The mystery of May, the bassist of Los Planetas who disappeared without a trace

In mid-January, Los Planetas announced that they were going to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their debut album,

Super 8

(1994), with a tour in which they would perform it in its entirety.

The news caused an instant upheaval among his fans, and has also encouraged furious speculation.

Only Juan Rodríguez Cervilla, J. (voice and guitar) and Florent Muñoz (guitar) remain from that first formation.

The drummer, Paco Rodríguez, left before recording the second album and the bassist, May Oliver, before the third.

She did not make music again—although it is said that she received offers from other groups—and she completely disappeared from public life.

To this day, it is known that this graduate in Philology still resides in Granada, that she worked for a long time in a bookstore and, as J. suggested in 2022 to journalist Israel Viana on

ABC,

at that time she was a teacher at an institute.

After the announcement of the tour, she herself shared part of the graphic design of the posters on her personal Instagram account, which has caused a lot of expectation and nervousness among her followers, eager for the founding bassist to return to the stage with the who are still his friends.

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A post shared by May Oliver (@mayolivermayoliver)

There have been quite a few bassists who have passed through Los Planetas in these thirty-odd years, all of them reputable and solvent, but none of them have enjoyed the charisma and appreciation of May among the group's fans.

To what is due?

“She played with her back to the audience, and that attracted a lot of attention, but there was also something very special in that bass sound, I admired her way of playing, very vulnerable, intelligent and precise.

She then disappeared when the group was about to climb to the top and no one heard from her again.

She wanted to go back to being an anonymous woman who had decided not to be part of that, and that caused her to be idealized, to become a legend for fans,” explains Granada writer Fernando Navarro.

He is the screenwriter of

Segundo Premio

, a fiction film inspired by the story of Los Planetas that has been directed by Isaki Lacuesta (it will premiere at the next Malaga Film Festival, in March).

May and the Underground

Los Planetas – initially baptized as Los Subterráneos – were born in Granada in 1989. J. met Florent, they discovered that they had great musical affinities and decided to create a group.

When it came to hiring a bassist, J. proposed May, who was his partner at the time.

She had studied at the conservatory, played piano and cello, but her tastes went in other directions: classical music, French pop of the sixties, Silvio Rodríguez-style author songs... However, she easily connected with the alternative universe of J., the one from Joy Division and The Velvet Underground.

According to the writer Jesús Llorente in his book

De el Los Planetas.

The true story

(Ediciones Rockdelux, 1999), it was J. who convinced her to buy a guitar and a bass through a crediconsumo (a bank loan to make purchases or cover personal expenses).

Neither of them had played any of those instruments until then.

With May, in the center, promotional photo for The Planets from 1996.

At the end of the eighties it was not common to see women playing in rock groups, but the explosion of the early

indie

scene changed things.

Among the international reference bands that were watched from here, guitarists and bassists like Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) and Kim Deal (Pixies) or drummers like Georgia Hubley (Yo La Tengo) shone.

Aventuras de Kirlian —later Le Mans—, had as its mainstays the bassist and lyricist Teresa Iturrioz and the vocalist Jone Gabarain, and on the Noise Pop 92 tour, which is considered the starting signal for Spanish

indie

, three of its four groups They had a female presence: Usura, El Regalo de Silvia and Penélope Trip, whose first drummer, Covadonga de Silva, later formed Nosoträsh, pioneers among our female bands of the nineties, along with Undershakers.

May was another of those first references, and his presence was fundamental in the first EP of Los Planetas,

Medusa

(1993) and the albums

Super 8

and

Pop

(1996), even co-writing the lyrics of some songs, such as

Brigitte, Ciudad azul

and

Waves from outer space.

“I saw Los Planetas several times in their first concerts and May attracted a lot of attention for his effectiveness as a bassist and for his live pose, always ignoring the audience, ignoring the fourth wall,” remembers Antonio Arias, leader of Lagartija Nick and also bassist, who produced the

Medusa EP.

“Her expression on the bass was fluid and from knowledge.

She had a strong personality, sense of humor and was also very eloquent, so I think she enjoyed that first time quite a bit, like everyone else,” he recalls.

Chance led to another of the best bassists in Spanish rock (Fino Oyonarte, from Los Enemigos) being in charge of the production of

Super 8.

His memory takes him down similar and also different paths.

She was a shy girl, warm and respectful, serious, but also with a smiley side to her.

She saw him looking more like a writer than a musician, with his big corduroy jacket.

Oyonarte points out, however, that playing behind her back was not a pose: “she did it out of shyness and to concentrate better.”

In fact, he did it that way in the studio too, turning his back to the control room.

