«My desire was for it to be a good book. Not taking Algora’s lyrics and redoing them, because that wouldn’t have made sense either because it is inimitable,” says Andrés Perruca in a restaurant in Chueca. It refers to the singer of the cult group El Niño Gusano, and the person referring to him is the drummer and author of ‘Life of a thin-skinned whitish chicken’ (ed. Jekyll & Jill), a mammoth of 859 pages sibilently laid out for that there is room for 1,300 to tell ‘the adventures’ of the band and much more: the Zaragoza of the 90s, their bar El Fantasma de los Ojos Azules, the talk of beloved colleagues, the nascent indie scene in Spain and a love letter to a poet. «Algora wrote differently, he was the literary man of the group. If anyone could have done something like that it was him, but since he’s not here… he probably wouldn’t have wanted to, if he had been there. Indeed, the singer, poet and writer is no longer here, he died in 2008 due to heart problems. He was 39 years old. «I was thinking about him while I was writing it. That’s why I talk to you directly in some chapters. I’m writing them to you. Fran Nixon told me one day: “We just have to write and make songs that Sergio would like.” Like a method. So, I think you would like it. It has some things in common, we shared a lot… but let it be understood well, I think that the greatest genius of El Niño Gusano was Sergio Algora. Related News report Yes 30 years at the engine of Spanish indie: in search of the heirs David Morán and Javier Villuendas Los Planetas commemorate their first album on tour and are the subject of a film by Isaki Lacuesta Let’s take a ‘moonwalk’ in time. Zaragoza, 30 years ago. There El Niño Gusano was born (whose name comes from the film ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ and not from Hideshi Hino’s manga), a group remembered today as the most unique of that first indie batch led by Los Planetas. A pop-rock of playful psychedelia with the chorus as its flag and with the distinction of its lyrics, of literary height and sunny surrealism. And 28 years after the release of his third and last album, ‘The biggest beetle in Europe’, Perruca, the trustee of the hi-hat, publishes the colossal project that has taken him decades (the first texts are from 25 years ago) to erect the Kilimanjaro of jokes, of the inside jokes of a gang, of the escapades of a musical group and of their relationship with others in the festivals that were beginning to be born. What if Pavement, Green Day, Estopa, The Chemical Brothers or Sr. Chinarro, among many; because he wrote everything down in his notebooks and “nothing is a lie,” he adds. Rejected by more than twenty editorials, Perruca has gone beyond being a witness and organizer of the events to make the tribute more coherent: to make another work of art in his own way but in spiritual communion for its freedom, grace and madness. Already from his own insults: our Rodrigo Fresán, for example, with this quote: «Andrés Perruca has wanted to publish this novel for years. Unfortunately he has achieved it. Or our Rodrigo Cortés: «Perruca? Who is Perruca? “This book is so bad that not even I could write it,” says Juan Gómez Jurado… The creator adds: “For the third edition, let James Rhodes come out with: ‘This book is shit like a piano.'” Joaquín Reyes ( who thinks there: “‘Life of a thin-skinned whitish chicken’ is the worst title imaginable for a novel of almost 900 pages”) commented at the presentation in the capital Maña that the work is like “Ramón Gómez de La Serna but without the repellent point. An elegy full of greguerías”, and reminds him of his ‘chanantes’ friends at that time “of the taste for chuminada and doing things without calculation or pretensions.” And here, due to the spread of ingenuity and creative will, we see a fanzine and Joycean spirit: «I have read quite little of Joyce, I think he is great but he bores me a little. Yes, I thought a lot about a phrase by Borges. Something like this: “When something is read very easily, it has been written with great difficulty.” It has to be light and fluid, making it seem like it was written in 5 minutes instead of 50 hours.”The magnifying glass effectIn that presentation, someone also said: “It looks like the adventures of The Five.” The Five Poperos, better, and the thing is: is there anything better in life than a good anecdote? «Especially if Sergio told them. It is the importance of where you put the magnifying glass. You had been with him and something happened that was funny or halfway good. But when Sergio told them, you said: “I was there, but this story he is telling is much better than how it happened.” And if he told it more times, it became richer each time. That’s what makes a good storyteller. Even in family stories, in bed…” And here I just add this phrase from his father: “I thought it was a cane field!” Sorry for the ‘clickbait’, although this one does not disappoint. Another revelation of ‘Vida de un pollo…’ is a certain elucidation of the lyrical mechanism of El Niño Gusano, the ‘making of’ of its magic and the final ratification to Algora when it stated : “I tell the truth but they will never believe me.” That is to say, the surrealist sambenito is qualified: «Again, it is where you put the magnifying glass. These things happened to everyone. Private jokes ended up becoming song titles and lyrics and we saw it as normal. There will be other groups to which similar things happened but their songs are “Nena, I will always love you” or “Rock and roll guides my steps I don’t know what”, well cool. It was a very free chaos, suddenly we liked a word and we were all week with the joke of ‘Telehueso’, by Marío Quesada (the bassist) and Sergio Vinadé (the guitarist), and this is going to become a song and we will open the disk. The ‘White