Covo Club

Discover the story behind Bologna’s iconic Covo Club, a refuge for innovative and emerging artists since 1980. Co-director Marco Cantelli shares the club’s roots, its role in shaping local culture, and the thrilling live music experiences it offers, from underground bands to future cultural movements.

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There’s a place in Bologna where a group of people is keeping alive a reality born more than 40 years ago in a 16th-century building. A refuge for passionate survivors and outcasts across the decades. Its reins are now in the hands of equally passionate who had the chance to spend their formative years there and gladly accepted the duty to keep it a buzzing spot for music and arts across genres and nations in Bologna. Its name is Covo Club.  

Marco Cantelli is one of the co-directors and Batman-like souls who live a normal life by day and then head to their Covo by night to host the most innovative and upcoming bands and artists. We chatted together to learn more about Covo Club and what it has in store. 

Covo stands as a synonym for “hideout” and “refuge”. The Club has a distinctive name for a venue dedicated to live music but its history is well-known.

“It was born in 1980 inside the Casalone building, in the San Donato neighborhood of Bologna (San Donnino area). A group of very young boys and girls—passionate about music and other forms of culture, centered around rock and punk but not limited to it—created a sort of refuge from the vices (sometimes deadly) of the time to hold parties made up of concerts, DJ sets, exhibitions, and literary events that gradually attracted more citizens than initially expected. It became a weekly staple for the city. After some time—I couldn’t tell you exactly how long—the attention it received crossed Italian borders, and the club found its name: Covo, which I’ve been told is a reference to a 1955 Fritz Lang film, Moonfleet, Il covo dei contrabbandieri”.

Bologna is a city that welcomes diverse personalities and cultural trends, and Covo Club is clearly an integral part of that. People who finds refuge at Covo Club are usually “underdogs” and the artistic research is always on point.

“Personally, although I think I speak on behalf of our group, I feel that Bologna is actually quite stagnant culturally. Beyond the almost populist claim that our city has been overly touristified—which I partly agree with—I find that in recent years, Bologna seems to live more on certainties than on research, more on aperitifs, cocktails, and placements than on real interest. It’s a general critique, of course, without specific references, but we’re far from the offerings my generation had a glimpse of in the 2000s, or even earlier decades. The cultural sectors operate with a marketing and business mindset, often without the foundation or skills for it. I think the result is clear to everyone, and it aligns well with a national nostalgia trend and the loss of desire to engage in truly social contexts and cultural sharing. At Covo Club, we simply invite artists we like, with potential (after all, we’re a medium-small venue) and who make good music, following various scenes from different countries as a group. We like not only those who show off their talent but also those who take risks, experimenting and making proposals at a time when, especially among industry professionals, it doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. Instead, we are sure that shaping one’s talent, abilities, and skills over time and without haste is the right thing, not necessarily to achieve success, but to be part of future cultural movements. That’s something you can’t plan too much for, but we’ll find ourselves in it—like always—from one moment to the next.
We try to be part of these movements by offering talented musicians (often in the early stages of their careers) a safe yet desirable place to perform. We select performances without relying on a catalog or waiting for an agency’s offer, purely for the pleasure of enjoying a show that we’d probably go see elsewhere. We’ve relieved ourselves of the anxiety of ticket sales—we’re not in the marketplace. That doesn’t mean we’ve gotten rid of all the other management anxieties—far from it”.

Speaking of your past, how did you arrive at Covo Club? Is there something the venue has done for you that you feel the need to give back in some way?

“I obviously started attending Covo Club first as a spectator… It must have been 2004, maybe 2005, and I was a kid who discovered, thanks to friends who worked at Covo, that in the neighborhood where I grew up, there was an important club that wasn’t just super cool but also brought in all the artists I listened to and loved. My friends and I would go there for the live shows, stay for two hours for the DJ set, and then get picked up by the unlucky parents of the day.

Covo shaped me, captivated me, and made sure (not without difficulties and not overnight) that I could become part of it. For me, like for all the other guys and girls in the group—there are about thirty of us, it’s an honor and a great responsibility. The work we do, especially with James, Enrico, Lorenzo, and George, who share most of the burdens with me, is all about giving back to Covo Club the musical and social education it gave us. The best way to do this is by offering quality programming—international, diverse in tastes—while maintaining and improving, day by day, a social and inclusive approach (in the fullest sense of the word), which we believe should be at the core of running a venue every day. 

Dealing with music isn’t our only job, and on rare occasions, we’ve even received criticism and provocations —that we lack professionalism, for example. We don’t take them seriously, for two reasons. First, we gain skills and education in other fields that are fundamental to adding further dimensions to our daily commitment to music and our professionalism. Second, we’re able to do our job at Covo Club with the same passion as those attending the concerts. We probably wouldn’t lose that passion if music became our only occupation, but this situation definitely strengthens our enthusiasm”.

Top 3 concerts that shaped and transformed you: where were they held, how did they make you feel, and how do they influence your work today?

“I’m not good at ranking things. I feel more contemporary than nostalgic; I love the idea of a world where, when you love an experience you can eventually recreate it. But I can briefly tell you what happens when you move from the role of spectator to that of someone behind the scenes, quoting our partner Daniele, who has been in the Covo Club circle for more than 20 years. 

When we started getting involved in the club’s workings, he told us, <You’ll never enter a venue the same way again>. I laughed at the time, but he was right: now I (and we) have a much more analytical and attentive approach. If I’m at another venue, I find it hard to fully feel like a spectator; paradoxically, it’s easier for me being at Covo. You find yourself at a live show, trying to figure out what works better or worse than at your place, and it’s one of the best ways to always strive for growth. But, since I hate not answering questions, I’ll throw out three live shows that I’ve certainly loved as a spectator and music consumer: The Rapture at Rolling Stone in Milan (I believe it was 2006), Lady Gaga for the Monster Ball Tour in 2011 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and—a recent surprise—the Paramore opening for Taylor Swift, which I saw in Amsterdam last summer.

As for the billions of live shows I’ve seen at Covo Club, three that come to mind right now are the Norwegians Datarock in 2008, with their red jumpsuits and big glasses; The XX in 2009; and—mentioning a recent one by a band that’s relatively unknown in Italy but is truly at a high level—Cari Cari, whom we brought last season”.