Escuela de calor by Radio Futura is the song of unmerciful cities in the worst hours of summer. When cities are ovens, and buildings and streets look like desert mirages. 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 the night to come. It takes courage to go out into the street boiling in those asphalt and metal cities of the eighties, with diseased trees and broken traffic lights.
Santiago Auserón and his team 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 open doors but no money with which to handcuff themselves. But it’s not just about money. It is that bag of uprooted people for whom the city is everything. Beginning and end. No town, no caravan, no apartment on the coast: summer in the city.
There is no non-urban trail or pity in this theme of city dwellers roasting in the setting sun. What there is in Escuela de calor is a fatalistic feeling that you can’t get out of there – wherever you are. Nor the song. But we almost appreciate it, how extraordinary it was and how extraordinary it continues to be.
You can only survive within this school as a frame of mind if you come educated. Because if not, you have it wrong. In the letter we immediately ran into a river that we assume will bring little water and many health problems. The evocative magic of Santiago Auserón, his lyricist, lets us know that he is talking about Madrid without mentioning it. by the river For the tribes of the lively Madrid. For the rare and essential shuffling of the guitarist, Enrique Sierra, at a time when Madrid was the epicenter of a country that threw the post-Francoism grayness into the ravine and thought it was New York because Andy Warhol made album covers for it by Miguel Bosé.
Santiago Auserón deserves credit for all of this, a graduate in Philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris, and the visible face of Radio Futura, a combo that had survived a reverse hype: they were not an invention of the record labels, but the promotion wanted to look like they were. They started by declaring themselves in love with youth fashion, with Marc Bolan versions and enlisted almost by force in a fan phenomenon in which they were the Octavo Pasajero with Àlien included. Radio Futura’s talent and stubbornness rescued them and saw them gradually become a rock band with pretensions, lots of pretensions, all the pretensions in the world.
Auserón’s lyrics, until he started looking for the Black Flower on the Rambla in Barcelona, ??were evocative and with a certain arrogant grimace, or at least that’s what we heard then. Listening now, it’s obvious that the problem was us, rockers with no desire to learn.
L’ Escuela de calor, in fact, was the place where the band rehearsed. A basement where the temperature reached was unbearable. This was the first school. Thanks to a less idiotic video clip than the usual ones of these eighties, made by Paloma Chamorro’s program, La edad de oro, we accept that an Escuela de calor is a little more than a city on fire. Or rather, that it is also or can be a place where there is no day or night and its waiters dance strangely, roll the dice and shake the shaker as if trying to hypnotize Dean Martin. It is the only kind of shelter that the city offers with the air conditioning on death. A refuge like those swimming pools where girls bare their bodies in the sun.
The protagonist of the song hopes that with the night the heat will give a respite. He is a connoisseur of danger, a swaggering brat who knows enough about life to get you crazy for me. It is not little. Actually it’s too much, because the guy in the song hasn’t found out anything. This pigeon will teach her because she did learn where she needed to – Bingo: in a hot school -. The chaval continues to be battered. He goes there without paying attention, he is told to be careful – don’t make a bad step, don’t make a bad step – because the metropolis has swallowed chickens braver and smarter than him. This kid seems to understand something at the end of the topic. Please get out of there. Too late, friend: this is the city in August.
