The time has come for Coque Malla to collect awards such as the Ondas for lifetime achievement, a reflection of a long career that began with only 15 years at the helm of Los Ronaldos. Almost four decades on the scenarios that have led him, after 50, to reflect on the end of the road in Although we are dead, where he talks about physical death, but also that of relationships, dreams and hopes. Ten stories to the rhythm of rock about a life stage that society ignores when it does not directly veto it, as it does with music by censoring artists, or with pop by ignoring it on the radio.
Although we are dead, after almost 40 years of career it sounds a bit like an epitaph.
We artists make our works with four things, and one of them and very important is the fear of death, always present in our culture: wars, illness, accidents, mystery, religion, everything revolves a lot around death. I haven’t invented anything.
Because right now?
The pandemic brought death very close to us, and this album has something post-pandemic. When we experienced Covid we were in the middle of a fire, it was not a time for artistic reflections, but now it is, and death and the feeling of fragility have crept in. On the other hand, there is my paternity mixed with the death of my parents in a few years, you stop being a son and become just a father, that makes you see everything in a different way. In addition, there is one’s own age, one does not consider the end at 56 as one did at 40, I’m not telling you at 30 anymore. And death as a metaphor for things that end, relationships, friends who grow apart, stages of life. life that ends, moving.
Everything has an end
Paradoxically, it has resulted in an album with a lot of vitality, it is not a festive album but neither is it mortuary, pessimistic, or dark. It has dark and mysterious parts, but at the same time it has a lot of vitality.
In Dance with the Dead he says “nothing matters anymore, soon I will leave my body.”
I become aware of death in a very real way and different from how I had considered it until now, when it seemed like something that did not suit me.
Currently the presence of death is hidden
At a record signing, a woman told me that her husband had died years ago and was feeling terrible, but she heard the album and it gave her peace. There is not always hope and you have to accept it, things end, whatever it is, life or a relationship.
In Místico he says that he no longer wants to be a false hero
Fame has something of false heroism, they take photos of you and you appear on TV, but heroism is something else.
Have there been times when fame has gone to your head?
The curious thing is that this reflection has come at an incredibly bright moment in my life. I have an incredible relationship, incredible children, and I’m doing great at work. The fear of losing that generates dark thoughts in you, we are machines for having problems and solving them. We are designed to solve problems and when we don’t have them we invent them.
In his speech at the Ondas awards, he called for a greater presence of pop music in the media.
I get the feeling that it’s quite a national problem, you go abroad and hear pop and rock on the radio, in bars, everywhere. This summer I traveled with my family through the United States, and we didn’t listen to a single reggaeton song. There was good music playing everywhere, in a supermarket in a town in Arkansas they played Blondie or Bowie, it’s their folklore.
For what is this?
I don’t know, I think it’s a problem of how the average Spaniard relates to culture and its artists. Art and culture in Spain is located in the space of leisure, and not in the box of spirituality, culture or personal growth, as I believe they intuitively do in Latin America, Europe and the Anglo-Saxon countries. Here a concert or a movie is placed in the same box as a dinner. People want to laugh, have a good time, and a small and somewhat mediocre relationship is created with culture and art.
In Blah, blah, blah he criticizes censorship in music
It comes from the helplessness caused by this moralistic wave that is attacking art. They want to impose moral and ethical norms that work for civil life, but that make no sense in art. Art must be wild territory because it is abstract by definition. Taking it literally and denouncing songs, movies, books or wanting to amputate them for being racist or fascist is absolutely stupid, medieval and useless. Censoring art does not morally improve a society, it reflects what happens in society, it does not influence it.
There is a musical continuity that includes multiple sounds
When an album works the most, when it is most credible, it is when the concept appears as you do it and not when in an intellectual way, cold, you consider the concept, go for it and enslave the entire musical and organic process. I didn’t think about making an album about death, I started writing and connected with something that had been worrying me for a while.
It concludes with Like the morning, a happy song
But then it goes wrong, in the end it goes to minor tones and ends almost like a horror movie. The song is composed for the musical Clara y el Abismo, a terrible story about a woman who is diagnosed with cancer and dies. It seemed like the perfect epilogue for this album, a reflection on death with ups and downs, and we end with a lullaby that seems to have hope, but suddenly goes wrong.