When they are together, David casts the rod and Jose picks up the reel, David opens his head and Jose closes the parenthesis. They get together while talking in their recording studio about the concerts that Estopa has just announced to celebrate its 25 years of existence, one at the Metropolitano in Madrid and another at the Olímpic in Barcelona, ??which will make them the first Spanish band to perform in lonely these spaces. Jose remembers what his nephew David, son of the other David and at 16 years old, was fond of arguing with his father about Saint Thomas and Saint Augustine: ‘Dad, we have to create memories,’ she tells him; like the party they are preparing on June 22 (Madrid) and July 10 (Barcelona) for all their fans, accompanied by a new album that will be released next March.
To whet your appetite, they publish El día que tú te marches, a rumbero song set in a video clip that recalls their long musical career, from the blocks of the San Ildefonso neighborhood to the kungfunauts of Rumba a lo unknown. Mounted on the Seat Panda that made them famous, an involuntary tribute to the factory where they worked when it was published, they embark on a 25-year odyssey where Troy is the La Española bar and Ítaca is the Olympic Stadium.
The story of Estopa began in one of those neighborhoods of Cornellà that Montalbán compared to those islands in the Pacific where Gauguin spent his last days wrapped in the innocence of earthly paradise. An innocence comparable to the sincerity that the Muñoz brothers transmit in their lyrics as well as in their treatment, as if they had just left the factory and all that about success and fame was not with them, a dream invented to have something to talk about with friends between beer and beer. “My father played the guitar, as did my uncles and their cousins,” Jose remembers his musical origins. Those were the years at the La Española bar, where they learned to play from Emilio Hita, guitarist of La banda trapera del Río and a regular at the place, “then he became a police officer.” The first song he taught them was the bolero Perfidia, “because he doesn’t have F,” says Jose, “if you play the guitar you know the difficulty of making the F chord with your fingers.”
They began to perform in bars in Cornellà, such as Tijuana or Bar sin nombre, and from there they moved on to Cova del Drac and Bikini, “which was already playing in Barcelona.” The next leap was to the big stages such as Sant Jordi or the Las Ventas bullring in 2001, of which they keep a memory in the studio in the form of a photograph, playing in front of 21,000 people. “It gave me the same vertigo to play then in Bikini as I do now at the Olímpic,” says David; Jose sees it as the Champions of music. “We want to do something special, that will be remembered by us and by the people, because until we turn 50 we will not repeat this event again.” But they quickly take off the pressure of playing where no Spanish band has ever done before, “if we don’t do it, nothing happens either.” “And after the Olympic, to the Bikini to relax,” adds David.
It is well known that success caught them working in the factory, “we made the dashboard of the Volkswagen Polo,” remembers David of his years at the Abrera plant, where Jose put “three screws” on each unit. “We also worked on Saturdays, from 6 to 6, and every 15 days we changed shifts, it was a company from the 19th century.” Novel Lahnwerk, that was the name of the Seat subsidiary that employed the brothers; It went bankrupt years ago, but from that time they still have one of the production sheets where they wrote the songs on the back. Between screws and bolts, the brothers combined rumba, rock and flamenco in 1999 with catchy joy. “It is our interpretation of the music we listened to,” explains Jose, “we added the importance that Sabina can give to the lyrics with a mix of rock and rumba.” Los Chichos, Camarón, Sabina, Albert Pla or Extremoduro were his tastes, “we liked everything that was hotter, more garrulous,” adds the irrepressible David.
“It’s a well-remembered time, we were all young,” says Estopa’s voice while recalling anecdotes like the day he arrived four hours late because he got sleepy and parked the car to sleep on the shoulder. “I don’t know if it’s necessary, but I would put all the children to work for a while in the factory instead of in the military, which is shit.” “It helps you evaluate,” Jose points out and David concludes: “No R&D, a la Seat, do you like philosophy? “A la Seat.”
From those years came hits like La raja de tu skirt, Tu Calorro or Como Camarón that will be played next year along with the songs from the next album, which will be called Estopía, and for which they have already recorded the songs. “We are always afraid that nothing will come out, but after the pandemic we got together and had a good time composing again,” says Jose. “We have found ourselves in a quite fruitful time,” he explains to draw an album where rumba predominates in all its aspects, “there is the Catalan rumba, the flamenco, the rumba rock, the choni, the cani, in addition to other colors that are not “We had never investigated like the ranchera, a more crooner theme, another grunge.”
“We have had four years to do it,” remembers David, adding a period of pandemic during which they did not compose anything. “Apart from watching a thousand series, we read the Odyssey and discussed it at vermouth time.” “Where are you?” David asked his brother, “Now I’m going to overtake you,” he responded, in a rush that led them to read the journey of Ulysses at night, or listening to it on audiobook when David went out for a run. “I’m going to the island of witches, piltrafilla, you have nothing left,” the older brother told the little one, who overtook him the next morning.
“It is not time wasted to spend time reading, it nourishes you with new stories,” says Jose when talking about some stories that somehow appear on his new album. “The sirens come out, and the hells, although that is from the Aeneid,” David explains, “they are things that inspire you,” and he puts Virgil on the table. “He was a poet in the pay of Octavio Augustus, it is a whole mechanism to justify that the emperor descended from the gods.” But as Jose remembers, the client is always right, “and if the client was Augusto…”.
Mythology has also surreptitiously crept into the video for El día que tú te marches, a rumba with love as the apparent motive, although in reality it speaks of the fear of losing inspiration. “The day you leave I will go down to hell/I will go down to the hell of cowards,” says the new song, illustrated among other motifs with a burning guitar that draws an infernal circle. “We have scanned our neighborhood of Cornellà and we have sneaked in transformed into giants, like Godzilla,” describes Jose while showing the video clip on his mobile, where they bring to life the covers of all the albums, such as Destrangis’s pig, the blinds of Is the street yours?, the Estopa 2.0 light bulb or the flames of Voces de ultrarumba, created with the latest technology, the same one used to create music without its creators. “Artificial intelligence is not yet there to make songs, it is there to make exam cheat sheets,” says Jose.
–Well, it is there but to make songs without soul –David argues.
–For soulless artists.
–There are artists who are like robots –the eldest extends–, I have asked the AI ??for a Estopa-type song, and shit came out. But a Bad Bunny song surpasses it.
–That’s why he got so angry with the song they made with AI.
–He will surpass Bad Bunny or Paquirrín, but never Lorca.
–Give him three or four years, I’m not saying ten, and he will overcome it too –Jose corrects him.
Has there ever been a time when the couple thought about separating? “No, we are inoperable Siamese brothers,” Jose states emphatically, “neither in the past nor in the future,” adds David. The couple remains faithful to themselves, also musically, “we no longer write about joints, our life has changed, we are not in the park with our colleagues, it is about writing about what we are experiencing,” explains Jose. “They would accuse us of being boomers,” says David, satisfied because they can continue singing most of their songs at the age of 40, already in the rearview mirror of the Seat Panda on the way to their private Ithaca, where there will be no shortage of beer, friends, a Super Nintendo and good music. to spice up the party.
