Aterciopelados returns to the roots of 'El Dorado': “It was an album of self-love”

Almost three decades have passed to return to the album of the Gallic woman, of the little rock flower, of the pockets that look for evidence of another affection.

To that Colombian classic that perfected, like no other has done, the fusion of punk with bolero.

It was in 1995 when Aterciopelados, the rock group led by Andrea Echeverri and Héctor Buitrago, offered the Latin American music industry a gold record:

El Dorado

.

There were 16 songs that spoke of the cruelty that the country was experiencing at the time—the social cleansing in “

Pilas, Pilas, Grin los ñeros”

;

the dispossession of lands in “

Siervo sin tierra”.

And he also talked about sexual desire without mincing words and in an authentic Bogotá tone.

“If I'm here, I'm coming/I told you no more and you laughed your ass off,” said his most famous single,

Bolero Falaz

.

Aterciopelados decided, in 2020, to pay a quarter-century tribute to the album that launched them to international fame, but the pandemic postponed that desire.

Last year, then, they did a concert in Bogotá where they recorded the entire album again and invited two other artists who also changed music in the nineties to accompany them: Carlos Vives, with his

Tierra del Olvido,

sang

Bolero Falaz;

Rubén Albarrán, from Café Tacvba with

RE,

sang

La Estaca

and

Mujer Gala

.

“The people who were there that night were of all ages, and that shocked me, because I thought that only forty-somethings were going to go and there were a few super young, super-young, skinny guys,” Echeverri recalls in this interview with El PAÍS.

This new live version of

El Dorado

, an album that was available on cassette in 1995, before CDs were used, will be available on all digital platforms starting this Friday.

Ask

.

Why was the album called

El Dorado

?

Hector Buitrago.

Because of the song on the album that talks about the legend of El Dorado, which tells of that mirage of the search for the city of gold;

Many conquistadors lost their minds looking for that Dorado.

But El Dorado, on this earth, we carry inside, it is our spiritual wealth, that's what the song talks about.

I think it's good to refresh that concept now, especially for young people: what is our gold?

our wealth as Americans?

Andrea Echeverri.

It is an album and a song of self-love:

Look, I have it here

.

I don't have it, everyone has it.

What is current today is that our wealth is not gold, it is not material, it is what we have inside and that we can appreciate.

Q.

Who were you in 1995 and what message did you want to send with the album?

AE

Our first album, prior to

El Dorado

,

Con el Corazón en la Mano

, was a very first album, made with effort, on a low budget.

There are people who love that album but I don't [Laughs].

With

El Dorado

we had more time to compose, they gave us a good budget, a good studio, and that's why we were able to explore all those angles: the ancestral and the identity.

Colombia Conexion

is almost a class on the history and geography of the country, while

Pilas

may be about social cleansing.

It was an album to reflect what we were, that was what we had in our heads.

It wasn't about doing something weird, but something authentic.

There was no music scene at that time—maybe before, but not at the time the album came out.

People did covers, sang in English.

What we wanted was to sound like Bogotanos and dress like Bogotanos—not the mass Bogotano, but to find the swing, the color, the aesthetics of the Bogotano.

It helped that Héctor came from the group La Pestilencia and I came from studying art — I was already in that same process of asking myself who I am and what I like, not what is fashionable.

Q.

Do you remember the reviews of the album when it came out in 1995?

AE

I remember Ruth [Infarinato], host of MTV Latino, who was very cool and was the only way to find out what was happening in Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador or Argentina.

MTV loved us and that's why we became famous throughout Latin America.

I also remember a Grandson, Alejandro or Andrés, who called me “la Laura Pausini

chapineruna

” [laughs].

HB

What I remember is that the success was immediate.

The record company chose the single that we released first,

Bolero Falaz

, and as soon as it came out it was a sensation, number one on all stations.

I remember one day turning on the radio and it was playing on one station, and on another station, and on another station... three or four at a time.

Q.

Why did

Bolero Falaz

resonate so well ?

AE

It was a time in Latin rock to build identities.

