Whoever has never sang out loud “that’s why go away, forget my name, my face, my house and turn around” throw the first stone. Brothers Lucia and Joaquin Galan They turn forty years old being, in addition to Lucía and Joaquín, Pimpinela. And they celebrate it with a tour that is quite a celebration. “The name was obvious,” laughs Joaquín. “The “40th Anniversary Tour”. But it also generated a feeling not only of a birthday, but of a party. In us and in the public. I think it has influenced the fact that the post-pandemic brought with it a desire for everyone to go out, to relive. And that it coincided with that return to the streets, to the theaters and concerts, reinforced that feeling. There are fifteen countries that we have traveled and we will finish here in Spain in October. It is being a great birthday party for the whole family ».
“We’ve always had that familiar feeling» explains Lucia. «That ours was more a product of word of mouth, something familiar, than a product of radio and promotions. And now we have that feeling again, that the new generations, boys of 16, 17, 18, are discovering us and that, thanks to the new songs, which their families listen to at home, they are reaching out to the old ones, rediscovering us, because they have gone looking for us in the past». Some of these songs, dramatized, that have been a house brand from the beginning. «Our inspiration at the beginning», says Joaquín, «were, due to the atmosphere they generated with their music, José Luis Perales, Manuel Alejandro, Juan Carlos Calderón… That was our inspiration. The decision to sing together came at the insistence of our mother that we did it. “You have to sing together, like the Carpenters,” he would tell us, putting the accent wrong as he did so. And what we did was unite what Lucía liked so much, which was learning theater, and what I liked, who at that time already had a musical group with which we imitated The Beatles. That merger seemed innovative and amused us. It was very funny to see the reaction of our friends at the beginning to that sung theatrics. It was not something that other duos did or that we had seen reflected the image, the type of song, of the public. People saw us and wondered where we came from, what the hell we were doing. Until one day Silvio Rodríguez, in an interview, was asked who was the most popular artist in Cuba and he said: Pimpinela. And it was as if at that moment they put the stamp of validity on us.
“People like it,” adds Lucía. «In fact, when for whatever reason we put less intensity on acting them, the audience’s reaction is also proportional to that intensity. The character that touches me, which is the woman who puts an end to many Latino macho conflicts… it is incredible to see how they react. They love it, it’s an immediate reaction.” But Lucía, when she gets off the stage, has plenty of those conflicts. “I’m not a feminist,” she says. «I defend women’s rights, of course, but I am not a fundamentalist on the issue. I believe that everyone has their place and I love it and I am flattered when a man opens the car door for me, brings me flowers, invites me to a dinner… It is not incompatible that I like a man to be a gentleman with the rights of the women. But now he is going to extremes. Until we return to the media again, and women feel again that this is a caress and not an aggression.
And they found their style. A very well defined one. AND “Forget me and turn around” is still the song that identifies them. “It’s a song that sums us up very well,” says Lucía. “Later we have made better songs,” Joaquín intervenes, “but this sums up very well what we are and continues to be an important topic for us.” One that, forty years later, continues to sing until those new generations that are now discovering them. Forty years pretending in their songs to be a sentimental couple. “Not being one has lengthened our artistic lives,” they laugh. “If instead of brothers we had been a couple, we would have lasted four months instead of forty years.” “Between us there is no mistrust or jealousy,” says Lucía. «It is possible that the problems that cause the separations in the groups are this type of thing, which undermines trust. That and the bed. “Sometimes at concerts we ask to see how many brothers there are”, Joaquín interjects, “and they raise their hands. And then we ask who hasn’t talked to brothers in a while, and there are also. Nor is it easy to maintain the relationship between brothers for forty years. It has also been a job of learning to know and respect each other. We are very perfectionists, very disciplined, very much to control each other, to tell each other what we have to improve. And sometimes we don’t tell each other in the best of ways. But then they tell you that we’re better now than before, and it’s very flattering. The public values it, tells us and that motivates us. We do our best, it doesn’t happen by chance. Now a part of the youth does not believe that there is virtue in the effort, they believe in a kind of magical realism because everything is a social network and they upload something and that’s it, success was achieved.
They also defend art as something “totally free. It’s like sex, the search for each one. Freedom: wild, primitive, instinctive. That does not warrant any cultural change or any trend at a certain time in history. We are absolutely against curtailing any type of artistic expression. “Anyone who doesn’t like it,” Lucía agrees, “don’t go, don’t see it, don’t listen to it. But this extreme and fundamentalist thing right now, of not being able to disagree or they have already accused you of being sexist, racist, wearing a green scarf… No. There are other possibilities of thinking and creating».
What a rant about love
By Javier Menendez Flores
On a stage, a woman and a man are at odds. They loved each other so, so much… But he betrayed her, he did not know how to see that he already had the treasure he went out to look for, and when he knocks on that door again he finds that she will never forgive him: “Go away, forget my eyes, my hands, my lips / that do not want you». Because that’s what songs have, that they are closed spaces and in them you win and, above all, you lose forever. There is no mercy for a “continue”. Pimpinela triumphed with that theatrical, histrionic, crazy musical proposal. With that farce or vaudeville where everything revolves around love and its ruins, heartbreak. Since, strictly speaking, the other aspects of life are nothing more than simple prosaic procedures that do not require the fire of saliva and skin.
Barely in the eighties, Argentina was getting rid of an ominous dictatorship, and in that context of dazzling spring and desire to eat life, the Galán brothers, Lucía and Joaquín, swelled to sell records. His success was to relax his eyebrows, drop every last ounce of solemnity as if it were ballast and transfer the real pulse of the street to music. Because if you touch people’s hearts by looking into their eyes and talking about yourself, you win them for life. And what better common language than that of conjugal quarrels, a universe in which reproaches, jealousy, cuckolding, pain and guilt gnaw at lovers until they are left to the bone. The drama, in short. War. That so Argentine –and so Spanish, of course– of the blood that burns, of the knife of passion, of the loves that kill.
And although the faces of that pairing of singers/actors were soon framed in neon, and Argentine pesos poured into their current accounts like a river, first, and then the southern ones, that had a b-side: some of their colleagues, who demonstrated not be so, they twisted their noses at that colossal success and bile rose to their mouths. They, so exquisite, so exalted, could not sell even a quarter of what those brothers sold, who every time they went on stage committed incest. They did not understand something elementary, that the beautiful dribbling and bullfighting, no matter how much art they have, can never compete with the goal or with the task completed as the canons dictate: the bull gasping in the arena and the vertical matador like a mast .
But perseverance ends up imposing itself. And Pimpinela managed to earn the full respect of the profession by demonstrating that behind those songs in dialogue that recreate short films starring ill-fated couples, there were two unfailing workers. Two professionals for whom what they did was just as important as a patient for a surgeon.
Now, forty years after it all began, with a long line of millions of records sold and showcases full of trophies, it’s time to hit the road again and claim their songbook. Because yes, because they feel like it, because the figure is well worth it. Joaquín and Lucía, hungry for Spain, the land of their parents and their second homeland, will recite their domestic tragedies in our country with the same passion, they say, as when they began.
The world may be another today, very different from that of those uncertain but throbbing beginnings. But if in the middle of a concert they feel like looking up, maybe they will see those first luminous swallows. «Goodbye», «why?», «because now I am the one who wants to be without you». Life, friends.
2023-05-29 02:33:25
#Pimpernel #Art #sex #wild #primitive #instinctive
