Eat the Phikis is the 1996 album by Italian rock band Elio e le Storie Tese, published after their second-place finish at the Sanremo Music Festival 1996 with the song La terra dei cachi, a humorous take on Italian lifestyle. Eat the Phikis had a good commercial success in Italy, by keeping the first place in the best-selling album chart (FIMI) for four consecutive weeks.

Songs

As usual for the band, the album lyrics are simultaneously serious and jocular, as they discuss a number of social and personal topics in an ironical tone. On a musical level, the album alludes to several other musical works by other people.

Intentional mistakes in the lyrics of "First Me, Second Me"

Track listing

Personnel

Guest musicians

Album title and artwork

During the recording sessions, the album was meant to be called Eat the Khakis, as a reference to "La terra dei cachi". "Cachi" in Italian and "khaki" in English are pronounced the same, however, Vittorio Cosma warned the band that "khakis", outside of Italy, does not refer to the fruits (in fact, they are known as "persimmons" in English), but is instead a common nickname for military uniforms in general, due to their khaki color. Because of this, the band, who were still fond of titling the album after the name of a fruit including an H in it, chose "phikis" as a reference to another album track, "Burattino senza fichi". Later on, the concept of "making everything sweeter", which permeated the lyrics to "La terra dei cachi", extended itself to the cover artwork, where a still frame of a great white shark, taken from a TV wildlife documentary, was re-touched by graphic designer Alex Koban from Milan-based CGI studio Imagic; Koban "sweetened" the shark image by compositing oversized dental braces over its teeth. The artwork is inspired by the cover of the 1994 album Time to Move by H-Blockx.

Footnotes