Chicken’ itself has its shock like this, for example, when a member says: “Is that New York over there?” «That’s when we found New York and we ended up taking it to Zaragoza. It was a blue display on the door of a jewelry store that had been knocked down. And we passed by there and Mario said: “Damn, New York!” And we took it and carried it all night, we had it with us for two days and we brought it to New York. And of course, with New York all day. Well, the same thing happened with the songs, which is not said to be an expositor. If you like it, it doesn’t matter, the phrase is beautiful.”El Niño Gusano ABCIn total, 67 self-contained chapters for the 67 songs they recorded, an originally ‘monster’ of 3,000 pages that ended up ‘filed’ in the current amount, the rest land digital burn, like a 50-page footnote on flamenco or a selection of readings of the same number of pages on texts read a posteriori that reminded him of Algora and that time, which took him several months to write, and all around a luminous pop group in a scene with a taste for the depressive, where they had diverse fans (from Carmen Alborch to Los Planetas or Terelu Campos). Did it go well for you financially? «Quite a disaster. Many times, to return from a three-concert tour with some money, we preferred to stop at an inn, not even a Ferran Adrià, and spend the 15,000 pesetas that we had each earned. We spent it on eating in two or three restaurants instead of eating a cold sandwich, which there were groups that did. We didn’t care if we came back with nothing or with that. We did not manage to break or charge any minimally high cache. Maybe we were just at the point of doing it. And El Niño Gusano was indie by chance. «We were a light music group, which happened to temporarily coincide in a time of the emergence of noise pop and Spanish indie, so it is normal that they put us there. But if we had emerged 15 years earlier we would have been a La Movida group because we have La Movida points and if we had emerged 40 years earlier, then they would have surely put us with Formula V. Although there came a day when the Maños stopped being noise pop for unexpected reasons: «The noise pop thing is true that we made a lot of noise because we knew how to play little and we didn’t have many means to record… and Mario had a pedal that gave him a lot to distortion. There I tell how noise pop died in El Niño Gusano, because a cook refilled the pedal and that’s when we stopped being noise pop because from that day on we sounded much cleaner and Mario didn’t buy another fuzz. I had never seen anyone use it as aggressively as he used it. He played super melodic and suddenly he wanted to make noise and that was a tremendous buzz. “Only three albums, like good groups. They were also a team that coexisted tremendously, a differentiating aspect compared to the usual trend in the guild’s books: “The first strong discussion It was the one that ended the group. The day to day life of El Niño Gusano was like this. The thing never amounted to anger, some differences but always in a constructive or bastard tone, but healthy. Couldn’t it be saved? “No. It was as if a vase had broken, which is very beautiful and solid but fragile. It was already a thing that you couldn’t maintain all that magic. Or we didn’t know. The worm is dying… Or maybe we were idiots and we should have gotten over that first argument and called each other the next day and continued, I don’t know. But I also think it’s okay to leave.” A band that tragically kept their word. Perruca always, half jokingly and half seriously, said that they were going to release only three albums, like good groups; The singer, half jokingly, half seriously, then replied that he would die at 39, like his idol Boris Vian. The saddest prediction for the end of the story came true, and Perruca believes that Algora “in 222 years will be known for its collections of poems.” Now he is the singer of El Niño Gusano and La Costa Brava, but his literary voice as a poet is very different from that as an author of light music songs. In fact, he sees it more as a poem than a poet, citing Gil de Biedma, or like Lorca, who said that his greatest work was himself. “It made everyone be more of themselves and their improved version,” he says. These almost 900 pages, with 500 footnotes and 1,262 mentioned groups, serve as a tribute to that and everything. In other words, ‘Life of a thin-skinned whitish chicken’ is the Worm Boy’s infinite joke. And, coincidentally, David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus was the last gift that Algora gave Perruca. «I’m going to tell you something, I haven’t read ‘Infinite Jest’. “I lost it, I think, in a move.” Nor has he been able to read the posthumous book of stories by his great friend. «Maybe I’ll never read it, I don’t know…». At the funeral, Nixon, the poet’s colleague on the Costa Brava, the first thing he said to Perruca when he saw him was: “We are not going to forgive him for this joke.” “She repeated it to me several times and it is true that we could not forgive her,” says the author. Infinity and helplessness. And, nevertheless, “life goes by and these years I have dreamed of Sergio, and suddenly he was very alive and it was a joke, with a Mastroianni-style mustache that was getting longer and longer. And I said: “But what about that mustache?” And he: “It’s real, because I’m actually alive.” I don’t believe in anything, but there is a game that if I haven’t seen Sergio with a mustache, and he keeps appearing to me with a mustache and he has never had a mustache, I prefer to think that there is a Sergio in another dimension than when “I’m very stressed from work, he comes to take me out of bars and tells me: ‘Don’t give it so much importance.'”
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