Asier Ávila (Rentería, 1977) says that he has never known how to have fun. When he was a kid it was easy to find him glued to the bar while his colleagues danced on the floor. He almost never managed to let himself go, to feel the music. Even today he has an image stuck in his retina; the one in the Apollo hall in Barcelona, packed with people shaking their bodies at dawn and he standing there without understanding anything. His incomprehension was the emotional germ of Party (Libros del KO, 2024), a book in which, between narrative and reportage, Ávila traces the intra-history of several of the milestones of the party world: from the arrival of the first Ecstasy pill to Spain and its subsequent democratization, the conversion of dance into generational expression, the reign of the DJs and the heyday of the big discos to the black legend of the night businessmen; frauds, scams, assassination attempts and collateral deaths in a world of multi-million dollar empires that left behind terrorist attacks, addictions and violence.
In a work with tragicomic overtones, Ávila takes a panoramic photograph of a Spain of debauchery that begins on a summer afternoon in 1982 shortly after Antonio Escohotado has celebrated his forty-first birthday. He will be the first MDMA taster in the country. Ávila receives this newspaper on a rainy October afternoon from his computer screen in Barcelona.
You are also the scriptwriter of the documentary Brutal Megamixwhich tells the wild story – including a frustrated murder – of the rise and fall of Max Music, the record company behind the compilation albums of the 80s and 90s. So the question is almost obligatory, which project came first, the book or the documentary?
I guess I would have to say the documentary because this project comes from the impossibility of selling all the ideas I had about the party world. In fact, several of those ideas are now part of this work: stories that structure the book’s chronological narrative. One of them was ‘Megamix’ and I tried to sell them because that is my job: I am a screenwriter and I present projects. But the fact is that they didn’t quite work, I only managed to give the green light to the Max Music issue until a series of events led me to Libros del KO and I was able to work on this project of drawing a line from the 80s to the present day, uniting all of them. the documents and testimonies that he had found. In the end, both the book and the documentary have been works that I have been developing in parallel.
In the documentary, Ricardo Campoy [gran empresario de la noche y socio de Miguel Degà en la desaparecida Max Music] He is portrayed much more sweetly than in his report.
It’s interesting that you say that because it’s true. I think the biggest problem with the series is that Campoy is the protagonist and he is the one who narrates the story. We did not want him to be, contractually he made sure that if his former partner appeared he would not appear in the documentary. In this way, we could not have a balance between characters and, furthermore, since he is the main voice of the work, he tells the story as he wants. And, of course, we try to build it, but you don’t criticize yourself as much as when someone writes a third-person book about your story.
Of course, in the audiovisual it is redeemed, it is humanized. He is a seducer with his way of narrating.
Completely. There is a dark side to Campoy that is not so clear in the series, although it is glimpsed. Nobody can be so perfect. But he does have the ability to open up—like when he tells the story of how he was beaten—and admit that he is also capable of doing bad things, although he seeks the complicity of the public when telling about his faults. He has talent when it comes to describing himself. Someone who reached that high has to have it. But yeah, he’s not a reliable narrator.
Going towards a book, what you have done, more than a novel, is a long report.
I don’t know whether to call it that because I’m not a journalist. I have worked for many years as a cameraman and editor and from there I have found my place in the industry based on the job offers that have been coming to me. But I have never had the idea of working with a written narrating voice, I look at everything from an audiovisual perspective. I think it is difficult to understand the book without understanding my profession. What I have tried to build is a documentary on paper. I write as if it were a montage. I go from a detailed shot to a general one or I move towards something that has nothing to do directly with the story but that connects organically with it. That is, for me it has been like making a documentary series translated into the limitless power that literature has.
I write as if it were a montage. I go from a detailed shot to a general one or I move towards something that has nothing to do directly with the story but that connects organically with it
Asier Avila
— Author of ‘Fiesta’
Speaking of structures, what is going on is a night of full-blown partying. The chapters are divided into the high, the trip, the comedown and the hangover.
I am incapable of not seeing a story in three acts. Four, in this case. It’s very screenwriter-like, the screenwriter’s perversion in translating life into a rise and fall. But this story has it!, and it is something that was clear from the beginning.
There is a lot of documentation, data, interviews, and very detailed descriptions of specific moments. How long has it taken you to research everything you say?
