On Tuesday they performed at the Starlite in Marbella with a tremendous success that is already the characteristic of this year, both on Spanish and foreign stages. And today they do it at the Terramar Festival in Sitges (10 pm), where a similar reception is predicted. They are Hombres G, the iconic band led by David Summers, who after forty years of career are an intergenerational reference. La Vanguardia subscribers have a 15% discount on the price of tickets, as long as they buy them at Entradas de Vanguardia.
The singer, bassist and composer talks about the survival of the band, its songs that have become hymns and, also, about the film Voy a pasármelo bien, directed by David Serrano, which opens today and has a soundtrack made up of the group’s hits from the mid-’80s to the early ’90s.
In your current concerts, do you pay attention to the composition of the audience?
Lately we’re freaking out because both in American concerts, in Mexico or the United States, as well as in Spain we’re seeing a huge number of twelve or thirteen-year-old kids. Kids of the same age as the protagonists of the film that we premiere tomorrow [for today]. Something awesome; we are hooking another unexpected new generation. We have a very large range
What does he attribute it to?
No idea. I want to think that it’s because we have some very nice songs that age very well, because in the eighties we didn’t want to sound like the fashionable sound at that time. We have always fled from fashion, we have always wanted to have a style of an important personality. And that perhaps, despite the fact that we started in the 80s, makes our first songs not sound 80s but rather timeless.
Did they consciously want to sound different?
But if it is the same as now: now reggaeton is in fashion and we are not going to do reggaeton; We have always been aware that what is in fashion, goes out of fashion. We have never wanted to get on the fashion bandwagon of the moment: in the eighties there was a sound with little keyboards, hairstyles and such, and we did not like to participate in what was a little more than the mass. Those musical movements, those moves, we didn’t care a bit, and we always wanted to make war on our own and make the music we liked. That is, what we are doing now, the music we want and that’s it.
Where lies the key for this soundtrack to continue to have such acceptance?
The secret is the songs. We have managed to accumulate a lot of very nice ones, and we are lucky that we have not been able to stop playing them in all our lives. Great classics to which we try to add new songs; that is to say, we have Sufre mamón, Venezia and others but then we have made I feel good or I notice it with which we have been increasing that list. But our idea has always been to make beautiful songs.
But isn’t there a master formula?
Nobody knows what it is. In our case, Sufre mamón was a huge hit but I haven’t repeated a song like that since then I did Voy a pasármelo bien, then I love you, then Trembling… I mean it’s not about a rhythm or of a riff, but that it has a magic that nobody knows what it is. But you either have it or you don’t: as the flamenco gypsies say, it’s either very easy or impossible.
As a performer, don’t you get tired of performing them over and over again?
not tired Just seeing the faces of those who listen to those songs… it’s like asking Paul McCartney if he gets tired of singing Yesterday, to name just one. When you see the power of a song and what it means to people and how happy you make those people over and over again, then you don’t mind singing it over and over again.
In the movie I’m going to have a good time, only songs from a certain stage of the band are heard.
Yes, because the film narrates in fiction the life of its director, David Serrano, his childhood, and the songs of ours that he listened to at that time are the ones that come out, and I respected it, even if it had included more recent songs.
How do you rate the final result of the film?
I think it will work very well. David has left his skin to tell this story and it has come out round. And the children are great, as are the adults, and the music is spectacular.
One of the topics that surrounded Hombres G since its inception is that its members were posh. You even said that they were kicked out of the Movida for that.
This topic has always bored us. They called us posh because of what I told you before, because we didn’t wear those hairstyles, crucifixes on our ears, and since we were quite normal and simple middle-class people, and we always have been, they had to pigeonhole us in some way. And since the little girls also loved our music, they pigeonholed us into that roll. And I assure you that we never have been; We have never been pimps or aristocrats. I have never gone to regattas or played polo, nor have I bought designer clothes. But we have carried that sanbenito until now.
And continuing with the past, they were also accused of homophobes for that phrase “I’m going to take revenge on that queer” included in their great success Sufre mamón. How did you experience political correctness?
I don’t care, I’m not going to change a single comma. When I wrote those songs I was 17 or 18 years old and people don’t put themselves in the historical context. And I assure you that when I did it I had no intention of offending anyone, quite the opposite. What we wanted is for people to have fun, transmit good vibes… we have never been a controversial group in that sense. And since that was never our intention, I am not going to correct anything or apologize. And to all this we must add that there is a lot of misinformation among those who accuse you of this or that. If people were more interested and asked why you have written that to that… but they don’t and they judge and crucify you right away.
Is nostalgia a good companion? The film I’m going to have a good time is still a look at the past impregnated with it.
I personally am not nostalgic. But in recent years things have happened to us that we would never have dreamed would have happened to us in the 80s. Now we are playing in incredible places: the other day we were at Madison Square Garden in New York, or in Miami playing for 16,000 people, or for the first time in our lives we were in Milan in front of 6,500 crazy people. That’s why I like to always look at what’s coming, because for me it’s the best. But effectively the film resorts to nostalgia because it is about the life of its director, and he wanted to remember the story of his childhood and infancy. And at this moment that is not bad at all because we are living in such convulsive and strange times that remembering those years when you were so happy, for many people it will work like a balm.
By the way, what is your favorite G Men song?
It’s very difficult because they’re all like my daughters, but I’ll tell you Sufre sucre. Because that song gave me everything else: for example now I’m talking to you thanks to her. I owe him almost my whole life
