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As Jairo Perera Viedma (Santa Coloma de Gramanet, 1975), he must be known at home at lunchtime, because as everyone really knows him as “Muchachito”, with surnames as forceful as Bombo Infierno. Now he presents a new album, Qué puede salir mal, his fifth album, with which he breaks a recording silence that lasted since 2016, when he released El Jiro. His rumba now sounds like a carnival party in New Orleans.
What Can Go Wrong has been created seven years after El Jiro. Why did you decide to re-form your band?
Actually, I didn’t form the band: bands form by themselves, and in this group there are people who have been with me for forty years. Others have been with me for twenty years and others have just arrived. There is one thing that is very much ours, which is closeness, and closeness was broken with the pandemic. The dressing rooms became the most boring thing in the world. Before the pandemic I had 700 people in a dressing room. Not all of them at the same time, but 700 people passed through there one night and the party lasted until after 4 in the morning.
For us it is necessary to be close, to be all together and to share. Without sharing, music is very different. It can be compared to eating. Eating alone, except for those who put the photo on Instagram or on the networks, is not the same as eating with four people. That’s great! One orders one thing, another one orders another and we give it to each other to taste…. Sharing is vital, as much for eating as for music. However, during the pandemic, every time we went to play we found more and more regulations and more and more boredom. Everything was a wreck, but we had to go out on stage anyway. That’s where the “what can go wrong?” thing came from. We had to go forward, no matter what. That’s the attitude.
I imagine that this year’s tour will already be a tour as they were until the pandemic?
The songs I’ve done are very much designed for the band. They are songs to be able to play them with my people. Later on I have another album ready, a very intimate one, entitled Cuando el perrico se queda solo, in which I talk about the things I feel, about people I miss, about simple things and more serious things. When I do something I know how to separate it, because it is not the same to tell the story you are telling someone in the bar, than when you think about it alone at home. When you tell something to a colleague, you yourself take the heat out of it. What can go wrong I have done it thinking to play it with my people and, above all, to have fun. It is very vitalist and very ironic.
A sense of humor is necessary: it is medicine. I was on my way to the other album, the introspective one, but then David Marqués came along, and he was very demanding so that I would do the main theme for his film El club del paro (The Unemployment Club). There I had to add humor and I felt like making music with irony and a sense of humor and wrapped by that band with winds and that New Orleans atmosphere: there they make funerals with sad music in the parade, but when they return from the funeral, the party has already broken out, because those who stay behind need that therapy. Laughing at a funeral is necessary.
What memories do you have of those supergroups, the G5 and La Pandilla Voladora, that you formed with friends at the beginning of this century?
They are, so to speak, two ghost groups in which I have participated: they didn’t really exist, they were meetings of friends, and that’s the beauty of that story. First we got together in the G5 with Kiko Veneno, Tomasito and Los Delinqüentes because we admired each other a lot. Kiko is the master of all of us and we called him Doctor No, because if everyone agrees on something, he is against it, and if everyone is against it, he is for it. He has a more modern view of things than the rest of us who are younger than him. Then we did La Pandilla Voladora with Tomasito and El Canijo (from Los Delinqüentes), because Kiko couldn’t, and we got together with Albert Pla and Lichis (leader of La Cabra Mecánica) to do a couple of concerts that later became more.
There is a curious story about the name of La Pandilla Voladora…
The name comes from what the most famous pirates of the 18th century called themselves when they would get together from time to time and do part of their journey together. But then each one had his own ship and his own history and captained in his own way; but when they were together they were “The Flying Gang”. The Flying Gang was created by Benjamin Hornigold, who was the mentor of Edward Teach, “Blackbeard”. We, at first, were going to be called Hunger, but The Flying Gang won, because we got together to go part of the way together and then we split up… to get our bodies back [laughs].
The name Hunger wasn’t bad either. I guess because you are more of a drinker than an eater?
We had some great moments with the food, because we all like to eat, and we like to eat well! And we like to drink well! The funniest thing is that with Tomasito, when the table is ready, the fork disappears without you noticing. He is on his feet, going back and forth and it turns out that he takes everyone’s forks. He is the one who eats the least in the world: he is like a little bird. Albert Pla, on the other hand, is a brutal cook. When people go to his house he asks for macaroni, but he is a very delicate cook with a lot of sensitivity.
And you, what are you good at cooking?
I always make the tortilla de papas and fried eggs. My partner cooks better than me, but fried eggs and omelettes are my thing. It’s a necessity: I go to play outside and when I come back, the first thing I have to make is a potato omelet. It’s like that’s how I know I’ve arrived home.