Malcolm Scarpa, the master rambler

Nor is it that his early death (at age 62) made him a pop icon, because the mainstream public still has no idea of ​​his existence. But it did stir up a hornet’s nest of sixties melomania that had become lethargic by assuming that from the nineties onwards, there was little to scratch. When he died and the late praise arrived, those who understood that they had been living in the city with a genius who He would have made good friends with Kevin Ayers, Arthur Lee or Syd Barrett They cursed themselves for not discovering it sooner. And perhaps they ran into him one day in one of the Metro corridors where he used to put his cap in his younger days.

«Malcolm Scarpa was special because he managed to link amazing melodies that went straight to the heart with resources that were sometimes not easy for the listener, but that made up an entity of immense beauty; and also because despite the enormous number of songs he made, the percentage of quality songs in his work is very high,” his comrade Iñigo Bregel from Los Estanques described to ABC after his death. «It was a great loss, but at least we had the great luck of becoming his friends and doing things with him in the last stage of his life, listening to his music together, then ours… and then commenting on both. Sometimes I would say to him, “Hey, how did you think of putting a sus4 chord in there?” And he would answer you, “what is a sus4 chord?” That’s when I realized his greatness. Without knowing theory, he managed to do impressive things. A saying goes that once you know the rule, you know how to cheat. But he knew how to make the best tricks without knowing the rule.

In addition to the lysergic champions mentioned above, Juan Manuel Morilla Scarpa (1959) was also passionate about Incredible String Bandand that is why he adopted the stage name of his guitarist Malcolm Lemaistre to present his songs, authentic blues beauties, jazz, country, vaudeville, psychedelic rock, ragtime, swing, French song or bolero, almost all of them in English, the language in which that the artistic revolution was forged that activated its detonator of pop fantasies. He always resisted composing in Spanish like a cat on his belly, and when he finally gave in to do it from time to time, he maintained the Anglo-Saxon spelling rule of writing questions without the opening question mark. It was his way of saying okay, he would give in, but with his conditions. This is how he titled his book ‘What do I owe you, Jose?’, launched in 2001 by the Gamuza Azul publishing house and now republished by Sílex.

Iñigo Bregel adds that “another of Malcolm’s incredible things is how he managed to condense so much information, so much emotion, so much good music and so much good work into one-and-a-half-minute songs,” and the same can be said of the content of this book, constructed with single phrases that, read at a glance, seem like meaningless gibberish, but that in reality contain parallel dimensions of consciousness and conscience. «I like people who when they want to say something important start by rambling. Then I ramble on and forget the rest. He couldn’t be seen on the stairs and the bastard kept saying goodbye. I don’t care who accompanies me to the door. When I meet someone, I can clearly tell that I want to leave,” Scarpa wrote in the first pages of a book described as “a compilation of notes, notes, reflections, nonsense, jokes, anecdotes, word games, tavern philosophy and humor.” black, written in bursts from a jammed machine gun, where Dostoevsky mixes with Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, Gijón with Tampa (Florida), Fausto Coppi with Adolfo Suárez, Lightin’ Hopkins with Edith Piaf and pickled anchovies with striped pants.

Malcolm Scarpa was touched by media coverage when he made the soundtrack for ‘Mamá es boba’ (1997), a film that its director Santiago Lorenzo defined as “a bitter comedy about people who are as kind as they are naive and who do not fit into a society that lacks of scruples. Until then, the life of this self-marginalized creator had been like this and until he left twenty-five years later, leaving a trail of sound chiribits through the streets of Madrid for whoever dares to look for them.