I have a bunch of columns in my blog now. 'Las Resenas Casuales' is for reviews, 'Los Treinta Principales' is for the best 30 albums of Spanish indie rock on my humble opinion (or, should I better call this 'The 30 Albums That I Truly Love And Adopt The Grandeur Of''?), 'Las Canciones Ocasionales' is for occasional videos which I suppose to be pretty interesting for some reasons. I started an overview of the bands from Canary Islands - the thing which never was made in English before. I dream of starting getting the interviews here. And the question is 'Why?' Or 'What's up to you, guy? What happened to you and made you totally wasted and fucked up? Why, for the God's sake, Spanish indie rock?'
I don't know, really. It was something like that.
Autumn of the year of 2006. 6:55 a.m. I'm sitting in front of the TV set and having my breakfast (I recall this to be some kind of sandwich) before going to the work. And it's 'Euronews' channel on TV. I'm talking with my wife and looking on the screen without a care. The 'music' section of Euronews could be pretty interesting at times. Not this time, possibly, as this morning there is someone called Deluxe. Never been heard about him. The skinny and unshaven guy in black clothes leaves his bycicle at the fence, sits on the low barrier of the playground in the park and starts playing a song with his acoustic guitar to a bunch of occasional beholders.
And within the next minute I stopped chewing, stopped talking. Even stopped breathing.
I can't recall the song Deluxe (yes, I learned only his alias from this short clip) was playing. I only know that the song changed my life.
The next couple of years I was trying to find in Internet some information about this guy. And it was not an easy target. First af all - requesting 'Deluxe' in Google you might retrieve the whole lot of useless trash including tons of deluxe versions of everything along with, dunno, VIP prostitutes. The second obstacle - my native town of Tula was not that sort of advanced place of living in terms of Internet expansion. It was, frankly speaking, one step above the dial-up.
The things started changing in the 1st half of 2008 when I moved to Moscow. Having cheap and fast Internet now, I learned that
Deluxe was the alias of Galician native
Xoel Lopez. But the far more important thing that I learned from all of my unstoppable searches: there were lots of great bands in Spain besides him. I recall
Tulsa to be the second Spanish band I fell in love with, and my actual all-time favorites
Love Of Lesbian were the third. Then I learned about
Mi Pequena Radio,
Pumuky,
Vetusta Morla,
El Nino Gusano,
El Hombre Burbuja,
Mercromina, etc. There were also lots of Spanish-languaged musical blogs which were mostly piratic ones. Some of them successfully converted into the informational and cultural resources intended for the support of indie musicians:
El Mundo De Tulsa,
Senor Pollo leaving their unfair past behind - and some fell into obscurity.
I might start this blog in Spanish - but there are many music blogs in Spanish which are far better than mine (I'm just living too far from the event places - and I'm way too shy to finally start making interviews! - to create really good resource). But almost no one talks about this great scene in other languages.
Why not in Russian? There is a big problem with my countrymen - they like something for free very much and don't like at all to pay for something they used to get for free. But I don't - and never will - give links to mp3s here unless it's free distribution by an artist himself - and it vastly diminishes the importancy of me and my blog in the eyes of an average Russian music lover. I know it sounds a bit snobbish - but that's the fact.
