• Newspaper. All Chimpún Interviews by Iñako Díaz-Guerra
  • Carmen Maura. "My left wasn't this aggressive, nasty ... If you can call this unfortunate thing of today a left."
  • Miguel Ángel Silvestre. "I live in the middle of the forest and I support myself with self-sufficiency, I will always be a Valencian gardener"

Coque Malla (Madrid, 1969) has been here all his life and that's why, despite hiding a portrait like Dorian Grey's in the storage room, it's surprising to remember that he was over 50 two times ago. Events, and he himself, don't help. She has released an album, Although We Are Dead, where the protagonist carries a scythe and has just been awarded the Ondas for her career. They're calling him old. "I've gotten that feedback from more places and it's starting to grate [laughs], but I take it to mean that, despite my young age, my career deserves an award because it's impeccable. Although who knows what the jury thought... In any case, I don't plan to die anytime soon," he jokes.

The thing about you is that you started absurdly young: you were 15 years old when you formed Los Ronaldos. I started, as you say, very young with a very successful group in a very special decade; Then I kissed the canvas and went through some difficult and dark years, but I overcame them and rebuilt my career. I also made films with films that were quite successful at one point; now some albums of a different kind but that also work, a Goya a few years ago for the song of Campeones... There's so much variety that in the end it feels like I've lived longer than I have. I don't stop to think about it. I'm not nostalgic at all, I think it shows in my walk and in the things I do and how I do them. My albums are very vital and very current albums. I look ahead and I'm not one to take stock or reflect on the past. I know it's there, but I don't stop to think about it. Sometimes I have no choice but to do it, like when Lasdelcine made the documentary about my life: they put it in front of you and you get excited. I see my wife telling how we met, Los Ronaldos telling how we separated and I live it all very viscerally, laughing or crying, without reflecting or taking stock and all this. It's over, it's and that's it.

More Chimpún Interviews

Quique Gonzalez.

"I don't accept the revisionism of art, now we are stricter with fiction than with reality and that is terrible"

"I don't accept the revisionism of art, now we are stricter with fiction than with reality and that is terrible"

Sara Sálamo.

"I am a highly sensitive person who has come to cry watching 'Deportes Cuatro'"

"I'm a highly sensitive person who has come to cry watching 'Deportes Cuatro'"However, you put out an album with a constant presence of death. Is it starting to creep into the background and making you uneasy? Yes, absolutely. That's why I made this record, because that's how I find... I was going to say "the concept of the album", but that seems more and more pedantic to me. Concept art is something else and it's big words, this of ours in the end is just pop and rock. Let's say that I try to make my albums faithful to a climate and that this climate is respected by all the elements that make it up: the sound, the arrangements, the production and the lyrics, as a fundamental part. I start writing and I discover in snippets of my lyrics what is troubling me at this moment in my life. And, obviously, when I started writing these lyrics I discovered that the passage of time, fragility and death were very present. Why have I gotten to this point? Because of the indisputable fact of age, because of being a father, which is something that puts you in another square on the existential chessboard, and because my parents have both recently passed away. If you're a parent and your parents are alive, you're still a child, but when your parents disappear you're just a parent and everything is different. All these things, added to a pandemic that hit us all with a blow of reality and fragility, have put death in my head and on my record. We normally turn our faces to death, but the pandemic forced us to look. Totally. I don't think there has been a circumstance in history so strong that we all live it at the same time and connected. Because there have been World Wars and there have been plagues, but not with this technology. That combination turned the pandemic into something very traumatic and meant a very powerful loss of naivety for the species. So, in a relatively short period of time I have found myself with fatherhood, my parents, the pandemic, age, etc. Fuck, as if not to reflect on the passage of time and fragility, but paradoxically it has generated an album that is not sad or mortuary at all. You haven't mutated into Nick Cave all at once. Exactly. It could have been acoustic and slow, but it's an album with a bad crap and an energy that you shit. Because the awareness of death generates a lot of vitality. Is having such beastly success at such a young age a blessing, because you've already achieved it, or a burden, because it haunts you and you're never going to get back to those heights? There was a time when it did seem like a curse, but everything has fallen into place and I think that the success of now is much more solid and more powerful than that of the Ronaldos. Los Ronaldos is mythologized as it happens with everything from the 80s. People say that in the 80s we filled stadiums and it's a lie. Not even God filled stadiums. Mecano and a little bit of El Último de la Fila, the rest of us were luxury orchestras that went from village party to village party. The kids in the front rows were singing 'Goodbye, Dad' and, behind them, the rest were chatting and drinking drinks. My success now is much more enjoyable. Now I fill big theaters with people who know the songs inside out. And it pays. That's it. People who pay 40 bucks to see me because they have 'The Last Man on Earth' or 'Revolution?' in their house and have heard it a thousand times. It's a much more solid and much more enjoyable success. The thing is, you're right that there was a time of pretty fucked up desert crossing, where people didn't like me. I took it seriously as a solo artist. I was the one from Los Ronaldos and the one from 'Adiós papá' and there was no way to get them out of there. That up the pride and makes the job very uncomfortable. You are committed to a work, to some songs, you want to show them to the public and it doesn't happen because that past is there all the time in front of you. But, come on, that ended a long time ago, from 'The Hour of the Giants' (2009) the sign changed completely. Another mythologized thing about the 80s is freedom. It's fashionable to say there was more than now. True or false? Qualifyable. A kind of moralism and puritanism has been generated, especially from social networks, which supposes a persecution of the message and especially affects fiction. Art, songs, books and films are persecuted in a medieval way. That didn't happen so much in the '80s. A lot of things could be said and interpreted as fiction or humor. Moreover, this wave does not necessarily come from the right as it might have happened then. Let's be honest: today that censorious mood comes more from the left. I'm a left-wing guy and I vote for it every four years, but this moralistic and puritanical vibe that comes out of it touches my balls. There are lyrics by Los Ronaldos that would be a scandal today. I'm thinking, especially, of 'Yes, yes.' Probably, but you have to fight for it and not be intimidated. It's a song, a fiction, nothing more. I read, and found it hard to believe, that Roald Dahl's books were being rewritten, that an association had even asked Alfaguara to withdraw them. That's very heavy. This is a matter of great concern to me and I do not think we can allow it. The way to do that is to be free and to say and write what we want. Do you remember the show 'Dallas' and the bad guy, J.R.? Well, some American jerks caught the actor who played him in a department store and beat him up. I remember that when I read that news as a kid it drove me crazy. Well, this moralism that pursues songs, books, etc., disguising it as refinement, has the same spirit as the Yankees who beat J.R. because he was very bad in the series. Fiction is fiction, it comes from the subconscious, and it must be free. A wild territory without any moral or ethical persecution.

