Fans crouched on cornices and bloodstained letters: how G-Men became the great fan phenomenon of the eighties

One night in October 1987, David Summers, the leader of Hombres G, got up to go to the bathroom in his suite on the 11th floor of the Hotel Libertador in Lima, Peru.

The reception at the airport and in the streets of the city had been impressive, the fans invaded the runway and cheered the group as if it were a parade.

More than three hundred fans were waiting for them camped around the hotel to monitor any movement of the band.

The parents of some of these girls had reported their disappearance after they ran away without warning, absolutely possessed by the influence of the Madrid team.

Summers leaned out the window to see if the girls were still down there.

He was still impressed by those kinds of reactions.

Men G had only been famous for a couple of years.

“More than an impression, what I got was a shock to the balls when I saw a girl on the ledge who must have climbed floor by floor, taking advantage of the building's ledges and was there, at the window,” recalls the singer in

the first authorized biography of the group written by Javier León Herrera and edited by Plaza & Janés.

“I was stunned.

The first thing I did was shake his hand, scared by the height, because he could kill himself.

He was no more than fourteen years old.

She had a pen in her mouth, so I gave her the autograph in my underpants and called security to accompany her ”.

That tour of Latin America was so tremendous that the media ended up baptizing the group as "the Latin Beatles."

If we stick to the expectation they raised among the younger audience, they were not exaggerating too much.

No one would have foreshadowed this fervor just a few years earlier, when they were unsuccessfully trying to get an LP out of a record company.

Today, 33 years after the intrepid climber fan incident, the group's story is back on track due to the recent publication of this biography.

The (sure surprising to some) punk principles

What will surprise those who do not know the history of the Madrid band well is its punk origin.

The genesis of the group includes an event unthinkable today.

It was the summer of 1980 and David Summers - who had gone to Torremolinos to celebrate his grandfather's birthday - saw Julien Temple's film

in a summer cinema

.

The film is a false and confusing documentary in which a free version of the formation of the Sex Pistols is presented from the point of view of their manager, Malcolm McLaren.

In fact, this is the Briton's last attempt to get something more out of the group (which had actually already disbanded in 1978 after Johnny Rotten left).

How that film, which is currently a rarity (both due to its limited availability and because of its very strange format), ended up being shown in a summer cinema on the Costa del Sol, remains a mystery.

The fact is that Summers, who at that time was only 16 years old, left that room transformed.

He had always been attracted to music, but that was different and new.

"When I was a child, I was a fan of music for all the records my father had and especially the great orchestras of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey," he explains in the biography.

"I wanted to be a clarinet player like Benny Goodman and play jazz."

But the clarinet turned out to be too complicated an instrument and not very compatible with the punk style that was beginning to interest him.

In fact, after watching the Pistols movie, David realized a fundamental reality when it comes to having a band: that the least thing is knowing how to play well.

After this kind of revelation, David and Javier Molina (who had known each other since kindergarten) formed Los Residuos, exploring that new punk facet that fascinated them.

Together they played in colleges and universities in Madrid along with other groups such as Los Nikis or Alaska y los Pegamoides;

dressed in pints, and even spitting at the public while performing foul songs with shocking titles.

Goodbye punk, hello pop

Their fascination with punk lasts for a little over a year.

Little by little, they dissolve and form one group after another.

His style begins to turn towards pop but always keeping the humorous touch of his beginnings.

The rest of the components change, also the names of the group, but in 1982 the definitive formation (and the name) emerged: Hombres G. They are made up of David, vocalist and bass;

Javi, drums, guitars and Daniel Mezquita A friend of Javi- and Rafa Gutierrez, who was

known in 1982 as musicians

during a performance of the children of Rocio Durcal in the musical program

TVE.

“They paid five thousand pelas to go for a while, and that for us, who didn't have a penny, was a fortune.

As if they give a kid today a five hundred euro bill ”, the members of the band explain in the book.

The farewell concert (almost before starting)

The band debuts at the legendary Rock-Ola in Madrid and begins to make a name for themselves in the capital.

"Hombres G is genuinely a group from the new wave of Madrid: their first

, from 1983, released by a small independent record company [Lollipop], were played by radio guru Gonzalo Garrido on his

program

,"

music critic Miguel

recalls for

Ángel Bargueño regarding this early period.

“But they tend to get away from that scene: its enormous subsequent success dislodges those who defend that the move was something respectable and cult, when it is not.

Nacha Pop, Los Secretos and, above all, Mom, also dazzled 12-year-old girls, "he says.

Even so, things don't quite work out.

The singles that Bargueño cites, songs that would later become

absolute

like

or

, fly over the tables of record companies to go straight to the trash can.

Time passes, and although they do not stop playing in Madrid, the dream of succeeding in music is fading.

"We got the opportunity to play at the Autopista venue on October 19, 1984. I don't forget the date, I made the concert poster myself," says David.

