"We have not returned. We have never left and we will never return. We are there, in the form of a song, which belongs to everyone," summarizes Manolo García (Barcelona, 1955) together with Quimi Portet (Vic, 1957) from the stage before the dozens of journalists who fill the Sala Galileo in Madrid for the presentation of the new work of El Ultimo de la Fila after they separated 25 years ago. It is a pyramidal mess, a title that, they say with amusement, arose from "the laughter of the food, the moment of the carajillo, the classic and magical moment of the beer", and they add that they like titles in which the noun and the adjective are not they correspond.
There are 24 songs that cover many of their songs, especially from their first albums. Topics for which, the singer says, they have "worked for two or so years with great pleasure: it has been very fun, very pleasant with what has accompanied those meetings, which have always been gastronomic, libation, libations that are never excessive but convenient. And not to improve the quality of the proposal." "A little yes," Quimi Portet interrupts, "although in moderation, it is always better to sing with a little bit of carajillo depending on the songs," he says to widespread laughter that compensates for the disappointment of being assured time and time again that there will be no tour.
"All the doors are open and all are closed. But this is a unique project, closed, finished. It was not thought with the idea that it would be linked to a tour. Nor did we think that we would do so much publicity. We are very grateful for the enthusiasm that people have for the material and for our career, but it is closed. Things can happen, thousands of things can happen, because we had a good time together. But when Last in the Line disbanded we continued to be musicians. We did not retire. If that had been the case Yes, we would now be thinking about returning to the stage. And it would make a lot of logic. Thousands of things can happen, but none of them are linked to this operation that is purely the recording of an album," García points out.
And in a meeting in which they have shown their total complicity, he remembers that "we have been friends for a long time and we have always gotten along very well, we work in a very simple way, there is no prior plan, we like music above all else and it gives us happiness. And there are many people who stop you on a corner and say 'Manuel' or 'Quimi, hey, what a beautiful song, what a beautiful concert, last night I was happy.' It is a reward that life gives you, that complicity, that living together, the joy of knowing that you share life with many people. Because we are hunting for days, there are not so many that we have, a few thousand. And they are spent. The ticket is only one way, and the possibility of, with a partner , hunting for days, is magnificent".
Even so, they acknowledge that the musical reunion has been "a cluster of coincidences." "We refused to go back, we thought that everything had been said, we had said what we had to say, you can't scrape the plate, it's bad tone," says García, and Portet explains that Pyramid Disruption "we started it practically accidentally, when We were asked to participate in a tribute to Àngel Casas, to whom we were indebted because he took us out of the darkness of our first Paleolithic groups, Los rapidos and Los burros."
They dared with Silver Planes, "we prepared a demo in the studio and in the recording process alone we had such a good time, it was such a gigantic airing of our iron family discipline and our solo careers that it was a moment of recreation. The The recording included his beer, his potatoes, his moments of conspiracies and fixing the world, which we continued to insist on and in the end we met a couple of days a week and recorded. Soon we had a jar full of 11 or 12 songs and we thought it would be a publishable work. But the genesis was recreational."
And about the album he points out that "there is always an emotional part, and when people are of a mature age like us, memory and nostalgia are always there no matter how much you act cool, obviously. You miss things from your youth like everything else." the world, especially we who have had a fortunate career, complicated at first with those Paleolithic groups and which then took off more than we could dream of.
And he admits that in him "there is a part of nostalgia, of memory, at 28 years old memory takes up very little of the hard drive, at sixty-something it takes up a lot and it is a large part of the emotional fuel you have when you start writing. But once the themes have been selected, when we enter the studio, we are ourselves today with the perspective of now and we abandon nostalgia and return to youthful emotionality, humor, the pleasure of the job. Knowing how to ration those doses of nostalgia, optimism, melancholy and good health That's what brought the album to fruition."
In one of the funniest moments of the meeting, Portet talks about humor in his work and life and the complicities that do not abandon them: "Humor is the anarchy that triumphs for brief moments. We live in a very strange thing that we call civilization and that It is very complicated to teach children. Humor is the only thing that saves us from that strange and incomprehensible civilization. How are we guys going to have mental health who go 300 per hour in an iron tube, it cannot be that some primates travel continent to another in seven hours and have mental health.
And, he continues: "Humor is a confirmation of the absurdity of our collective existences and an affirmation that our personal existence does have meaning. When you are a teenager and you start to have friends, they are the people you laugh with, with whom you have codes No matter how stupid they are, they make you laugh and no one understands. And even though we are in our sixties, we do the same. We have nonsense that only makes us laugh and our relatives get a little scared, these guys are still laughing at this nonsense. Yes, it still makes us laugh. Humor is basic in our texts."
Portet remembers that they had an African percussionist "who was an important dabas-eater and after each meal he said: 'I ate well.' We still say it, we can't finish the meal without saying it, and our relatives look at us with saddened faces." And Manolo García remembers that in the precarious van with which Juan Carlos García traveled through Spain with his first groups "he had a folder of endless jokes with which he livened up those tedious hours on national roads. Jokes that still survive. 'How are you, how are you?' Are you there? Well, come on, you...' We've been laughing at this nonsense for 45 years."
However, the end of the meeting is very serious: García remembers that with The Last of the Row they always collaborated with environmental organizations and even organized a concert in which Tina Turner participated to raise money for 21 organizations: "19 used it well, in In two cases the director of the association ran away with the money and we were notified. "Human behavior is a mystery," Quimi adds. And Manolo concludes: "Today the scientific body warns of the environmental emergency and the politician ignores that scientific urgency. The most important thing today is to stop the increase in temperature on the planet, without that possibility there will be no songs, nor countries, but chaos and terror". "And there will be no vermouth either, and we are not going to allow that," Portet smiles.
