Buenas Noches Rose: the story of the best Spanish group of the nineties that never was

This story could be titled: how can life be so complicated when you have everything to succeed.

There was a period, in the mid-nineties, when music journalists and fans looking for new talent were excited about the Goodnight Rose phenomenon.

It felt like something big was happening in front of the eyes and ears of those who were there, in small Madrid venues like Siroco.

Enrique Bunbury, at that time finishing Héroes del Silencio and starting a solo career, even commented to the group: “For a season everyone talked to me about you”.

So it was.

And suddenly, Goodnight Rose disappeared.

The singer and magnetic image of the band, Jordi Piñol

was erased.

And he is finished.

This is the chronicle of some teenagers from a public high school in Madrid who reach their dream of becoming rock stars, along the way they discover the ugly side of the entertainment industry and end up disappearing in a gigantic silence.

A documentary,

reconstructs his troubled career.

Alfredo Fernández

guitarist and main composer of Buenas Noches Rose with Rubén Pozo (later in Pereza, now solo), has not spoken to the vocalist, Jordi Skywalker, since that dark day for the band in June 1998. “ He left for tobacco and did not return.

So clear.

We have exchanged a couple of

during these last years, but we have a pending conversation.

What he did was tragic, ”says Fernández (Madrid, 48 years old) by phone from an Asturian village of 30 inhabitants where he lives and takes care of his eighty-year-old mother.

They live alone.

“40% of what we eat is from our garden.

I have to walk five kilometers to buy tobacco.

Yes, I am quite isolated, but it is a pleasure to live here”, says the musician, now also a writer, and about to release an album.

We locate the singer, Jordi Skywalker, in a coastal town in Corsica (France).

He has been living there for nine years with his wife, Isa, and the couple's three children: 24, 20 and 14 years old.

They own a tattoo parlor.

"My two older children are tattooing

," he says over the phone.

This is how things have derived for the members of this very peculiar band.

The formation of Goodnight Rose.

From left to right: Alfredo Fernández (guitar), Juan Pablo Otero (bass), Jordi Skywalker (vocals), Rubén Pozo (guitar) and Rober Aracil (drums).

Jordi Skywalker (Madrid, 47 years old) has many things to tell: why did he leave without showing his face? Where has he been for the last 25 years? Does he regret that decision that ended the great hope of Spanish rock? ?

But first it is convenient to describe the context.

The nineties in a public institute in Alameda de Osuna, a peripheral area of ​​Madrid adjacent to Barajas airport.

“It was a dormitory neighborhood where we were quite isolated: the subway had not yet arrived.

We did not leave that environment.

We gave a certain identity to the fact of making a bottle, since there was always a guitar around there, ”says Pozo (Barcelona, ​​47 years old).

In a population of 15,000 people there were about 30 rock bands.

In this environment, Buenas Noches Rose emerged, all high school students.

They formed a band with strengths that you couldn't find in others.

A solid musical base, with two guitarists (Alfredo and Rubén) who complemented each other, and an overwhelming singer, who could remind Iggy Pop or Jim Morrison, “but who was even crazier”, says Alfredo positively.

Jordi was scary on stage.

Sexy, wild, unruly, unpredictable, charismatic.

At concerts he seemed like a hypnotic pastor lecturing his parishioners.

The image of the group was very powerful.

Nothing was a formality for them: every time they stepped on a stage the place burned.

Jordi: “I didn't write, that was the work of Alfredo and Rubén.

What he did was interpret.

I possessed a great energy and I let it flow.

A kind of Mr. Hyde appeared on stage.

He put me in a trance.

When the concert finished I felt like a purified saint”.

They practiced a frowning guitar rock, with some of the

of the time, the seventies rock of Led Zeppelin, of the Rolling Stones stage Mick Taylor.

youth :

death, suicide, drugs, prostitution... Their first album

was released in 1995. They had already beaten the club circuit in Madrid and their fame began to grow.

In

tells Leiva, the most popular rock musician to come out of Alameda de Osuna: “Good Night Rose meant illusion and magic.

Those guys were doing something that we wanted to do.

Maybe if they didn't get to be in the neighborhood we wouldn't have had that place to look.

You saw them on the posters and the message was: you can.

They encouraged the rest of us to try."

Leiva was just a prototype of a musician at that time.

The ugly side of the industry

For the second album they signed with a multinational, BMG-Ariola, and began to see the ugly side of professionalization.

They were 19-year-old neighborhood friends in a world they didn't know how it worked.

Alfredo: “There was a great rush to be famous.

Our producers saw that we were the goose that lays the golden eggs and they squeezed it a lot.

We don't identify that."

They were proposed to get on a bus and tour Spain some days offering up to three concerts.

“We play a lot and in a precarious way.

That burned us, "says Rubén.

Jordi Skywalker (right, bearded), with his partner and their children touring France in a donkey-drawn wagon in the early 2000s.

