Well, I’m still here. (And when I say that I mean “over there”.)
Last time I posted I may have sounded a little wobbly (it very much did feel weird) but since then I think I’ve successfully (nay, triumphantly) found my Madrid legs and things have begun to take off.
To be honest, I’ve been spending far too much time in pokey bars, boring strangers with my ropey Spanish and absolutely pounding the streets of this city to even think of posting here. And I can only apologise for this.
There has also been an intemperate amount of record buying (fortunately a friend came over with an empty suitcase) and no doubt when I’m back in the UK, I’ll be testing your concentration levels with a selection of these. In the interests of The Fuller Picture though, I should probably say that right now I’m in a laundrette, drying towels – it’s not quite been the relentless round of exotic cocktails and mouth-watering pintxos I’d like you to believe.
But anyway, finally here I am and finally here’s something a little more PP…
Son Rompe Pera
A couple of weeks ago, a chance flip through Songkick brought me to MadridMon, an Academy-sized venue in the Moncloa district of Madrid, to see some Cumbia – a band from Mexico, calling themselves Son Rompe Pera, the vehicle of brothers “Kacho” and “Mongo” Gama. The following day, a Colombian waiter at the bar round the corner from the flat patiently explained to me that Mexican Cumbia is a very different animal to the Colombian version (obviously), but I’m not sure I would have been any the wiser had I known. The one thing I can pronounce on confidently was that I had an absolute blast. What an evening.
“Kacho” and “Mongo” are marimba players, siblings who grew up watching their father, a noted player in Mexico. If you’d asked me on the bus over what exactly a marimba was, I’d probably not have been absolutely sure of this either. Now of course I’m an expert, so allow me to man-splain a little, it’s “a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars that are struck by mallets. Below each bar is a resonator pipe that amplifies particular harmonics of its sound.” (wiki) but I’m sure you knew all that.
On the night, the brothers mostly played the same marimba, an absolute monster about 8 feet in length (oh, that’ll be the 5.5 octave version then…) which they played together and which would have easily accommodated a third brother, if there’d been one. It was a boisterous affair with enthusiastic crowd surfing, a lot of bare-chested men with Mexican-level tattooing careening around the hall and at least one guiri acting like a fool.
Watch this:
(I swear that marimba was twice the size in Moncloa…)
As here, Mongo moved away from the marimba at times and played a fair bit of psychedelic guitar (full on wah-wah, most of the time) which took a pretty raunchy Cumbia into full on sixties-Chicha – honestly, I couldn’t have asked for more. To be fair, the set ranged drunkenly all over the place, using various Latin tempos I am unqualified to name, a fair old array of blue beat rhythms, some Bo Diddley beat at one point, a load of punky couldn’t-give-a-fuck energy and a period of Fall-style throwing the mic out to the punters.
Even for a senior gentleman such as myself it was just about impossible to keep still and very quickly, despite the normal self-consciousness, I’ll admit to jerking around like an idiot, jigging like a chump, dancing like no one was watching… [Community Note: Literally no one was watching].
It was a raucous evening (a keenly-contested mosh pit had formed pretty much from the start) with a lot of audience noise (not the excited Spanish teenagers chatting type, more the “I’ve been on the piss for the day and I know the words” type). It makes the recordings I made a bit “atmospheric” but you’re good with that by now, right?
I’ll finish with a video of the band also at their local launderette, their own towels presumably tumbling around in the dryers behind…
(Actually not the first video I’ve posted of a Cumbia band playing in local premises…)
Footnote: I met a bloke in a bar the following evening who was sporting a Son Rompe Pera t-shirt and had been at the gig. He turned out to be a friend of the band. He was a lovely bloke who seemed genuinely chuffed that an elderly Brit might be interested in Cumbia, and we talked for a while about the evening. He promised to get me a t-shirt and we left on “Hail fellow, well met” terms. As of today, the t-shirt is yet to materialise, mind, so I may have been over-estimating the extent of our Mexican-British bond (as with all these anecdotes drink had I’m afraid been taken). I fear I may have to buy one online, like an ordinary punter…
Partly Porpoise 