I was never a fan of Van Gogh’s Ear. Its stellar appearance, in 1998, caught me at the age of 30, a very bad age to manage prejudices. Too old and seasoned to appreciate those girl meets boy lyrics getting off the train and since then he loves him and adores him and loves him again. Too young and arrogant not to despise those music that stuck to your hypothalamus and you couldn’t remove it even with an electroshock. Too arrogant, at least, to admit my guilt. Because, yes, I confess: even then I was bellowing those songs in the privacy of the shower and the cabin of the car like someone giving themselves over to a solitary pleasure. You could like it or hate it, but you had to be dead in life not to feel the stream of passion and vulnerability that was released from that mouth by that girl who ate up the microphone, the stage and the four guys who played behind her. Her name is Amaia Montero. The rest is history.
Amaia left the nest wanting to fly alone, and, lost, she couldn’t quite find her route. The boys replaced her ipso facto by Leire Martínez, who, since then, has had to deal with the shadow of the former outside and inside the group, like Hitchcock’s Rebeca in Manderley. Three decades later, the story repeats itself. The boys, now gentlemen, have just communicated, unilaterally, that they are separating their paths from Leire. Only they know if she has left or if they have invited her to leave actively or passively. It may all be a plan to get Amaia back, now that she is selling. Or that Leire is tired of being the other one without her people defending her. Personally, I am less with those who see the matter as a diva fight, and more with those who see a four-guy market calculation. They are the composers, the owners, the brains of the business. But she, they, are the soul, and, without a soul, there is no paradise. I don’t think this is a story of good guys and bad guys or vice versa. None is completely. But, in the process, the seams have been seen. And that, in times of party statements, marathons of clone interviews and public relations dictatorship, is rock and roll of the good one.
