For two decades the stone building in Vallico Sotto that is now the Vallico Academy was the Towler Institute, and physicists came every summer for the QMC in the Apuan Alps workshops. Every year I tried to get a rock and roll evening going, and every year it came to very little. Physicists, it turns out, would rather talk; the willing musicians were few, Pablo López Ríos, who drums, sings and plays the guitar rather well, chief among them.

The workshops have finished, and the building has a new life. The Vallico Academy is, in its own words, “an experiment in thought, community and the renewal of a Tuscan mountain village”: residencies, lectures and long conversations in a village of twenty-five people on a rocky spur of the Apuan Alps, with a farm on the terraces above. Its first lecture series was given in the old church in the summer of 2026.

Come and play

The evenings up here are long and quiet, and anyone visiting the Academy who plays anything at all is warmly invited to play. You need not bring a thing. The Academy has a full PA with microphones, a Nord stage piano, two electric guitars (one of them a Fender Stratocaster), a bass, electronic drums and a drum machine, an electric violin, and a washboard with metal thimbles, which you will need for It’ll Be Me.

It takes less than you think to start. Simple Johnny Cash songs are easy to learn (try Folsom Prison Blues), and full transcriptions of almost any song are online, on sites such as Songsterr, where you can switch between the lead, rhythm and bass parts while it plays. My taste in music may not be yours, so bring your own songs.

The Vallico Sotto Star Club

Pour encourager les autres, I have spent some years trying to become a Jerry Lee Lewis impersonator. I have very little natural talent, especially for singing, and most rock and roll sheet music is no help, since it puts the vocal line in the right hand as if nobody were going to sing it. In 2013 I reckoned the job would take three years and planned a debut for the summer of 2015, before the children and old people of Vallico Sotto. The debut is running a little late and the old people are all dead and there are no more children.

Until then, here is the Great Man himself, sending a studio full of teenagers wild on Granada Television in 1964:

Then put the whole record on, live at the Star Club:

This particular record, Live at the Star Club, Hamburg, recorded on 5 April 1964 with the Nashville Teens behind him, needs a little explanation. AllMusic called it “the greatest rock & roll album ever recorded”; Rolling Stone said it was “not an album, it’s a crime scene”; Q thought it might be “the most exciting performance ever recorded”. That is exactly what my debut at the Vallico Sotto Star Club is going to sound like. Definitely. Absolutely. Oh yes.

To prove it, here is my ideal set list, twenty-three songs with links to the records, the films and the television.