Coque, in the newsroom of EL MUNDO. Angel Navarrete

As a left-wing voter, what do you think of amnesty? It's going to seem like an evasive answer, but I swear it's not. I'm absolutely disconnected from reality. I know what's going on, but it's way over. It's a very delicate issue and I think it would have to be much more in the debate to give a certain opinion. Again, it seems like an excuse, but it's not. My disconnection is absolute: I don't watch TV, I don't read the newspapers... Have you become a hermit? A little, yes. I evade reality. The only thing is that my wife turns on the radio in the morning and we listen to a little bit of SER. Can THE WORLD mention the SER? You can. Well, I listen to SER in the background and today they were interviewing Zapatero about this matter. I've listened to him carefully, because I've always liked him very much, but I don't want to take his version for granted and repeat what I've heard because it's too delicate a matter to give an opinion without all the information and all the versions. In that hermit life, don't you miss sex, drugs and rock and roll? A hermit, but at times a hermit of the political and social reality of the country. We had a great time at the concerts and... Let's leave it there [laughs]. Since I haven't toured this year, I've been calm, but touring gives you a parallel life that is necessary, because it's part of the nourishment of our spirit. Hop in a van with eight maromos and do the goat a bit. That life is what calls you to music as a young man... And now too. In the mid-'90s, especially with that generational classic that is 'Everything is a lie', you seemed destined to succeed as an actor. Why did that die? For an unavoidable reason, which is that I see it as impossible to grow and make two solid careers, such as music and cinema. To become my equivalent in an actor, someone with a lot of respect and a lot of experience who has built in cinema what I have in music, you have to give your life, your blood and your skin. I've done that in music and the other thing was decomposing. I've turned down a lot of roles because I was on tour or because I was locked in the studio and that's a vicious cycle: you turn down roles, you stop being there and the directors stop thinking about you. It's normal. But lately I've done some things: with Resines in 'In Low Season' and now there's a movie called 'Buscando a Coque' about a couple who are big fans of mine and they haunt me for a reason I can't tell. Finally, we need to talk about a serious issue. If I hear 'I can't live without you' at one more wedding, I can do something crazy. I'm not surprised. When Macarena and I got married last year, we set up a stage. I went out to sing and said, "This is the only wedding in Spain where 'I can't live without you' isn't going to be played" [laughs]. Almost every artist in history has that song that is not the one you like the most, but it becomes a hit, people love it and it never goes wrong because it pulls other songs. I don't know, the Stones have 'Satisfaction' and I have this one.

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