20 years of the Xixon Sound

Gijon  © Arle Corte

Gijon (Xixon in the local Asturian language - pronounced "SheeSHON") is a medium sized city (pop. 277,733) perched on the northern coast of Spain between the Bay of Biscay and the Picos de Europa mountains. It’s a port surrounded by declining heavy industry, empty shipyards and closed mines. The city has been suffocating in a kind of post industrial malaise for the last 30 years or so which has only been partially alleviated by tourism (Gijon is a great place to spend your summer provided you don't mind a few grey days and occasional rain - There's a lot going on culturally but don't expect Ibiza).

As a fading industrial town it shares certain characteristics with Seattle or Liverpool and 20 years ago it gave birth to a musical scene which the press quickly dubbed the “Xixon Sound”. It may not have had the international impact of Merseybeat or Grunge but it did have an enormous influence on Spain’s national rock scene. It was also notable for the high quality of music of many of bands that emerged from it.

Like Merseybeat or the Seattle scene, what most of these bands had in common was geography rather than “sound” however they did represent a kind of freshness that was comparable to the contemporaneously emerging Britpop and a rejection of the 80s values of flash and fame at all cost. There was an indie ethos which, for the most part, the bands stayed true to. Musically, they seemed to take their cues from the Velvet Underground, the Pixies and Sonic Youth however with time those influences widened to include Britpop and 1960s rock and folk. The bands also shared a collaborator and producer in Paco ‘Loco’ Martínez and used his studios near Gijon to record.

By the early 1980s Spain had thrown off 40 years of a bigoted and blinkered petty bourgeois dictatorship and had embraced democracy and the future. Everything that for decades the dwarf-like dictator Franco and his henchmen had kept the lid on was now emerging into a new cultural spring. Suddenly ideas could flourish and Spain seemed to be a country that was dominating the arts, music, fashion, and culture. It even had the Olympics in 1992. Spain had hit fast forward and was enjoying the ride.

The Xixon sound also represented a kind of generational change. This generation, which came of age in the 1990s and which most of these bands represented, was the first to be raised post Franco. They had no personal memory of life under Franco and seemed to regard themselves as part of the great world cultural flow rather than something separate. Spain was no longer, as Franco had claimed, “different”.

The Xixon bands therefore seemed to reflect a fresh, new outlook, a more independent spirit and a rejection of what had previously been taken for granted. Many of the bands unashamedly sang in English (or their version of it) although it must be said that as the bands started to find and explore their own creative voices many realized that their native language gave them greater potential for self expression and reverted to Spanish. Also, for the first time in Spanish rock, bands like Nosotrash, The Undershakers and Pauline en la Playa were all female.

Manta Ray

For me the two talents that really stand out are Manta Ray; one of the best bands to ever come out of Spain and whose high powered post-rock music deserved to be better known internationally (and who have a separate post here) and Francisco Nixon (whose bands include Australian Blonde and La Costa Brava) who has a gift for writing really catchy 60s inspired pop and rock. Other bands like Dr Explosion, Nosotrash, Pauline en la Playa and Nacho Vegas have also maintained a high quality of output over careers now spanning 20 years or more.

Francisco Nixon

Why all this happened in a moderately sized port on the northern coast of Spain is anyone’s guess. You could write a book about it. Someone should because as far as I know there are no Spanish histories of this scene as yet which is a little strange considering its cultural importance.

The choices below reflect my own taste rather than being a representative roundup. The best bands, in my opinion, were the bands which demonstrated a folk / psych / pop direction and that’s why most of the songs chosen below tend towards those styles.


So here are 15 tracks from 20 years of the Xixon Sound. Maybe it's the sun(!). Maybe it's the sea. Maybe it's the surfers on San Lorenzo beach. But there's a lot of wonderful high quality pop and rock here...





Australian Blonde - Cool Dive
Named after an ad seen in a London telephone box offering the services of an Australian blonde, they were the band that achieved the most success in the mid 90s. Formed by Fran Fernández (AKA Francisco Nixon), the band went on to have a national megahit with Chup Chup which was featured in the film Historias de Kronen and also in a Pepsi ad. They later recorded an album in New York with Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate.
The band were produced by Paco 'Loco' Martinez who would also produce many of the other Gijon bands and whose influence on the scene was substantial.

Australian Blonde - Control is perhaps my favourite by the band and displays Francisco Nixon's knack of creating Beatlesesque perfect pop.

Doctor Explosion - La Chatunga
The jokers in the pack and a band best seen live. Mid 60s R'n'B, punk, garage, surf and Link Wray riffs all mixed up with a lot of tongue in cheek humour - and the band work up a storm. allmusic link here

Doctor Explosion - Chesterfield Childish Club - A cover-version of the garage tune "Night of the Phantom" by Larry & the Blue Notes in Spanish. From the band's LP "¡¡ Chupa Aquí !!Doctor Explosion!!" (2008)
Better than the original!

And they also do a cool psych version of Joy Division's Blue Monday here.





