After 30 years on stage, Elefantes know each other well enough to present the gardening treatise in which they describe the musical flowers that make up their garden. There are 30 songs, one for each year full of collaborations and versions with which the Shuarma band defines itself with all the peace that it did not have in its beginnings. “I don't feel like I've been around for 30 years,” comments the voice of the group, gathered together with bassist Julio Cascán in the La Conxita bookstore in Sants (the group is completed by Jordi Ramiro and Álex Vivero). “In music everything changes, the craft of writing songs and getting them to people, the most artistic part, is never the same because you are never the same.” That's why when he enters the studio, still today, he has the same feeling as his first recording at the Montseny studios, where they recorded five songs “because we didn't have money for more.” Now they will review their career on a tour that this April 19 will stop at the Palau de la Música within the Guitar BCN festival.
With eleven albums published (twelve, if you count this new anthology), the authors of Azul continue with their musical journey because they do not understand life any other way. “My worst personal moments have come when we have periods of inactivity,” Julio Cascan confesses. “The bands also have to stop, and that's when you think about things, you don't feel good and you have to make up an excuse to go gig, we need to get out.” A need that Shuarma (named Juan Manuel Álvarez), author of Que yo no lo saber or Me ha re mistaken, associates with the importance of showing oneself through songs, “it is the most important thing in music, more than pleasing , that through the songs they know the people who have made them", only in this way is a real bond with the audience achieved, "the important thing is to find what you identify with, and we have found our voice."
The album with which they celebrate three decades on stage includes the band's greatest hits along with a selection of versions including the bolero Sabor a mí by Luis Miguel, Mujer contra mujer by Mecano, Somewhere by Duncan Dhu , or the well-known I love you, by Perales. “We started making covers although from the first day we already had songs, but we love covering other people's songs, it helps us define ourselves,” highlights Shuarma for whom covering Perales is “like attending a master class.” The vocalist looks back and remembers that the music that defines us is not what we decide to listen to, but “what you have heard, whether you have chosen it or not. I never listened to Perales, but my parents played him a lot, just like Raphael or Serrat, this music was inside me.” That's why he has no problem acknowledging her love for Rocío Jurado, "she fascinates me with that hair and those dresses, just like Isabel Pantoja, although I don't like her character too much." Of these folkloric songs, a passion stands out that he feels in the same way. “It's stupid to pretend that no, I'm a modern person. We are folkloric, passionate, very emotional people,” he says, and Julio concludes by remembering that “it fits a lot with us because our character is like that.”
In Gardening Treatise, the list of collaborations with names like Rozalén, Love of Lesbian, Bunbury, Coque Malla, Antonio Vega or Manolo García, who gives his voice to Agua, is overwhelming. “I remember the day he sent us the song, when I heard the first sentence tears of emotion fell on me,” Shuarma recalls about the collaboration with half of El Último de la Fila. “Over the years we have created bonds with many people, friends who feel music in a similar way even though they have different styles.” This good relationship contrasts with the one they maintained in the beginning between the different bands on the Barcelona scene, when “there was more distance, it is also true that we were an atypical band and that worked against us.”
“It's an aesthetic question,” says Julio Cascán, “the bands of the 90s came from a tradition in which the musicians were haughty, generated tensions, it was a question of personal positioning.” These habits have changed over time for the greater comfort of the musical scene, but Shuarma misses the theatrical part of that attitude. “I love folklore, generating a character with a point of attraction or rejection, like theater masks.”
Another change compared to the beginning is that then “it was easier to play, everywhere they gave you three plugs and they let you play without a problem. We got tired of doing concerts in all kinds of places, many that were not suitable and we had to adapt them, there we learned Latin.” Looking back, Shuarma values the learning of those first steps, “when you later go to a suitable space everything is easier and you can focus on the music.” Lessons from a few years in which the band broke a lot of stones, as they continue to do today, as Julio Castán recalls, “now we reach more people, we work better, we have an infrastructure but we continue with the feeling of warriors, of working with our hands. There are light days, like when you play at the Palau de la Música, but then you go to the Principal Theater in Zamora, Badajoz or Mexico, and you have to work.”
Along the way there were eight years of separation from the band, between 1996 and 2004, which are now seen as a failure, "we should have pressed the pause, not the stop," Shuarma acknowledges. “For eight years we did not get together again, but the day we rehearsed again it was as if no time had passed. During those years we had all made music, we had gone around a lot, but we had the feeling that the house was there, the rest were just trips.” Maybe that's why now that they no longer feel the need to convince anyone that their band is essential, "it's much more relaxed to live like this, these are us, these are our songs, now you choose who you want to listen to."
“We are artisans of what we do,” Shuarma points out, “we do it all ourselves, we like to take good care of it because we cannot control what happens outside the doors with a song, but inside our small garden, where we have planted our songs, we put everything we are and know so that they flourish.”