We had always looked outward a lot and that was the moment to say, “What did you hear as a child?

Meringue?

Put all that in and make your proposal.”

It was a contemporary, rock thing, but full of fusions of what one heard in the store or on the bus.

People were ready to hear something that wasn't in English, rhythms that reminded them of their mother.

Because the bolero reminds me of my mother, she sang boleros all her life.

That's why the label signed us, because the order at that time was “firm local product.”

Caifanes and Los Fabulosos Cadillacs were on fire and the record labels wanted an idyllic, local, divine moment.

We were there prepared.

HB

That song is a classic because it has everything: the name is a hook, it tells a fun story of infidelities, with a lot of humor, with pop, with bolero and Bogota words.

The “

look here I'm coming

” and we end with the “

laughing shit

”.

At the time that was a scandal, they even censored it on some stations.

In some places they had that part cut out, and I remember that in some television programs they told us that we had to sing something else, that we should not say “cagada” but something else.

Q.

In the new tribute to

El Dorado

they invited Rubén Albarrán, from Café Tacvba, who a few years ago said that he would never sing another classic of the time because it was a violent song against women:

Ingrata

from the album

RE

.

Has something similar happened to you with any

El Dorado

song ?

Aterciopelados, celebrates the anniversary of their emblematic album El Dorado.

ANDRES GALEANO

AE

Well, I did a version of that song,

Ingrato

, when Café Tacvba turned 30 years old.

But yes,

La Estaca

, [song in

El Dorado

], a song that Rubén sang with us, we changed it.

Before he said "goodbye, may you do well, may a car pick you up, may a train pick you up, I love you dead."

That's softer than

Ingrata,

but the same message.

We changed it to “don't let a car catch you, don't let lightning strike you, alive but far away, very very far away, I love you.”

HB

Yes, times change.

We did what we said with black humor, but at this moment it is not politically correct, and that is why we decided to make a change.

Although sometimes the politically correct thing gets very radical.

Q.

Some songs from

El Dorado

were less known than

Bolero Falaz,

but perhaps today they still resonate with Colombian reality.

I think, for example, of

Servant without Land

AE

Ugh, that one, we screamed at that one in a couple of rehearsals.

Later, looking at the videos of the concert, we see that there are a few people screaming too.

It's a beautiful, moving song, and it's very hard when you wrote about something like that 28 or 29 years ago and it's still true.

[He speaks about the dispossession of land from a peasant: “Holy shit, what injustice, servant hand, in the end, he was left without his land.”]

That song has something peasant that is not heard as much anymore because Colombia is so tropical: a lot of vallenato, very reggaeton.

HB

Wow, that song, finding it on that album, with that Andean cadence and rhythm, was very special.

The lyrics are based on the book by Eduardo Caballero Calderón that has the same title

.

Q.

The violence narrated in El Dorado, from 1995, is still present in another form

AE

Yes, we would like to say that everything has changed, but no, things are still hairy.

Q.

Like

Pilas

, who talks about social cleansing

AE

Y

Pilas

is very good.

I once wrote that playing El Dorado, 28 years later, is about feeling young, beautiful and punk again during the two minutes that

Pilas

lasts .

Q.

How do you see your legacy 28 years after El Dorado?

AE

I think we, the nineties, started it all.

In other words, without us there would be no reggaeton in Colombia.

When we started there were no musical instruments: there were only two stores, and when you went, you fogged up the glass looking at a little guitar there.

There were no engineers, managers, nothing.

Now there is a movement, an infrastructure that supports many types of music, including reggaeton.

We were the first Colombian group that had been nominated for an Anglo Grammy, because Latin Grammys did not exist at that time.

When we left the country they made jokes about what we had in our suitcase, about whether we were drug traffickers.

HB

Now there are musicians who say that “I sang

La Estaca

at school.”

AE

That was J Balvin.

He was a schoolmate of Alejo Jiménez, from Sony, and Alejo told us that he and J Balvin played

La Estaca

at the school's flag raising.

Imagine [laughs].

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