That summer of 1986, the Companyia Elèctrica Dharma played in the town, and everyone knew the chorus of the song that opened the LP entitled: Deu anys de resistència: Força Dharma! Force Dharma! . The Berlin Wall hadn't fallen yet, they were drinking beer and they weren't even twenty years old. They carried some stellar flags. They felt like heroes waiting for they didn't know what. On Saturday, the Dharma celebrated half a century of life with a great concert at the Palau Sant Jordi. Time burns like cigarette paper. In the eighties, there were few independentistas. They keep a photograph of the group, from that time, all quite hairy, in the Fossar de les Moreres, one September 11 morning.
When La presó del rei de França plays and everyone jumps for joy, he realizes that he is lucky to be alive. Some can no longer say. For example, Guillem Agulló, murdered by the fascists thirty years ago. Today he would be 48, he would be a little younger than Dharma. The murderer of the young Valencian left-wing independentista was sentenced to 14 years, but he was released from jail after four, for – it was said – good behavior. The court that judged those facts did everything possible so that the crime was not considered what it objectively was, a political assassination. They preferred to describe it as a "youth fight." Fascism has had and still has accomplices of all kinds. Before Vox reached the legislative chambers. Guillem Agulló's parents have had to endure threats, ridicule, graffiti and all kinds of expressions of hate from those who feel unpunished. "Shame, cavallers, shame."
The anniversaries come together in this April, in which the peaceful hymns of the Fortuny brothers remind us that youth is always part of the future, more than memory. The thirty years of the murder of Guillem Agulló; the eighty-five of the execution of the Christian Democrat Catalan leader Manuel Carrasco i Formiguera, by order of Franco; the sixties of the execution of the communist leader Julián Grimau, when the dictatorship wanted to pretend that it was modernizing; the fifties of the death of the worker Manuel Fernández Márquez in a confrontation between the police and the workers who built the thermal power station of Sant Adrià de Besòs... The dead and spring. The Dharma celebrates life, but it is too hard to show that nothing has happened here.
The album that the Dharma recorded with the Cobla Mediterrània is a work of art that must be listened to again. Without the usual prejudices of those who, for example, find it modern to dress as flamenco or flamenco at the April Fair and, on the other hand, make a disgusted face when a sardana is played, because "it's too identity-based". Without what the Dharma sowed, today The Tyets would not have given birth to the song Coti x Coti, which triumphs among young people. And let's not abandon the anniversaries: in April 1983, Parliament unanimously approved the first language normalization law. Today, unfortunately, rebuilding some essential consensus is a very difficult task.
