The voice of conscience asks Manolo Garcia “plus music and more songs to try to handle the perplexity that assails him when he listens to the morning news. “Precariousness, lack of life, threats, crisis, crisis, crisis… Ukraine, and now this mess of espionage,” she sighs, suspecting that planet Earth is no longer what it was. Hence the title of this album, ‘Mi vida en Marte’, because the planet has become a place where its inhabitants “we are puppets, anguished currantes without having been the provokers of the crisis”, all abducted by a fearsome “zombie-technological reality”.
The album did not come alone: It is accompanied by ‘Desatinos plucked’, a work largely conceived “in a frenetic weekend” and recorded “pim-pam, urgent”. If ‘Mi vida en Marte’ presents an electric feel, in the pop-rock tradition, its twin is more acoustic and tabletop. It could be thought that the first represents his commercial bet, and that the second is the object for ‘connaisseurs’, an observation that he disputes. “I don’t know if I’m commercial or not. I have never changed a song one millimeter to try to sell moreI’m not even going to do it. For me, the market does not exist. At the time of creating, my mind is elsewhere”.
intensity of life
He was lucky, because the pandemic breaks caught him with the ‘Geometry of lightning’ tour mostly completed, and given the “bizarre situation”, he decided to get the best of himself. “Since I don’t have a dog to walk, I started looking for songs. That way I got away a bit, and it didn’t bother anyone, ”he explains. And the 27 that make up both albums ended up coming out, starting with ‘Diez mil Veranos’, a song that projects “a pretense of intensity of life, of finding meaning in days”.
The songs immerse you in his distinguishable poetic world, with dreamy twists and turns and views to the south: citations to toponyms such as Andalusia, Granada, Algarve, Sicily, Estrómboli… “The south is where I have always moved”, he reasons. “There is a search for hedonism as something unattainable”. And a certain idealization of pre-industrial imaginaries is glimpsed. “The American prairie tribes despised the wheel,” he notes with fascination. “They wanted nothing to do with her!”
With Pepe Robles
‘Mi vida en Marte’ is “a band album”, with Gerry Leonard (former accomplice of Bowie and Cohen) in the credits, and civilized traces of rock ‘riffs’. A classic, Pepe Robles, appears as an accomplice in ‘Angelina’. “In the 70s, listening to him with the Modules, made me aware that I should stop imitating Anglo-Saxon singers and find a personal style”. And ‘Desatinos plucked’ goes through rumba, Andalusian, flamenco textures, although he’s shy about claiming certain genres. “Flamenco it’s a word i can’t use”, he observes. “It would be an imposture. This would be flamenco pop, popular music”.
Now that we are talking about eco-anxiety, we must remember that he integrated, already with El Último de la Fila, environmental sensitivity into the pop agenda. That floats again in these songs, although he feels more skeptical every day. “The activity on the planet has consequences, such as the increase in temperature. All this is known, but it is to cry out against the desert”. Barcelonian from Poble Nou, he is witness to the green axes and ‘superilles’ drawn up by the City Council. “They are layers of makeup, band-aids for a cancer“, considers. “What’s the use of removing lanes if we don’t eradicate fossil fuels? Public works companies will be delighted, but they are patches with which someone wears a medal or makes a profit”.
‘Orwellian’ helicopter
His music appears, perhaps more than ever, as a window through which to desert the earthly noise. ‘My life on Mars’ appeals to irony: that “Orwellian” helicopter on the cover, taken from the photo he took on October 4, 2017 in Barcelona. “It was flying over the ‘mani’. I removed the word ‘Police’ and put the 8 ”, an allusion to her eighth album. “When it started the ukrainian thingI tried to change the cover, because it has an almost warlike connotation, but it was already in machines. I hope it is understood that I am a pacifist.”
Last Sunday, Manolo García surprisingly appeared at ‘Lo de Évole’ (La Sexta), not to present his new releases, nor to talk about his imminent tour (with stops, this summer, at Porta Ferrada and Arts d’Estiu, and on November 5, the Palau Sant Jordi), but to recreate, together with Quimi Portet, a piece with 32 years of history, ‘When the sea has you’, from El Último de la Fila. “They proposed it to us because we were the first band with which Julia [Otero] counted,” he explains. “And Quimi and I are not ordinary people. We are quite ‘freakies’”. There’s no more. “He is on his personal journey, and I am on mine. There is friendship and we meet regularly”. Both of them endorse Jiminy Cricket’s maxim that illustrates the notes of ‘Desatinos plucked’: “Everything that goes up comes down, don’t let anyone get too cool”.