Why I wrote Angel with Drumsticks

Writing this book became an important project. My husband Angelo met we were in our 40s so we had not shared the early years of our adult life.

He told me early in our relationship that he had been a drummer and devised a new way of playing the drums that filled up the gaps in the music but initially didn’t relate a great deal about his band. 
I really only knew it was mid-late 60s and they were called Angel and the Brains. Until I talked to him more about his experience I didn’t even know why they picked it for a name.

It was several years into our relationship that the story of La Messa dei Giovani and the bands performance started to come out and I became more and more intrigued as to why this band, who supposedly were not only excellent musicians but also considered one of the original Italian Beat bands.

This is the story of my husband life until he emigrated to Australia. He was the band leader and drummer of Angel and the Brains

Over time he shared more of his story with me and I convinced him it was one that needed to be written and the truth told.

I didn’t realise until we talked over his sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet recollections spanning six years of his life just how emotional it was for him to share his memories.

The exercise of recording his memories and researching additional information together brought us closer. I came to understand him so much more.

I am proud that finally his story has been told.

Book overview

In a new book about the Italian Beat band, Angel and the Brains, one band member tells his story about what really happened following the first beat mass performed in Rome on 27^th April 1966.

It is a hard hitting revelation of how the bands, following an invitation from the Catholic Church, to perform the Mass, had their careers destroyed by the Vatican in an attempt to save its own reputation.

The reader will discover that many articles written in recent years are wrong in their descriptions of what happened following La Messa and falsely acclaim the event as being a successful innovation of the Catholic Church at the time.