Funk Investigators

1984

Picture the scene: Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of those borders people love to box their history into. For decades this was the West's last line against the red bogeyman of Tito's Yugoslavia. From the mountains up north to the crossings at Trieste and Gorizia, hundreds of barracks were packed with thousands of conscripts, and the frontier leaked heroin by the ton, straight out of Turkey through the Balkans. Out on the street it's grey uniforms on weekend pass and teenage junkies nodding off in doorways. That's where our resistance starts. That's where we zip up our parkas and build a world of our own.

Perseo (Pordenone, 1984 - mid 90's)

Downtown, but off the map. Right where the cultures with the wrong codes and the wrong language end up once they're shoved to the edges, and get labelled "subcultures". Even more so in a sleepy little town like ours, where everything's black or white, good or bad, right or wrong.

So the Perseo, a games room tucked into the heart of town, becomes an enclave, a subcultural ghetto, magnetic north for every kid who can't make sense of the world around him and needs to build his own. A world that doesn't stop at the city limits, fed by stuff happening in places you've only read about or heard of secondhand. A world with its own lingo, its own "secret" music, and clothes nobody else would be seen dead in.

Slowly at first, then overnight, the Perseo fills up with Mods, Rockabillies, Skinheads, and with "normal" kids who stumble on the style that fits and just fall in. Like us, a lot of them never leave.

Mods (Pordenone, 1984 - Today)

Mods in Pordenone at the time sounded like a joke. Pordenone really? Fifty thousand people, a few miles from the Yugoslav Federation's nuclear bunkers, in a town where every day is the same and every change gets watered down until it isn't one. Belonging. A family you pick yourself. Who you are, alone and as a crew. A world bigger than your postcode. Style. The road there is all hairpin bends, hard braking and stalled starts, because the "normal" world is still out there and you've got to deal with it like it's nothing. That's Mod in a nutshell: "clean living under difficult circumstances". Being yourself, recognisable wherever you go, and tight with your crew, always. That's why it's no weekend fad. And that's why, for all their trying, no political side has ever managed to claim it.

Scooter Boys (1988)

Scooterism kicks off when a lot of Mods start pouring time, care and cash into one of the movement's core symbols: the scooter. It's not just how you get around town and get spotted on your own streets anymore. The Vespa and the Lambretta become the way to reach your people all over Italy and abroad. All those long runs rewrite the rules, on looks and on mechanics. Out go the extra lamps and mirrors. Frames get stripped of everything that isn't essential, engines get illegal tuning, and suddenly you're covering more miles, a lot faster. The clothes get tougher too: still sharp, but less dressy, built for life on two wheels. A subculture inside the subculture is born. Some things stay put, the music above all: Soul, Rhythm and Blues, Original Reggae, Ska. Others keep their roots in Modernism but get reworked for the road. The scooter teaches Mods the fine art of adapting. A mindset that comes in handy for the rest of your life.

Soul Boys (1984 - Today)

Black music, the beating heart of our world, rides with us the whole way. It picks us up. It sets us free. It holds us together. The Modern Jazz the Sixties Mods lived for (Mod is short for "Modernist", a name that came straight out of that obsession) cut so deep that the grooves and sophisticated melodies of African American music got wired into the DNA of every new wave of the movement and its offshoots. The soundtrack to every single day since that fateful 1984, and one more challenge on top of all the rest: knowing your stuff, to keep the subculture alive.

So we turn into collectors too, hunting records you can only track down with near-scientific digging. We become selecters. We build a language of labels, styles, dance moves, artists and a scene miles away from anything mainstream.

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