Clamores, Galileo, Libertad 8, the Búho Real, Costelo, the Sol room, the Rincón del Arte Nuevo, Candela, Moby Dick, Caracol, the Aqualung room, Revolver, the Clandestino…; Many venues scheduled daily concerts allowing you to look the singers in the eye. Concerts which brought together fifty or a hundred people, other times twenty, but which allowed you to choose from a range of singers who packed up their suitcases to no longer make things so easy. On any given Tuesday, you could stop by Clamores and see Germán, the owner, finishing preparation for an Antonio Vega concert. Tickets available, of course, because Madrid has no waitlist or lines out the door for a second place at dinner. Not a cough could be heard. The only saint was Antonio and the others, devoted to the miracle which began around nine o’clock in the evening. Or Darío, the legendary founder of Búho Real who scheduled concerts in the bar of his temple and who was the first stage for giants like Bebe. I remember her singing while watching Borja, my friend. There were no more than fifteen or twenty of us before Virgin realized that this woman was stopping time when she made songs like “so long without feeling”, songs lost because not recorded on her first albums. Then Carlos Jean and Javier Liñán caused a sensation with a musical production that would come out of Búho Real to fill the squares all over Spain. But it had been ours for a few years. In Libertad 8, the young Quique González rehearsed and, on several occasions, he was accompanied by Enrique Urquijo for this masterpiece of “Even if you don’t know it”. It hurt when the Madrid leader of Los Secretos sang it. The night then seemed like an evening full of magic that offered opportunities, spreading excitement every two blocks. Carlos Chaouen came to Galilee from the south. Until I saw it for the first time, I didn’t understand what it meant to sing raw with a guitar. His vocal cords were torn and the sound of the instrument blended with that of his own throat. He left you stunned, stringing together the verses that were burned into your memory while the glasses of the wine glasses slipped between his sentences, landing on the tables. It was almost a ritual, with a thunderous silence that was broken when he began to arpeggio his “Seed in the Earth”. A singer dressed in black, who you later had next to the bar because Madrid drank everything without distinguishing one from the other. Standard Related News Yes, this Malasaña of the illustrious Pigüi Alfonso J. Ussía He wore worn leather. jacket which was large. His homeland was the Plaza de San Ildefonso, although at night he could be seen in the Plaza de la Luna El Candela, who is about to see the light of his cave again, it was the border that many did not have the courage to cross. For me, it was a dream to see Joselín Vargas hitting percussion with the table, while his cousin Antonio Carmona sang a cappella a mid-tempo text that hypnotized everyone who stopped there. That’s why he got up at night. Because the elf woke up around noon and ordered a whiskey with ice to warm his throat. The Clandestino on Barquillo Street was a brick vault in which cigarette smoke gave the impression of a Norteña valley waking up in fog. Halloween wasn’t celebrated, and perhaps that’s why you occasionally encountered the undead who spent their nights as an extension of their days. There, suddenly, the concerts started very early in the morning because no one was in a hurry to come back. Just to arrive. Before going to sleep, you could eat spaghetti or a fabada at Lady Pepas, and what’s more, you could leave with a memory of having seen Krahe on his boards. This Madrid that sang everywhere understands neither reggaeton nor autotune. Young people now prefer to smoke strawberry shisha and listen to monothemes on their cell phones while they write to each other on WhatsApp what they don’t say to each other in person. That’s why at night everything seems almost the same. And Sabina stopped writing in bars and Antonio went to heaven. And Carlos Chaouen in India and Bébé at another pace and at another time. Quique González in Cantabria, Joselín in New York, Darío transferred the Búho and Germán got tired of scheduling concerts. Isaac from Lady Pepas, Miguelito from El Candela… Madrid continues to see how everything grows while some gaps will never be filled.