“We took it almost as a farewell party: if nothing happened, at the end of the year we would sell the instruments and forget about it”.

It was then that Paco Martín, a former Ariola executive who has just founded his own company, Twins, and is looking for fresh meat, comes to the room, having heard very well about them.

He meets a group that has taken the concert as a party, resulting in an absolute disaster, with endless technical problems and a great drunkenness.

“The bass hit the ground with such bad luck that it hit the cable plug and broke,” recalls Summers.

“I didn't have any more cables, just one, so I couldn't play.

Without further ado, I said on the microphone: 'The concert is over', and the peña instead of booing us began to cheer and party.

That was the triumph of chaos in its purest form and Paco Martín found all that chaos incredible and frightening ”.

After that fiasco, the contract and his first album arrived: on March 11, 1985,

was released

.

From then on, things started to get out of hand.

"Suddenly, Hombres G arrive like a blast, practically like a coincidence that ends up being an unprecedented milestone," says Arturo Paniagua, music journalist and radio and television presenter.

“Somehow they broke with that conception of pretty pop, well structured and politically correct, to give way to ideas between the surreal (

), the comical (

) and the most festive (

).

Between these types of stories, a simple way of telling things and some tacos that more than one of us sang at the top of our lungs, I think they represented a whole generation very well, ”he says.

Tocata and the explosion

The definitive bombshell in Spain came in May 1985 with the performance on the TVE

.

“Spain had never seen us, they only knew us something in Madrid.

After seeing four different kids for being normal, which seems a contradiction in itself, the album skyrocketed in sales ”.

“The concept of the fan group was coined by Tequila,” Bargueño explains.

"Until their irruption in 1978, idols had always been soloists."

But Hombres G takes the fan phenomenon to another level.

"Virginia, a teenager from Zaragoza, wrote [David] more than two hundred numbered letters and planned to continue until she fulfilled her dream of conquering him," the book relates.

“Some came to worry him, because they threatened to commit suicide if they did not get to know their idols, and the letters arrived stained with blood as a warning that they were serious.

Others came with the signature of the parents authorizing their daughter to have a relationship with the singer of the G Men ”.

'Sufre Mamón', the movie

The commercial potential of Hombres G is already so great that both the group and its record company know that, no matter how terrible what ends up being projected on the screen, the fans will sweep the rooms, as had happened before with The Beatles or Elvis.

This is how the filming of

begins

, the first feature film (of two) that Hombres G will star and which, in a movement that is quite

, is 50% funded by the Ministry of Culture.

“Above all, it

,” says Arturo Paniagua.

“Because you're not seeing some guys trying to be actors, they were four colleagues who still didn't believe what was happening to them and they had a great time.

I think the spirit of his song

was a great constant in that first stage of the group ”.

"The dialogue in the first movie had to be completely dubbed because it was full of tacos," David acknowledges in the book.

"We studied the dialogues, but since we interpreted ourselves, at the time of filming the script he was going to take the ass and we said whatever came out of us."

The premiere took place at the Rialto Theater in Madrid.

"A doorman used to say that he had only seen something similar in that cinema when Sara Montiel premiered

in 1957", Dani recalls in the book.

“It was amazing, the Gran Vía was cut, we had to go up to the roof to say hello.

There was no way to hear the movie.

That was like a live concert, people got on their seats, lit lighters, began to sing songs and shout ”.

The expected success

From the premiere of

in 1987, the group's fame skyrocketed.

It is the time of the expansion of the band in Latin America, when the anecdote with which this article begins takes place.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the songs of Hombres G are not considered "soft" or "posh", as is the case in Spain.

In America, his lyrics are considered transgressive.

They ravage Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, but perhaps it is in Mexico where their success is greatest and longest.

Over the years, the records and the premiere of another movie, both they and their fans change and the initial illusion fades.

The death of Manolo Summers, David's father, in 1993 also did not help and, without an official announcement to certify it, the G-Men fade away.

The legacy of the crocodile girls

It might seem rash to speak of the legacy of a group that is, in fact, still active.

They got together again in 2002 and since then they have released albums and made many tours.

40 years after David Summers left that summer cinema in Torremolinos, Hombres G is no longer the same group.

“A while ago”, Arturo Paniagua confesses, “Summers told me that he couldn't spend his whole life singing

because, basically, he was getting older and that no longer worked.

Hence, taking into account what the band had always been, their adaptability was very surprising ”.

“Without a doubt, what will be remembered about Hombres G is their ability to be a kind of spokesperson for an entire generation,” continues Arturo.

“Knowing how to capture the way of speaking, thinking and feeling of a lot of people and transforming that into songs.

Being a fan of Hombres G had more to do with a certain sense of belonging, being part of something cool, revolutionary and disruptive.

Like every great music phenomenon "

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