I was a bit disoriented. We arrived at the terrace of the Itsasmuseum and on the esplanade they were celebrating the Afrika Eguna. There was an aroma of pilgrimage and multiculturalism. Inside, in Ship 9, reggae was playing and it was more muggy than in Jamaica in the month of July. On the terrace, you could hear speaking in English and French. When the gig started, they came out first the dogs, who I think are from Arrasate and surroundings, and they greeted like this: “Gabon, Portu”. Later, it was the turn of the others, who were called The Repairer, and with a French accent they said in a more than acceptable Spanish that they were “a band from Barakaldo”. Can someone explain it to me? I lost myself What difference does it make. The lines are crossed, the music perverts the borders, you sit on the terrace with a cold beer and good company… Someone tell me if there is a better place to call homeland.
the dogs, I have already said, they are the first to go up. There are four of them: bassist in the center, two guitarists in each corner and the drummer in the background. No, wait, there’s a fifth to come out suddenly, out of nowhere, grab the mic and start tensing the veins in his neck. It’s still fucking hot in there. In his corner, the guitarist in the Gluecifer shirt, also painstaking in the choruses and in the work of spokesman, puffs as much as he exudes and will come to imitate Andrés Calamaro in Los Rodríguez when he sings the chorus of “Mucho mejor”. . If you know it, you will already know what to do. Then, loudly, they will ask Haritza, the owner of the bar, to turn on a fan. The heat does not subside throughout the concert. The singer puts the mic in his back pocket and puts on and takes off his The 4 Skins T-shirt. In one song, he pours water over his head and then throws the bottle into infinity, which is just the place where Ana comes from having a cigarette and narrowly misses the plastic. They have just started, so to speak, and are already asking for more beer to cool off. The poor singer, it occurs to him to shout “nik, ura” and one by one the laughter of his companions falls. At the end, one mutters sarcastically: “straight edge”. Well, drink a or drink b, you can see something of that. They go from street punk to hardcore punk without shaking their shins, never on tiptoe, always sunk to the mud with the rhythm, their throats in tension and a volume so high that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen so many people with earplugs, those of some, even, helplessly improvised.
They sing in English, Basque and Spanish. They even have one with a title in German, “Raus”, which they explain to us what it means. Vive la calle!, a work released last year, stars in the repertoire. They begin, in fact, with the one that opens the album, with the same title. It’s like a demonstration of principles. And finals: “Detrás del cristal” and “Sombras”, also on that album, will close their performance. In fact, almost all of them are touched, and with them it will be that they get polyglottic. In Basque, they sing “Zatoz”, for example; and, in English, “Don’t Try” or “New Generation”. In the front row, the rock knows it, even the last one, that they offer it to us as a tribute, because they become an MCD and someone steals the microphone to sing it to their heart’s content. Before, they already made another version. Jawer, also a Crap guitarist, sang Eddie and the Hot Rods’ “Do Anything You Wanna Do”, but maybe I’m getting it wrong, because, I repeat, at that point, I was already a bit disoriented, and we were only halfway there.
With the last one they thank Le Réparateur, like this, with the little mouth of pinion, because they try to pronounce it correctly. The French have their problems with the rocky consonants of Spanish, with the tonic accent and with the conjugation, but they present themselves in fluent Castilian and even admit that they would like to say something in “Basque”. And it is that they are half Basque. The day before they played a concert I would almost say private in Barakaldo. It was advertised on the tour poster, but it didn’t say where it was going to be. They have played before in the town, in the long-awaited El Tubo, and there was a year in which they did a double on the same weekend. They are so from the town that the first row is full of neighbors. At the end of the gig, when they are discussing how many and which ones to play to finish, they have to interrupt themselves to say goodbye to Animal and his wife who are already leaving. Factory citizenship, yes. When they travel far in their discography, to Sortir la Tete de la Poubelle to sing their “T’es malade” with great rage and rage, they introduce themselves like this: “How are you friends? Are The Repairer. We are a band from Barakaldo”.
There are two, that I haven’t said: drummer and guitarist. So they have a place on the stage. The guitarist sings and makes trips to his girth, and he stands on one leg, like a flamingo resting on the water. He takes up a lot of space. They start strong, showing their teeth: incisive and steely punk, without ornamentation or conatus, as if x-raying the skeleton of the genre. They always tend to the same pattern, but they defend their bet well. The third already alters you because it is “Tout ce que je croise”, which is an old acquaintance because the Hereux et Gros was enjoyed a lot. They go back to that one to recover others, like “Pas d’avis” or the title track, “Heureux et Gros”, with that riff that fills your memory. They also sing that song turned into something else, almost a hymn, which is “Pas la Meme Merde”, where the singer mixes French and Spanish.
Contrary to what happened with Txakurrak, the drummer from Le Réparateur wouldn’t have a little cardigan left over and shyly and politely asks that the air conditioning be turned down a bit, but he has to laugh when, next to me, Ana says it out loud and makes it clear: “Nooooo”, that we do not forget the sweltering summer in Arrasate. Much of the rest of the repertoire is taken from his latest album, Super, merci. It seems to me that they say txakoli, but I think they sing “Oh, Caroline”. And I don’t know if when they say that in their next song they’re going to talk about the police in France, “that’s a problem”, the one they play is “Police partout”. The one I do recognize is “Etiquette”, because they drop a key before exploding again and because the lyrics are as frank and spontaneous as their music. And we appreciate it better because it was sung in Spanish. From her back pocket, she took out a chop, spread it on the ground, and demonstrated that she doesn’t have refraction problems because from the top of her microphone she read while she sang. Flat and fill.
And the final firecracker was not such because, in reality, the level was up from the beginning. They end with “Besoin d’amour”, I think, where the hardcore returns and I hear “ce soir”. Since I’m that stupid, I can’t help but think of “Lady Marmalade” and crack a smile that, luckily, he didn’t see. no one, because anyone explains how and why that silly association crossed my mind (and how does it stay here forever, Holden?) And what’s more, you didn’t even remember: no, they didn’t sing Plastic Bertrand’s song. he asked why not. Well, because they no longer need it. In the end, what they will need is to play one of Putakaska when they return to Lyon. The music perverts the borders, the lines are crossed, we return to the terrace and that long live the disorientation