as the original Italian release even though the preference for most Italian prog lovers seemed to prefer the band's original language over the international accessibility of English. Neither the track order differences nor the addition of the emotive title track reformatted from the band's debut album detracted from the overall masterpiece status of "L'Isola Di Niente" thus making THE WORLD BECAME THE WORLD pretty much an equal counterpart in this double marketing attack. While many artists can sound rather clumsy tackling a language other than their own, PFM were masters of their craft in every way and that included marketing themselves to a larger world following.

The album was a huge success and the band continued to release albums in both languages with a total of five English language releases appearing between 1973 and 1977. Pete Sinfield deserves a lot of credit for making THE WORLD BECAME THE WORLD so believable as an English language release given that the way Italian is constructed is so vastly different. There is nothing about THE WORLD BECAME THE WORLD that detracts from the Italian version, at least to my ears as the music delivers all the same passion and musical maestro magic that the original Italian language delivered so masterfully well. Given that the Italian version worked so well with "L'Isola Di Niente" opening and "Via Lumiere" closing the set, the band opted to keep those tracks in the same running order however the scrambling of the mid-section proved to remain as powerful either way. In short, yet another masterpiece!