There is a lot of archive, both documentary and audiovisual. For example, when there is a murder and I describe the trajectory of the bullet that kills that person at that moment, it is because there is a sentence. I use the sentence as if this were a true crimesince, for professional reasons, I have that natural tendency. As for the interviews, I did many and I found very bizarre stories, but, unfortunately, many were similar or repeated and I had to focus the shot.
As the narrative progresses, the horrors and few scruples of the businessmen of the night appear: prostitution, violence, death, overdose. What has it been like to approach all of this?
I have tried not to link partying and the disco world to crime because that is very easy and has always been done. I also wanted to show the lights because going out partying is always fun and liberating, because all of this had a naive, utopian beginning, but it soon begins to transform like all phenomena that are born in this way. Everything ends up being infected by the rest of the things that happen around you.
It must be taken into account that much of the material in this regard tends to document events. I have tried to balance it so that the dark side does not win. On the other hand—and that is why the subtitle, which points out the tragicomic side, is very important to me—the stories that I look for both in real life and those that I try to turn into ideas to sell as a series, are stories in which The characters undergo a transformation, which is where the drama is. Here all the characters live it: Santamaría dies, another falls at a specific moment but then recovers… They all go through dramatic moments and my intention was to narrate them in a way that would be attractive to the reader.
He commented that many stories have been left out, but there is a secondary character that punctuates the entire book and whom he has interviewed in person: Begoña Pascual, why continue her life in parallel?
I had a serious problem with this and that is that this is a man’s story. I had talked to other women, of course, but none of them had a dramatic arc that served me like the rest. None had—fortunately or unfortunately—the tragic power that accompanied the others.
For a long time, women couldn’t be DJs or great businesswomen. Most of them were waitresses. They were not left the space for their figure to be sufficiently representative in the party world. We must remember that they could not enter a nightclub alone until the signing of the Constitution. And I did not want to cross the Bakalao Route along the paths that others had already traveled before.
That’s where I found Begoña, she now lives in Barcelona, but she lived and enjoyed Valencia a lot in her youth. And he has had no problem telling me what he did in those moments. She knew how to enjoy the party and leave it in time—in fact, she disappears at one point in the narrative. She is also the only female character with her own voice in the entire plot. That was important.
For a long time, women couldn’t be DJs or great businesswomen. Most of them were waitresses. They were not given the space for their figure to be sufficiently representative in the party world.
Asier Avila
— Author of ‘Fiesta’
You talk about how the characters are not the protagonists but rather the scaffolding of the context, of the image you want to show. However, there is more than one singular appearance. The philosopher Antonio Escohotado and his unique life opens and closes the story.
There is a topic that interests me a lot and that is researching the world of Ecstasy or MDMA. This is quite a revolutionary and significant drug. Especially taking into account the fact that, a priori, it would not seem like a drug that should fit in with the night due to the effects it produces. In fact, research is being carried out on how to use it in medicine. Something quite common with drugs -CBD, Psilocybin…-
And, in these, there was a moment when I found that Escohotado was very possibly – as in many other things – the first to try an MDMA pill in Spain. He says it himself in an interview and the person who gives him the ’eme’ also certifies it. And it makes perfect sense because the dates fit. It was a few years before its democratization—let us remember that its consumption began among the elites. If he wasn’t the first, he was one of the first. And a fact like this leaves you with a very powerful beginning not to take advantage of it.
We are now approaching the end of the interview. Big names parade through the pages of your book, is there someone you would have liked to interview but couldn’t?
Alejandro Conde. I think he’s someone fascinating as a character. I have only been able to tell his story through newspaper archives. The good, or bad, is that there are many [ríe]. He has committed several crimes that are public, there are multiple sentences, I have interviewed those who worked with him…. I have built it from the others and I have based it on facts that were irrefutable. But I think that as a character he goes a long way, I have been trying to write his story for some time, which is—almost—the story of the gap.
I would have liked to talk to him, yes. But I think that in reality it was not necessary to create that panoramic image. It would have given everything more scope, for sure. And I think he is a person with many edges. He was a Don Quixote of the party, one of those pioneering businessmen who started the phenomenon. A phenomenon that, at the same time, was their way of life. They were there, they danced until they closed their doors. He was someone who started very young, at 28 years old, and built an empire. He made history.
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