Radio Futura’s School of Heat is the song of merciless cities in the worst hours of summer. When the cities are ovens and the buildings and the streets seem mirages of the desert. Working class neighborhoods with low red brick houses or tall buildings like curses. The city is deserted, the bars and shops closed and the inhabitants in their homes like cockroaches, waiting for night to come. It takes courage to go out on the boiling street in those asphalt and metal cities of the eighties, with diseased trees and broken traffic lights.
Santiago Auserón and his family write the summer song not for those who do not believe in summer, but for those who, believing in it, cannot spend the summer. Urbanites for whom their own city is a prison with its doors open, but without money with which to bail out. But it’s not just about money. It is that bag of uprooted people for whom the city is everything. Beginning and end. Neither town nor caravan nor apartment on the coast: summer in the city.
There is no non-urban trace or mercy in this theme of city dwellers roasting in the setting sun. What there is in Escuela de calor is a fatalistic feeling that, from there –wherever it is– you cannot get out. Nor the song. But we almost appreciate that for how extraordinary it was and how extraordinary it continues to be.
We can only survive within that school as a mental framework if you come learned. Because if not, you have it wrong. In the lyrics, we immediately come across a river that we assume will carry little water and many sanitary problems. The evocative magic of Santiago Auserón, his lyricist, makes us know that he is talking about Madrid without mentioning it. By the river. For the tribes of the Madrid movement. Because of the rare and essential waddle of guitarist Enrique Sierra’s plucking, at a time when Madrid was the epicenter of a country that was throwing the dandy grayness of post-Francoism into the ravine and believed it was New York because Andy Warhol made covers for Miguel’s records bose.
Santiago Auserón has the merit of all this, a graduate of Philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris, and visible face of Radio Futura, a combo that had survived a reverse hype: they were not an invention of the record companies, but the promotion wanted them make it look like they were. They began by declaring themselves in love with youth fashion, with versions of Marc Bolan and enrolled almost by force in a fan phenomenon in which they were the Eighth Passenger with Alien included. The talent and stubbornness of Radio Futura rescued them and made them gradually become a rock band with pretensions, many pretensions, all the pretensions in the world.
Auserón’s lyrics until he started looking for the Black Flower on Barcelona’s Rambla were evocative and had a certain arrogant pout, or at least that’s how we heard it then. Listened to now, it’s obvious that we had the problem as rockers with no desire to learn.
The Escuela de calor, in fact, was the place where the band rehearsed. A basement in which the temperature that was reached there was unbearable. That was the first school. Thanks to a less idiotic video clip than the usual ones from the eighties, made by the Palomo Chamorro program, La edad de oro, we accept that a School of Heat is more than just a city on fire. Or rather, that it is also or can be a place where there is neither day nor night and its waiters dance strangely, throw the dice and shake the cocktail shaker as if they were trying to hypnotize Dean Martin. It’s the only kind of shelter the city offers with the air conditioning to death. A refuge like the one in those swimming pools where the girls bare their bodies in the sun.
The protagonist of the song hopes that with the night the heat will take a breather. He’s aware of danger, a braggart kid who knows enough about life to make you crazy about me. It’s not little. It’s actually too much, because the boy in the song hasn’t heard anything. That pigeon is going to teach it because she did learn where she should –bingo: In a hot school–. The kid is still breaded. He goes around without paying attention, he is told to be careful – don’t take a wrong step, don’t take a wrong step – because the metropolis has swallowed chickens braver and smarter than him. That kid seems to understand something at the end of the topic. He asks please get out of there. Too late, friend: this is the city in August.
