Having just turned 60, María del Olvido Gara, Alaska, can boast of a multifaceted career in which she has always done what she wanted. Over the course of four decades he has made films, television and above all music, from his beginnings in the middle of the lively Madrid scene with Kaka de Luxe, passing through Dinarama and of course Fangoria, the band formed with Nacho Canut in 1989 with which he has published a dozen of albums, the last in the form of a triple EP released in 2021 and 2022 with tracks he presents on the A todo láser tour in a summer full of bowling, including those he will perform on Monday at the Jardins de Terramar Festival and on the 16 August in Porta Ferrada (9.30 p.m.), in both cases accompanied by the Nancys Rubias, the band of his partner, Mario Vaquerizo. In a break between concerts, she serves La Vanguardia from her home in this Madrid that welcomed her when she was 14, newly arrived from Mexico, to become her home.
Do you see parallels between you and the new generations of urban music?
You can’t compare, it’s not the same to be 15 years old now and have TikTok than not having it, it’s that absolute. Or having to try to get someone to bring you a Ramones record from New York and be able to listen to them, see them, hear them speak and at one point even have them like you. The world has changed, it’s completely different, we have a head from the seventies, we have the mentality of people like Deborah Harry, it’s a different world. This does not mean that Chris Stein does not have his I nstagram and we talk to him.
Aren’t they alike in wanting to break with the past?
Everyone has their references, it’s absurd to think that the rockers of 1957 had them and the boys of today don’t. It is absurd to generalize because, for example, since the confinement electronic pop has appropriated everything, to our amazement. All of a sudden a guy like The Weeknd is doing German electronic pop, and a lot of people are incorporating electronica that mixes it with urban music, which is electronica after all, but they add more trance sounds to it, or faster bpms or what do I know It’s a brilliant time, there’s a lot we like about it.
He continues to defend individualism, an idea that is sometimes misinterpreted.
It’s normal, when we started individualism was very frowned upon, because it was a time when the progressive, the hippie, the collective ruled. We were like the Velvet Underground, that is, rare people in the prevailing world, and suddenly in the eighties and early nineties people stopped paying so much attention to it. Right now there is a lot of tendency towards collective thinking again and the collective thing scares us a lot. Anything other than being able to define yourself without having to use a series of dogmas, neither those of your parents nor those of those who are not your parents, scares us very much. There are times when you fit better with what is imposed and others when you don’t; nothing happens either, life is like that.
Dividing society into blocs eliminates nuance.
Civil war is complicated and dangerous, this is easy to see if the Martians come and invade you. Are you a Martian or not a Martian? And listen, you may be Martians at one point, but if you’re with humans does that mean the rest of the world that’s with you is like you? Well, maybe not, maybe some want to annihilate the Martians and others want to marry them. Circumstance changes everything.
What is left of the years of The Crystal Ball?
It was an award because I like television, unlike most people who did television in 1984, who didn’t like it, thought it was evil. For me it was the good and I was stuck there, inside the good, which was what I could like the most.
Can you imagine making such a program now?
Can you imagine that a 15-year-old girl is now filming Pepi Luci Bom? It’s not possible, I think we are the first generation, the oldest now, who for the first time see things that were done before and that can no longer be done now. Usually it’s the other way around, the younger generations are seeing that more can be done. Not that everything is like that, there are other things that could not be done before that are now done, but it is still curious.
Is this situation linked to the emergence of extreme right-wing parties?
It is linked to extreme parties in general, and extremes touch each other.
Are extremes a cause or a consequence of our society?
We are at a time when people tend to position themselves in a more radical way between black and white, or very black or very white. Although it is not the example either, because if we look at the electoral results 90% of the people are between the center-right and the center-left, the headline should not be used for clickbait either because fear is a formidable weapon You have to try to get away from this, most people want to be well and that what is next to them is well and point.
You recently celebrated 60 years, how much longer do you plan to continue?
We didn’t have bigger references when we were little. We had Bowie, who was from 1947; Elvis died at the age of 42 and was already a very old person. Today it is scary to see that Mick Jagger continues to do concerts and that Cher is formidable, so it will all depend on how the distribution of genes was in the primordial pool and which ones have touched you. There is no will on our part either to continue or not to continue, it is something that goes from year to year. Maybe one day we stop playing; of course, logical.
