El Niño Gusano was one of the most unusual anomalies of Spanish indie pop of the 90s. A gang dedicated to jokes in a context where egocentric personalities reigned. Four music lovers in love with 60s pop at a time when it was more important to follow modern bands. And a musical project faithful to its announced expiry date. His audience didn’t know it, but singer Sergio Algora insisted for many years that El Niño Gusano would only record three albums and break up. “Because a group of true friends should only release three albums,” he argued. This is just one of the many anecdotes that its drummer, Andrés Pérez Perruca, tells today in a book overflowing with laughter, music, adventure and love for life.
Life of a thin-skinned whitish chicken (Jekyll & Jill) is the messy autobiography of Perruca’s most intense years, structured around a chronological journey of the 66 songs recorded by El Niño Gusano. It is therefore also a biography of the Zaragoza group. The author recalls how all his compositions were born, evaluates where each of them failed or shone and, taking advantage of the fact that the Ebro passes through Zaragoza, he spices up each chapter with the most hilarious adventures. These are, be careful, 836 pages of delusions towards. Nonsense, yes. But El Niño Gusano never stood out for their mental health but for a crazy spirit of perfection: they surpassed their own musical abilities, gave themselves fully to the public and enjoyed life to the fullest.
Perruca knows the spirit of El Niño Gusano in depth because he was one of its four founders and built a literary artifact worthy of the group. A book with a prologue… on page 628. A book with sentences in Greek, Tagalog, Chinese, Corsican and of course Russian. A book with changes in typography to give more vertigo to the unstoppable cascade of experiences. A book with over five hundred footnotes, some of which are as long or longer than the main text. A book with a creeper mentality where anecdotes, sub-anecdotes and sub-sub-anecdotes trap and hypnotize the reader. Because here we are talking about music, yes, but not only the music of El Niño Gusano. Also by Raffaella Carrà, Chet Baker, Bola de Nieve and Cecilia. And not just in music. We also talk about Buster Keaton, Paul Auster, Eugenio and Alfredo DiStefano.
a love letter
Above all, Life of a thin-skinned whitish chicken It’s a love letter to Sergio Algora; a love letter of 836 pages because the love accumulated was important and reciprocal. “When you’re with Sergio, everything is new and bright and the local bar suddenly turns into a tavern He realizes that it’s not little or in the canteen Star Wars or in the famous Cabaret Voltaire five minutes before the melting of Dadaism,” confesses Perruca in the first pages. “Algora makes you feel unique and envelops you and distills you and you let yourself be trapped because you never tire of being the way you are when you are with him and you close your eyes and let yourself fall into an unexpected tunnel and you live in wonderland,” he adds later.
The life of a chicken… It is also a collective treatise on musicology written with elbows in the measures. Includes precise definitions on thorny issues: “[Ser indie es] imitate the Beatles without showing that you are trying to get rich while shouting from the rooftops that you are a loser. Also scientific formulas to distinguish whether a song is pop or rock: “If while listening to the song you move your head back and forth, it’s rock. If you move your head from side to side, it pops. Even a suspicion that is impossible to confirm: “Édith Piaf seems to be sneezing without making any noise. » And already some advice worm: “You should always try to make the songs as cold and short as a kiss on a Tuesday in March” or “sometimes we exaggerate by wanting to entertain when the best solution may be to try to bore”.
And of course, The life of a chicken… It’s a machine gun of anecdotes. The day they ate at the restaurant of an English band called Radiohead, hence the title of the song TolKas… More than a trunk of El Niño Gusano memories, the book is a top hat. And anything can come out of a hat. Drum jokes? There is. Jokes about Loquillo? Come on. Battles for Quini? Of course. Descriptions of the tone and rhythm of each group member’s snores? Doubt offends. Perruca is passionate about everything. He therefore analyzes with the same dedication the sound composition of Put your mind in the sun and the Spanish dubbing of the film Top secret, the legendary Spain-Malta or a game of Parcheesi with friends. “Can you write too much?” Can. Should that be the case? Probably yes,” he muses in one of five hundred footnotes. Some are so long that they overshadow the main plot. Although it may be hard to believe, scissors, a machete and a lawn mower were used to shorten the book. The first version reached three thousand pages.
