The Sidecar room is celebrating its birthday and wants it to be noticed as it is a brand of the house. Its co-founder and current top manager Roberto Tierz is the one who happily and satisfiedly explains what they will offer for 40 hours to commemorate precisely the 40 years of existence of the legendary space in Plaça Reial.
The marathon, between March 24 and 26, will start with an institutional inauguration where the mayor and the president of the Generalitat are expected to attend, “because everyone wants a photo in the middle of the campaign. And then what we wanted to put in those three days is everything we do during the year to give it visibility, because when you say Sidecar many people only think that we do concerts and discotheques. And no, we do more things”.
Thus, there will be an exhibition by the illustrator Cristina Daura; talks such as the one given by Gerard Quintana, Santi Balmes and Ramon, from The New Raemon; concerts of the new batch, dj sessions, podcasts, showcases, a program with Radio 3, a stage in Plaza Reial with performances and rock workshops for children, and a food truck-churrería where they will give away chocolate with churros.
And also the presentation of This is not the Sidecar book, a work written by Tierz himself with a prologue by Carlos Zanón and published by 66 rpm Edicions. “I explain my point of view of what the Sidecar is. What I have tried is, stringing together anecdotes that have a background, to explain how the authorities saw us when we opened until 2007, when they gave us a medal. Because we must not forget that in 1982, when we opened, what everyone wanted was for us to leave”.
Tierz recalls the genesis of the adventure. In the local Relative Humidity, which opened after us, there was a phrase that I liked and that said “use the bars”. And that was kind of the idea. “We arrived here, we did an inaugural concert on December 31, 1982 in District 5, but in 1983 we did an exhibition of comics, another video clip, which at that time was very new, painting, reading poetry, we continued doing concerts… what we wanted was to be the place where things happen”.
And that opening was carried out by “my partners who were 22 years old and I was the eldest at 23, and we didn’t know anything, but we had traveled, we were in Amsterdam and we were very hooked on the model of a couple of places there, and without realizing it we took it and put it into practice.”
At that time, only Karma, Zeleste, and Magic existed. “In relation to the other places we offered much more current music, demos, new wave, punk, Los Rápidos, but on the other hand, as waiters we were very atypical because we were the age of the customer or less, we dressed like them… and the connection was immediate, because you could be having a drink and talking about Elvis Costello. We bring that freshness, the change of music and the concept that you can do anything here. And we had a very quick connection with people within a month.”
The connection, on the other hand, with those who rule in the city has been ambivalent. “There are like two layers; one is the people who are in Culture, with whom we have always understood each other wonderfully, very good connections and exchange of ideas, and then there is the administrative part, including the police, which has nothing to do And both layers at a given moment can come into contradiction.”
However, the friction has been diluted. “For us in general, the relationship is getting easier, because it has been going on for many years and it is consolidated, and also many of them are regular customers. We are no longer weirdos who wear their hair in a bizarre way. And that makes things easier. things.
But in another sense, it is true that the level of freedom that existed in the early years, since Franco died at the Olympics, was fantastic and you could do whatever was accepted. Without being nostalgic, I do miss that a bit; Now all of that has faded away. And the boil has been lost.
In this change throughout these four decades, the variation of the public, as well as of habits, also plays a notable role. “Before, people went out every day, because there they had Tinder, music and so on. Now you find all of that at home, without moving, spending less. And there is one significant thing: with all this urban music, when they come to The club have an attitude and generate problems that are the same as those generated by punks in the early eighties. A rebellious attitude, very adolescent on the other hand, against everything and everyone. And it annoys me as much and I like it as much as before with the punks. But what I am not going to say is that before it was better, because before you were young and that mediates your point of view a bit. There are those rebellious people, there is the logical change, but there is one essential thing that yes It has changed and it’s the habits, like being in the hall and at concerts always with the mobile phone, they take photos without stopping, they hang them up, it’s their great priority, more than what happens on stage”.
On the other hand, from its privileged location at number 7 Plaça Reial, the Sidecar has witnessed the evolution of the environment, the Raval, “There is a period that is the best, that is from 2000 to 2010, when there is a reasonable balance between tourism and the neighbours, and that tourism ends up winning. All the local shops are disappearing and that makes the neighborhood fall apart, and in parallel, places like us are disappearing. In fact, we are the only ones around here who work mainly, eighty percent, with the public from Barcelona. In a way we are the last of the Mohicans, it costs us a lot of effort because you have to convince people to come to a place where there is not much travel around”.
Even so, he faces the future with optimism. “I am very confident in the reform that is going to be done in the Rambla, the reopening of the Teatre Principal, there is a great investment in a cultural sector that is not designed for the tourist who comes here to drink sangria and paella. Now we are in a phase that is not down at all, but down and I think we are moving up, and I think things are going to happen in the next two years that will cause us to recover. What we do here is what we would like to see, it has always been our philosophy, and keeping an amateur spirit in a professional company”.
And he concludes: “Look, I get along better with a man from Gràcia than with one from Dublin who has come here to get drunk like the Yankees when they go to Mexico. We are a place for the people of Barcelona, ??we don’t know how to do anything else”.