Penelope Trip - Zoom
Here at their most pop and not necessarily representative of the rest of the band's work which is much more noise oriented and feedback-drenched. More about the band here

Nosoträsh - Completamente Sola
Wonderful. Perfect pop. Formed in the mid 90s and according to legend quite spontaneously one night when the girls were out in one of Gijon's (many) bars and suddenly decided to get a band together. They have developed their own quirky style and are still gigging. More on the Wikipedia here

Nosoträsh - Gato Al Sol.
Gorgeous.

Nosoträsh - Mis muñecas. Written by Alicia Álvarez of Pauline en la Playa (see below). Classic hook.

La Costa Brava - Natalia Verbeke
Francisco Nixon (of Australian Blonde) again with his other band La Costa Brava. Although the lyrics do not reference her specifically, the song is named after the Spanish actress who played the girlfriend in the Spanish version of British TV's Doc Martin. Just thought you'd want to know.

La Costa Brava - Adoro a las pijas de mi ciudad. Tongue in cheek but affectionate song about his love for a certain type of local girl. Pija is a difficult word to translate but online it turns up as posh / preppy / stuck up / swanky / elitist / exclusive / swank / toff... Whatever. He adores them.

Francisco Nixon - Nadia 
Francisco Javier Fernández Martínez on his own with yet another piece of classic pop. This time the muse is Nadia Comăneci.
More on MySpace here

Pauline En La Playa - El mundo se va a acabar (2013)
Formed by sisters Mar and Alicia Álvarez in 1997 when they started writing songs that didn't fit in style-wise with their previous more rock oriented band the Undershakers. This is the title track from their latest album. Band website here http://www.paulineenlaplaya.com/

Pauline En La Playa - Un Muelle
Unplugged and live in Paradiso - one of the best independent bookshops in Northern Spain. They have a great vinyl LP section too. Worth a visit if you're passing through!

Nacho Vegas - Perplejidad
Currently one of Spain's most successful solo artists. As I said here about Nacho Vegas, "A great song-writer and story teller. His songs probably best portray contemporary Spain. According to last.fm (and a few other places) he "blends the polyhedric language of rock and the most stark lyricism into an intense whole. His lyrics are painful and celebratory, pathetic and grand, brutally lucid and of an intimate beauty; a desperate philosophy of survival shines with a wicked sense of humour and a longing for the divine".
You have to listen now, don't you?

Manta Ray - Cartografies (I.Mi, II. Última, III. Esperanza)
A band so good I've already posted about them here. One of the best bands to come out of Spain in the last 20 years or so.
This is a longish track which seems to merge the 90s minimalism of Massive Attack with the 60s psychedelia of Pink Floyd and the Beatles. The last 5 minutes are really rather glorious. Crank it up.

If you liked this, check out these...

The Return of the Manta Ray

 

Horizonte Eléctrico - 10 Great contemporary Spanish bands that should be better known outside Spain

 

Horizonte Eléctrico - 10 Flamenco Rock Classics

 

Horizonte Electrico - Spanish Rock on Scoop.it

 

 

Playa Poniente, Gijon © David Mainwood

Freak Out! In praise of Improv

© David Mainwood

Rock Improvisation?

OK. Maybe it could sound like an awful racket but what's wrong with that? It's rock music. It's supposed to be rowdy. Back before rock became predictable corporate big business it was quite often the done thing for bands to alienate the more conservative sections of their mainstream audience by dropping all pretense of form or melody and heading off into full ahead warp drive jamming mode - occasionally for quite long periods of time.

Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Soft Machine, Tangerine Dream, even The Pretty Things (see below)... All would embrace improv in some way during live performances. After all they were a generation schooled on blues and jazz experimentation and progression.

So bands might take off on an extended 12 bar riff and the guitarist might show off a bit. However, if you were really lucky, like on say Hendrix's Voodoo Chile (long version) on Electric Ladyland or the Grateful Dead's Dark Star, the musicians would listen to and communicate with each other in order to develop a theme or an idea and the results would be truly spectacular. Of course they weren't just making it all up as they went along. There was structure but space was left for the musicians to explore the variations that could be thrown up by the riffs and changes within the song. There was a rough map. But you don't always have to take the same route to get to where you're going do you?

In a lot of cases the results may not have been so successful but whatever happened to that spirit of adventure? By the 1980s a kind of musical post-punk puritanism held sway over the UK indie scene and with it came the belief that guitar solos were the work of the devil and that any kind of jamming was mere ego wanking. The great John Peel may even been partly responsable for this as his radio show had a massive influence on the 80s indie scene in the UK and by then Peel was not a great fan of this somewhat lengthier form of musical adventure.

This, I think, was a form of musical puritanism and it held sway over the UK indie movement for too long. As a result UK rock became predictable, safe and rather backward looking. Puritan indeed. If the UK wasn't making guitarists of the stature of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Peter Green anymore, that's why.

In the 90s the US had a jam band scene of whom Phish were probably the most successful but in comparison with some of the bands featured below they seemed a little anodyne to me.

So, anyway, here are a few of my favourite examples of bands who abandoned all pretence of musical health and safety, took a risk and jumped over the edge into the improv ether and just occasionally found true inspiration...