Other situations arose.

The market wasn't looking forward to it since they didn't fit in with the massive rock of Barricada or Los Suaves, nor on commercial radio.

The album they gave to BMG,

(1997), was dark and depressing;

imprint

of some themes of the first.

This complicated the work of diffusion in commercial channels.

They posed uncomfortably for some youth magazine, but artistically they did not allow themselves to be tamed.

“It was the time when Nirvana and Pearl Jam played in Los 40 Principales.

The idea was that we composed what we wanted because those who succeeded did so.

No concessions had to be made: the market demanded authentic people.

But, of course, this was not the United States but Spain, whose music industry has always been a bit in the dark”, summarizes Alfredo.

They also assume that drugs were not good at managing setbacks.

"We were very young and we didn't have someone with a head nearby who knew what the subject was about," Alfredo points out as one of the keys.

The money didn't come either.

They managed to become independent from their families, but they were only allowed to share a flat.

There was a feeling that no one was behind the wheel.

Alfredo: “Each one began to go their own way.

We were monkeys playing with a knife.

We lacked maturity."

The day before a concert in the Canary Islands at a festival with The Prodigy as headliner, the singer does not show up.

Curiously, they were going to pay them the highest cache of his career.

The

locates the vocalist at a friend's house and relays his surprising decision to the band: he leaves the group.

Jordi explains today: “I lived a somewhat schizophrenic reality.

I was not mentally well.

He also took a lot of psychedelic drugs.

I lived it all very intensely.

I had a series of mental

telling me: 'Your destiny is to die young and leave a nice corpse.'

So I thought, 'Fuck, I don't want that.

And he adds: "I met a girl who helped me remake myself as a person."

Her name is Isa and they are still together today with three children.

Jordi Skywalker today, in the documentary 'Who the hell are Good Night Rose?'.

At this point in the Goodnight Rose story, the screen splits in two.

On the one hand, Jordi;

on the other, the other four Good Night Rose.

Jordi: “I knew that life was going to destroy me.

At that time I stopped using substances.

I needed lucidity to rebuild myself, because I was totally empty.

Looking back, maybe I should have said to my colleagues: 'Look, I'm terrible.

Give me a few months and we can return to it anyway'.

But, of course, I think of this now with 47, not with 21″.

He and his partner secluded themselves in Cabo de Gata, then in the Alpujarras... Jordi worked in restaurants, vineyards, on a farm, became a donkey therapist... He toured France with his family for three years, all of them in a wagon pulled by donkeys

His companions, meanwhile, continued without him.

He began to sing Alfredo.

In one of the concerts and before the insistence of the public shouting “Jordi, Jordi, Jordi”, the guitarist approached the microphone and said: “The singer has retired from rock and roll.

And the dead have to be buried and continue”.

Today, Alfredo acknowledges that they surely had to leave him with Jordi's fright: “But we continued because what we wanted was to commit suicide.

It was a kamikaze attitude."

“We thought: 'Let's continue a little while longer to see what happens.

In addition, there were commitments…”, adds Rubén.

Around him, the void: the company gave them the letter of freedom and the

ignored it.

They published an album thanks to crowdfunding,

(1999), but the discouragement was deep and they decided not to continue.

Alfredo: “For many years I felt the rage of how a kid closes the door of something big on his face.

But over time I think that maybe he didn't play”.

Shortly after, Alfredo formed Le Punk and Rubén founded Pereza together with Leiva.

Daniel Molina, one of the promoters of

a finished documentary that is in the process of managing song rights, speaks: “They have one of the best debut albums by a national band, but just when they were take off, Jordi's departure came and everything went to waste ".

Everyone relives that time with “affection” and good memories.

"Lots of laughter in a van with friends being happy: playing rock and touring Spain several times giving concerts," summarizes Rubén.

Jordi: “The story of the Roses was something very beautiful and strong at the beginning, and then came the downfall.

It leaves you there like: 'Fuck, what a shame'.

In 2020 the possibility arose of offering a concert at the WiZink Center in Madrid.

The pact was between the five classic members: Jordi Skywalker on vocals, Alfredo Fernández and Rubén Pozo on guitars, Juan Pablo Otero on bass and Rober Aracil on drums.

The day before signing the contract there was another fright.

This time it was not Jordi, but Rubén.

“Yes, I sing the

Maybe I was wrong to back down.

I thought it was better to continue with my own thing [he has released his fourth solo album,

and not open the page of other groups I've been in.

The Good Night Rose thing was super good and ended as it did.

Right now I don't see the point of meeting.

But time will tell, we still do

someday".

An open ending for the best Spanish rock band of the nineties that never was.

May 2022 in the Galileo Galilei room in Madrid.

Private pass for fans of the documentary 'Who the hell are Good Night Rose?'.

At the end, several musicians go on stage and everything ends as seen in the image.