Management: VerbiGracia (5255) 5336 9502 (5255) 5336 9198 monica@verbigracia.com.mx ileana@verbigracia.com.mx ***** Booking Europe and Asia Rob Challice: rob@codaagency.com ***** Booking Canada Rob Zifarelli: rzifarelli@theagencygroup.com
This, surely, is one of the more glorious moments in the history of clashes between global music styles. There’s a stirring, south-of-the-border brassy mariachi introduction, a grand announcement ‘Rude Boy – this is made in Mexico’, and then a sudden switch to a Ska beat as Los de Abajo launch into a Spanish-language, Latin-flavoured treatment of that old Fun Boy Three hit from back in 1982, The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum), with one of the original Fun Boys, Neville Staples, joining in. This is the Ska revival as seen from a recording studio in Mexico City, and directed by the production team of Neil Sparkes and Count Dubulah, best known as those exponents of global dance music, Temple Of Sound. And it’s just one of the wildly varied styles and fusions in the Los de Abajo repertoire.
So what’s different this time round? An enormous amount. The band have been touring the world (they had played in 26 countries at the last count) and they’ve been absorbing new global influences while continuing to explore their Mexican roots. As founder-member and keyboard player Carlos Cuevas puts it “our music has changed through the years, and been enriched by more influences – both by the styles we heard outside the country, and our research into Mexican music and the ways of creating a contemporary fusion”.Anyone who has seen the band playing live in recent months will know what a classy, exhilarating and impressively varied outfit they have become. Most bands strive to repeat their studio sound on stage, but Los de Abajo are such great players that for them it’s been quite the other way round. The sheer energy of their live shows, and their range of styles and influences, have not been fully reflected in their recordings until now. The band responsible for all this began back in 1992. Carlos, Liber, guitarist Vladimir Garnica and drummer Yocu Arellano met at high school, determined to “make music that was 100% danceable and cathartic, take it beyond our country’s borders, and with it a message about the political and social situation we are living through in Mexico”. Musically, they set out to mix “mestizo (half-breed) rock” with other influences from salsa to reggae and Mexican styles. According to Liber, “we’ve always had an itch to mix the local with the global”.
They broke onto the international market with the help of David Byrne, who signed them to his Luaka Bop label, and suggested that their music should be called ‘punk salsa’. The band preferred the term ‘tropipunk’ (“because of the fusion of tropical rhythms”, said Liber), though he described their first album, released in 1998, as “practically a record of political songs, with a punk attitude in the lyrics, inspired by The Clash”. Since then, the band have matured as musicians, and continued to break down barriers as they popularised their music around the world, and – a harder task, amazingly enough – within Mexico itself. According to Liber “the national Mexican market was more hostile to musical fusion”. LDA v The Lunatics shows how far they’ve come.
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