A sudden rush of nostalgia has stopped me from this Australian pop phase I was going through. I’ve opened a time capsule finding the forgotten soundtrack of what I was listening to during the late 90s. It makes me remember Lima’s gray skies oppressing the almost 10 million people that only see the sun during the summer. That winter fog that blinds us while walking down the promenade. The dusty streets that never see a drop of rain. The monochrome clothed people, that like shadows, wander between graffiti and nightmarish traffic. The stray dogs. The shouts of kids playing football on the roads, two stones being the goal posts. The yellow flavored Inca Kola afternoons. Sunday’s at the ice cream shop. Tea time with coca leaves. Those were the days when the bleakness of the city couldn’t crush us. We were up to overthrow the president. We felt we were making history.
Radio days weren’t over. Spanish pop was my first love. Though it wasn’t indiepop clearly, I always enjoyed guitar pop. A pop upbringing that now I feel grateful for. And though this is a wild guess, I’m pretty sure we were the most 80s pop influenced country of the region. It’s still quite common to go to the clubs and listen to The Lightning Seeds, The Jesus and Mary Chain or even The Primitives. This doesn’t happen here in Miami, mind you. Spanish pop was popular, very popular. Till today people are passionate about Aviador Dro, Aerolíneas Federales, Décima Victima, and many more. You can tune radio shows playing these songs on FM. There are bands like Religión or Flash Strato that were more popular in Lima than in Spain.
It was 1997 when “Los Días y las Sombras” by Voz Propia was released. Voz Propia is a cult Peruvian band, they’ve been around since the 80s where they were part of a burgeoning underground movement in Lima. If you ask me a genre I’d say they are post punk. This is their third release and it is their best, which means it is just OK, nothing great. But I always had a soft spot for the opening, eponymous, track. Back then it was like opening a time capsule too: it was recorded in the 90s but it is a song that sounds, breathes, eats, lives, exudes 80s. Another surprise, or maybe a nod, was the album’s artwork, as it shares the same photo as The Pale Fountain’s Pacific Street. I wonder if Voz Propia liked them or if Michael Head would enjoy this record. Do you remember those puzzles, when we were kids, where you had to connect dots to make a picture appear? I like doing that with bands. Finding out how everything correlates, making the six degrees of separation a fact and not a theory. And then I realize, if it was a nod to The Pale Fountains, it could have been a hint to the Liverpudlian scene. And pondering a little more, I get this strong suspicion that this track could have been recorded by The Wild Swans after an intensive Spanish class. What do you say?
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