“When she made a mistake in the recording she got very nervous, so there were some moments when I sent the others to have a few beers so I could work alone with her in the room, and try to get her to gain confidence.”

The producer remembers that “May, as a bassist, was an

amateur,

like the other members of the group, but she transmitted his personality as a musician, which for me was the most important thing to capture at that time.

I love the bass of the

Super 8

, they are clear, resounding and effective, and she contributed a lot to the group's sound, in addition to her attitude of doing whatever she wanted.”

This very free spirit is emphasized by J. in the book by Jesús Llorente: “May had very clear ideas.

For her, music is passion, and that was in contradiction with the world of the industry.

May was not willing to change her life.

For her, music is something great and important, doing things when and how you feel like it.

He was an important support between Florent and me, with more radical ideas than mine for almost everything.”

If you try hard you can disappear

May decided to leave Los Planetas on September 22, 1996 after a concert at the BAM festival in Barcelona.

“We were very sad.

There was an incredible deluge and I remember that all the groups were in the hotel watching the rain fall behind the glass door,” the bassist told Llorente in that same 1999 book, in which it is the last interview that she has granted to date. where we have evidence.

“I had been saying for a long time that I was leaving, but I wasn't clear about it because it was like leaving a boyfriend you love very much.

We were completely burned out, the concerts were shit, the group controlled my life, we needed to rest, but we were in the wheel, with the record company and the

management

company very much on top of us.

One fine day, shortly after, and after a concert we gave in a town in Almería, I left it.

There are things that you don't know why you do them.

Suddenly, you see it clearly and you leave something or someone.”

Florent experienced his departure with a certain anger, and added a very strong component of insecurity to the equation, as he recounted in the aforementioned book.

“She herself did not see herself as having the strength to try to go far, she does not see herself as capable, she believes that everything is shit and that nothing can be done to solve it.

It is difficult for me to assimilate that a person who has been able to climb with us has given up on it, but at the same time that is the charm of her,” said the guitarist.

In any case, there were other factors that May confessed to Llorente, such as distancing himself from the band's discourse on drugs ("it seemed very stupid to me, because it was so obvious, it was too noticeable! It's absurd to brag about that") or that That initially natural idea of ​​playing with your back turned “made me a slave to my own attitude, as if it were a trap.”

“We spent too much time partying and drinking a lot… I don't know, the fact is that she wasn't interested in the rock and roll life on the road.

She was more artistic and she wanted to do something really revolutionary in that sense,” J. told Israel Viana on

ABC

.

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A post shared by Los Planetas (@los_planetas)

Shortly after she left the group - although it was not yet officially known - the listeners of the Radio 3 program

Discogrande

voted her best bassist of the year, but she was already out of everything, and did not want to pick up the phone from the person in charge of the program. , Julio Ruiz.

It was a difficult time for Los Planetas, who flirted with dissolution until they resurfaced with

A Week in the Engine of a Bus.

May explained to Llorente that, when she saw the group presenting that third album on television, on

Radio 3 Concerts

, she did not like their sound or their image at all.

“Sometimes he calls me Juan (J.) to agree with him about many of the things he regrets, because deep down we think the same thing.

It's funny to remember that, at the beginning, when we set up the group, we talked about not giving interviews, about not selling ourselves, but in the end we always went one step further.

"I didn't want to give even one more."

consolation prize

“He won't talk to you.

She is not very fond of the press and she never gives interviews.

He doesn't want to know anything about Los Planetas,” J. told Israel Viana when he asked him about her in the

ABC

interview two years ago.

The writer of this, even knowing about it, tried to interview her for

S Moda

in various ways, but the response from the band's

management

was equally forceful: “It's going to be an impossible mission.”

Like the head graphic designer of Los Planetas, Javier Aramburu—with whom May was also closely related—her silence is not due so much to carving out an image of mystery as to her extreme shyness or other vital priorities.

Fernando Navarro, who says he based himself more on the songs of Los Planetas than on the real characters when devising the script for

Segundo Premio

, is also skeptical "with such a home-grown mythomania as that of Spanish

indie

."

For him, “it's a shame that people get an idea of ​​a person they don't know because of that idealization, but, on the other hand, I understand that it is an attractive idea, because we all fantasize about the myth of disappearance".

Regarding the expectation mentioned at the beginning that May return to the stage for this tour, we can venture that it does not seem likely... although you never know.

Los Planetas will be playing 'Super 8', starting in May, at the Galaxy Sound (Málaga), Warm Up (Murcia), Tomavistas (Madrid), Atlantic Fest (Vilagarcía de Arousa) and Vive Latino (Zaragoza) festivals.

There are more dates to be announced.