Revenge of the nerds or when the Housemartins made it fashionable to be smart

If you missed it, it was because of heavy metal, but if you were a good guy in the '80s, you listened to

, who also started their career in '83, the same year that we started the race for democracy.

Times when you went out into the street and people, as Palito Ortega sang, seemed nicer...

"Take Jesus, take Marx, take hope"

, said the

.

Punctual 40 years ago it became fashionable to be intelligent.

And this happened thanks to a band from the historic county of Yorkshire, in England.

Never before in music has there been a better time for the ugly, the weird and the excluded.

Never before was being different been so cool.

Since then, an aesthetic of cinema, music, fantastic literature and science fiction has grown, embracing the

concept until transforming it into a revered tradition.

Norman Cook, originally called Quentin Cook, was asked to change his name to join the Housemartins, in 1985.

Never before in music has there been a better time for the ugly, the weird and the excluded.

Never before was being different been so cool.

Since then, an aesthetic of cinema, music, fantastic literature and science fiction has grown, embracing the

concept until transforming it into a revered tradition.

There was still a field missing for Harry Potter and more for Tinelli's intellectual glasses.

When the short-lived Housemartins released their first two studio albums (

and

) they sold so much they charted in the UK below only

little claim

performance

.

From the elegant beginning that

 Their first LP sold more than half a million copies in a few days, and yet not even Bobby Flores can explain why the Housemartins are one of the least claimed bands of the '80s.

Something like five years lasted.

They ceased to exist in 1988 and since then those of the Aspen 102.3

they love them unconditionally.

Here are these lines of tribute to the injustice and oblivion suffered by a band that could make you dance and cry in the same song.

Some British journalism considers that his passage through music "would deserve to be as indelible as that of Joy Division, Smiths, Nirvana or

".

Norman Cook, who was more successful as a solo artist, renaming himself Fatboy Slim.

There's a vintage T-shirt:

Their ballads are beautiful, with

, 

or

in the lead, all songs that reached #1 in England, where the Martins showed unsuspected convictions for being pop: ironic denunciations of the Conservative government, excessive growth of the big cities, distortion of nature, etc.

Paul Heaton

, songwriter and singer, formed the band with Stan Cullimore (guitarist), Ted Key (bassist) and Chris Lang (drummer).

The origin was the port and working-class city of Hull, east of Manchester.

Then

would arrive to take over the bass and there were also other changes in the line-up.

Elusive, rookies and with the face of seminarians, they were the anti-rock in a decade where you had to put on weird hair along the way.

in

.

That was what the Housemartins were like, clad in appropriate poop-colored cardigans.

Out of those unalienated Englishmen came, fittingly, an even blacker sheep:

 would soon be known as

.

The DJ did what he had to do and disappeared from the face of popularity in the best Housemartins style.

group

, who released 

and were soon eclipsed at the hands of Chris Martin and his megalomaniac solo project known as Coldplay.

Paul Heaton

, after the separation, put together

, which is going through its 20-year career and puts this Paul, according to the drunken or specialized critics, at the level of another Paul, by Paul McCartney.

On a YouTube search Housemartins will likely lead you randomly to the Smiths.

Or vice versa.

It's just that the Housemartins are Smiths for the poor, as a record label friend once said.

Or it's the Smiths, but happy.

Or the Smiths, but with less rain (and without as much ego).

Andrés Calamaro would define Ned Flanders' favorite band well: the Housemartins were Marxist Christians who did not like to be treated as prophets.

Rebels in their own way, the group won the award for "best new band" at the Brit Awards and the Martins, who turned their backs on the music industry, missed the ceremony, sending doubles to collect the award.

If the punks made safety pins and razor blades fashionable, Housemartins imposed intelligence.

We wanted to have glasses because of the Housemartins, but their fame was so short-lived that when we really needed them, contact lenses were already used.

When they broke up, on the eve of the latest compilation album

(Go Discs!, 1988), that one with a horrible, sky-blue cover, the boys rehearsed a statement with the citrus pen of Heaton, the Morrissey of the Martins:

POS

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