Music, stones and endless nights: the bar where the Gijón sound was born resists everything

When they opened the bar, in 1992, an old woman who looked like a witch appeared and prophesied a very dark future for them, very dark, because very bad things had happened there, very bad (they never knew which ones). To make matters worse, the first song that was played, as an opening, was

, by the Rolling Stones, where Lucifer himself very kindly introduces himself: “Nice to meet you”, Mick Jagger sang.

But the thing was not so bad, despite the ominous prophecies: almost 30 years later, the La Plaza bar, in the heart of alleys in the fishing neighborhood of Cimadevilla, in Gijón, with its capacity of just 30 people, is still alive. Its history, as the epicenter of the Xixón Sound in the nineties, among many other nocturnal and musical adventures, is recounted in the recent book

, by Luis Argeo and published by Milvecesmil. "It is a legendary bar that can also represent other music bars that meant a lot to a generation that, due to age, now sees that life takes them out of the gambling dens," explains the author.

Carmen González del Valle, co-founder of La Plaza and who died in 2015, with Nacho Álvarez, the other founder and today the sole owner, a few weeks after opening the bar, in the first months of 1993. Transfer of Luis Argeo

A curiosity of the text is that the narrator is the bar itself, La Plaza, those walls that speak and wait for Nacho, its owner, to come and open its doors and start a new day.

Nacho is Nacho Álvarez, who was a bassist for the band Manta Ray and now plays as a “craftsman and bastard” singer-songwriter accompanied by the Bendición Quartet.

When he set up the bar, he came from working on the scaffolding and was trying to study Psychology at a distance.

The premises had previously been occupied by a pizzeria and later by a gay bar.

Cimadevilla was still a dark and dangerous place of drugs and prostitution.

"The Plaza, which had such generational origins, continues to maintain its style, its way of being, its music and its parishioners," the owner recalls today. In fact, the first customer to come in, Penelope Trip member David Guardado, still stopped by the other day. According to Álvarez, the generation of forties and fifties that formed the Xixón Sound is now mixed with the new kids that frequent the place. "It's not a nostalgia bar: young people continue to use it in the same way that we did in our time," he says. Not an easy thing at a time when, based on economic crises, urban music, social networks, dating applications, online video games and Spotify, it seems that the culture and forms of sociability typical of music bars are declining among the kids .

The band Penélope Trip in front of the facade of the La Plaza bar. Luis Mayo

The importance of La Plaza in the Xixón Sound was fundamental.

"The main appeal of the '90s music movement in general is that it was a bar phenomenon," recalls Francisco Nixon, who was the

for Australian Blonde.

"Bars where you can listen to music that, with few exceptions, was not played on the radio or on TV, and where groups and fans lived together and learned from each other."

They were places to play, share records, tastes and information, where to perfect the craft, and also where to dream of success.

“If today music happens on social networks, in the nineties it happened in bars.

And in fact, he died as soon as he left the bars and went to the festivals,” says Nixon.

Now the music has gotten into the

.

Cut your hair, change your life

Bands like Manta Ray, Australian Blonde, Nosoträsh, Penelope Trip, Undershakers or Doctor Explosión turned the city of Gijón into one of the most powerful epicenters of the independent scene of the 1990s, and the press dedicated itself to propping up, and even inflating, that cultural scene that emerged from the neighborhood of Cimadevilla. “When Xixón Sound used to come out in

but we didn't get more than 600 people into a concert in Madrid”, says Xabel Vegas, Manta Ray's drummer, in the documentary

, by Alejandro Nafría and the producer Mr. Umbrella. The official T-shirt of the movement, financed by the gangs themselves, showed the legend: “Cut your hair, change your life”.

Interior of the small La Plaza bar during a carnival party in the early 1990s. Cession of Luis Argeo

"We were some friends who invented our entertainment," says Tito Pintado, who was the singer of Penelope Trip, who also remembers that in the city itself they didn't pay much attention to them until they noticed from the outside and... then they didn't pay them too much either. .

“From the outside it did look like something bigger, in fact, people from Madrid and other places came to La Plaza as a pilgrimage, as if it were the indie Lourdes”.

Nacho Vegas, who was a member of Manta Ray, put drinks there for a while, although he was not as well known then as he is now.

In recent years, a kind of revisionist current, with books to that effect by Nando Cruz or Víctor Lenore, have come to criticize the

scene of the nineties as hedonistic, individualistic, harmless, lacking in social conscience and, above all, obsessed with Anglo-Saxon music and faulty English singing.

So no one noticed such things.

Facade of the La Plaza bar, considered the epicenter of the Xixon Sound of the 1990s. Cession of Luis Argeo

Gijón thus built an image like Seattle in the north of Spain, combining its musical movement with other cultural milestones such as the Black Week, the Euroyeyé festival or the Gijón International Film Festival that in those years, led by José Luis Cienfuegos, turned to independent cinema. The bar also became the most frequented bar by the people who organized and attended the movie buff event. According to Argeo in the book, La Plaza was also the object of the anger of those who reacted against the air of modernity and growing gafapastismo: "Death to the prescription glasses", read a small graffiti that appeared next to the door of the bar . They left it there, because it was funny. What was not so funny were the stones that were sometimes received at the cry of "death to the

."

“It was a very intense time,” says Alicia Alvarez, then a member of Undershakers, now with Pauline on the Beach. "Groups, fanzines, concerts were set up, we filled everything with posters." Álvarez has frequented La Plaza since he was 14 years old (it was there that he met his partner, curiously David Guardado, the first client), on endless nights in which imaginary bands formed at night that had already dissolved the next morning, because the imagination was free. The Xixón Sound, like so many other cultural labels, generated its controversies. “At that time, almost everyone renounced the label, because of that thing of the youth of wanting to differentiate themselves by going their own way,” reflects Argeo.

More than two decades later it seems that the term is accepted with better spirit.

About the Xixón Sound, like the Madrid scene, it has also been said that it was a product of the imagination.

"I don't think so," argues Alicia Álvarez.

"There was an important scene, what there was was no stylistic unity, because each one belonged to his father and his mother."

As Argeo observes, the movement as such, rather than being inspired by other musical currents, was inspired by others that were taking place in the city: the Kras community radio station, rebelliousness or neighborhood movements.

Portrait of Luis Argeo, author of the book 'La Plaza.

Confessions of a music bar'.

The La Plaza bar continues, pandemic through, with its usual hustle and bustle and Argeo says that it has gone down in history: tour guides have already been seen who, showing the now somewhat gentrified neighborhood of sailors, stop in front of the bar to gloss their exploits and heroic times. "I perceive a continuity: many of us who were at the beginning continue to go, still involved in musical projects or cultural management," Alicia Álvarez continues. What happened to the Xixón Sound? Some of the people who participated are still in the business, in other projects, such as Nacho Vegas, Elle Belga, Pauline en la Playa, Francisco Nixon, Petit Pop or Nacho Álvarez himself. What does Xixón Sound look like in the distance? “Thanks to that, being young in Gijón in the 1990s was more fun,” Nixon concludes. And then adds:"I leave critical judgment to others."

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