The Pretty Things - Why?
Let's start off on reasonably safe ground with the Pretty Things doing a version of the Byrds' Why in Germany in 1969. Surprisingly for a band best known for its SF Sorrow rock opera the Pretty Things also liked a bit of a jam. R'n'B colleagues the Yardbirds were probably the band that most popularized the idea of bashing a few chords and letting the lead guitarist wail over screeching feedback when they let Jeff Beck loose on their I'm A Man single. The Who did something similar on Anyway Anyhow Anywhere where the guitar solo section is basically freeform noise and feedback. And they got that into the top 10! 
Why has a certain droning element which lends itself to extended freak-outs and here the Pretties take it all the way.

The Butterfield Blues Band Live at the Whisky A Go-Go, Hollywood California,1966
A breathtaking version of East / West. One of the first and greatest rock improvised pieces of the 1960s. According to writer Joel Selvin they had a massive influence on the direction San Francisco bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane would take after playing there in late 1965.

The Soft Machine live on Dutch(?) TV in 1967 with Kevin Ayers. One of the geat jazz influenced improv bands of the late 60s and probably the best UK exponents of the art. They quite often just improvised their way through whole sets.

Cream - NSU at the Grande Ballroom, Detroit, October 15th 1967.
Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker were musicians raised on jazz. Cream had ruled the roost in the UK in 1966 but by now were being upstaged by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Eric Clapton had to raise his game to respond. Here he plays some of the most inspired music of his career. This is Cream at their competitive and thunderous best. Hold tight...

Jimi Hendrix - Red House live at the San Diego Sports Arena, May 24, 1969.
One of Hendrix's best ever performances and, for me, easily the best version of this song. The solo has structure and develops. Hendrix played this at every show and there may be hundreds of versions of this song so it would have been easy for him to churn out the crowd pleasing cliches but he didn't. He followed the muse and, jazzy interludings and all, the execution here is superb. Hendrix has the chops and the ideas. He knows what he wants and by golly he nails it.

Tangerine Dream Bath Tube Session
Filmed 1969 in the Ruins near Potsdamer Platz this is very early pre-synth Tangerine Dream when they still used guitars and is really quite spectacular. There is no song at all just extended jamming. This is really freeform rock. Musical spontaneous combustion. 1-2-3-go! And the first one to the end is the winner.

The Grateful Dead - The Eleven 
October 12, 1968 at the Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, California.

This is it. Stunning. Sublime. The finest rock jamming you'll hear. Played in an 11/8 time signature hence its title. It's like speeding down the motorway at night with no brakes. Scary but veryf exhilarating. Listen to those drummers! Jerry Garcia really swings. What is holding this together? I get goosebumps when I listen to this.

This piece should really be listened to within the context of the 40 minute non-stop Dark Star > St Stephen > The Eleven > Death Don't Have No Mercy set that the Dead regularly played at this time. Check out the full show here
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-10-12.sbd.miller.86759.sbeok.flac16

The Dead were the real masters of improvisation in the late 60s. They played on acid and believed in the egoless concept of a musical "group mind" which would direct the flow of the music. In fact the band would romp their way through some pretty wild and intense music around 1968 - 69 and it begs the question that, although performed with electric guitars and drums, given the complexities, is this still rock music or the did the Dead come up with something else entirely?

The Grateful Dead - 1969 Dark Star set to vintage 1950s San Francisco film

The Grateful Dead's Dark Star is one of the finest group instrumental improvisations of the rock era.

Dark Star is a sort of enormous musical riverscape that flows, meanders, occasionally becalms, and finally regathers itself to provide an always exhilarating trip through the rapids down to the sea.

It evolved during performances mainly from 1968 to 1974. It started off as reasonably short instrumental but by the early 70s it had grown into a sprawling beast of a thing that varied from jazzy syncopation to intense freeform meltdown.

The most famous Dark Star is probably the one on the band's 1969 Live / Dead album however my own favourite Dark Stars are the 1970 ones. Anyone familiar with the Live / Dead version will notice the change in form and mood. The 1970 Dark Stars are nearly all tightly structured, gorgeously melodic, and rather cheerful and sunny affairs that lack any of the darkness and occasional noodling of the later (and longer) 1972 -74 ones.

So, here's a nice short (20 minutes) version that, although not as majestic as some of the later 1970 Dark Stars (check out the sublime 14th February 1970 Fillmore East version on Dicks Picks Vol 4), does feature some lucid Jerry Garcia lead. The jam in the second half is particularly joyful. This is chill-out and pick-you-up music.

It's also nicely set here to this vintage 1950s film of San Francisco directed by Tullio Pellegrini. This is the San Francisco the Dead grew up in. Full of vintage cars, trams, behatted pedestrians, and even a visit to the zoo.
Whoever is responsible well done!

Shall we go?


Grateful Dead - Dark Star Live at Thelma Theater, Los Angeles on 11th December 1969

Listen to the full show here
Grateful Dead at the Thelma Theater, Los Angeles - 11th December 1969
from archive.org http://archive.org/details/gd69-12-11.sbd.gerland.10987.sbeok.shnf

The original film 
from archive.org