Zaragoza was a party
The experiences contained in The life of a whitish chicken… would be enough to film a Party people 24 hours a day hand. Because, of course, in Manchester I would never open a sandwich bar where you could get a beret lifter or a Penesaurus. In fact, more than half of the book takes place in bars: roadside bars, hospitals, airports, Zaragoza… In few musical biographies, we will have seen so many waiters contributing to tasty conversations. And of course, two of those servers were Perruca and guitarist Sergio Vinadé, who ran their own restaurant for thirteen years. The Blue-Eyed Ghost is the other main protagonist of the book, a bar without television or slot machines where a geography competition took place on Mondays and, from time to time, musical fights were organized between popular groups; read Teenage Fanclub and Pavement.
It always seems that going out in Zaragoza in the 90s was like riding a roller coaster (Russian, of course) that no one could stop. Algora, Vinadé, Perruca and bassist Mario Quesada lived surrounded by a similar clique. Also unique characters like Vizcaíno (owner of the Recordings in the Sea label; the authentic Mister Camping), Genzor, JosephO, Bigott, Anguso, cOchi, eMea, Jasón… Most of the names are pseudonyms or distortions of the real ones, so for non-Zaragoza, read The life of a whitish chicken… It’s like sneaking into a new group of friends. And so, little by little, we learn that Vinadé celebrates its birthday 88 days a year, that some songs taste like frogs’ legs and others like lentils, that if for so many groups the greatest pleasure is drinking, for El Niño Gusano there was another superior one: eating. They gained six kilos while recording The largest beetle in Europe.
Beyond the endless collection of adventures, Perruca strives to provide all possible information on how to approach musical composition. Or, at least, how El Niño Gusano responded. This is one of the most valuable aspects of the book and a juicy collection of aphorisms arises from it. towards. There are a few. “An album is good when the last song is better than the first.” “If you don’t argue in the third song, you’ll never argue again.” “With guitars, it’s a bit like with swimsuits, having more than two is a bit silly.” “Radio is above all about listening to people talk. “Friends are there to discover records.” “Songs don’t last as long as the clock says, everyone knows that.” “Surely there is life after death, there always has been life after death, but that has never been the case for us.” Yet the flashes of solemnity are buried among dozens of jokes, thousands of puns and slaps of humor. mongo. “Being a good rhyming idiot takes practice and dedication,” Perruca confesses proudly. worm. “The girl is absolutely right. You must be an idiot. It’s always necessary,” he maneuvers in another passage.
The big final joke
Despite the great pleasure of participating in El Niño Gusano, a kind of premature sadness hangs over the entire book. The ending is known to everyone. Sergio Algora died in 2008 due to health problems that he and his friends were well aware of. Hence the delusional-fatalistic tone of The life of a whitish chicken… This collective impulse towards death is a game between joke and nothingness with extreme emergency stops in hospitals. Nevertheless, this certainty about one’s end was an incentive to dream beyond one’s possibilities and to abandon oneself to life with all the consequences. Algora was a celebration of vitality. Confetti and champagne under any excuse and circumstance.
In addition to breaking the record for bars, waiters and footnotes, The life of a whitish chicken… pulverizes that of cultural references. El Niño Gusano was a deeply cultured group and among the musicians, poets, filmmakers and actors there must be more than three thousand dates. A whole bacchanal of name deletion. But there is something missing in this book. With the thoroughness with which Perruca breaks down stories, with the precision he is able to inject into the most bizarre anecdotes, a certain specificity about the reasons that precipitated the dissolution of El Niño Gusano is conspicuous by his absence. Perhaps Algora was beginning to feel it “like an old attraction that one day served as a good time,” as she sang in Sleep, one of his most beautiful compositions. There has always been a certain mystery and the book doesn’t clear it up at all. No complaints about the direction of events. From the dissolution of the group came two others no less pleasing: La Costa Brava and Tachenko.
Bookstores are full of musical biographies. There are detailed ones. There are some imprecise ones. There are liars. There are those who are interested. There are avengers. There are some in vain. There is wikipedia. This one about The Worm Boy is first and foremost a love biography. It’s a love song for Algora, for music, for friendship and for life itself. Life of a thin-skinned whitish chicken It’s a marathon of happiness and also a 3,000 meters with obstacles where each obstacle is a death. A lot of people die in this book. Too much. But from each loss, Perruca carves the most moving paragraphs. And above all, this book is about the joy of living. And Worm Boy was just that.
