Jorge Martinezbetter known as Jorge Ilegal, embodied the paradigm of the tough guy, outspoken, quarrelsome but extremely charismatic and friendly. For his last fight, the hockey stick he carried around as a young man in the 1980s was not a deterrent. Cancer took his life at the age of 70according to several Asturian media.
Martinez, singer, guitarist and soul of the rock band Ilegalesannounced in September that he had cancer and illness prevented the group from continuing with its planned performance schedule. He died at the Central University Hospital of Asturias (HUCA), in Oviedo, where he had been hospitalized for several weeks.
“It’s not because it was unexpected or predictable that it was less hard. It was a kind of great force that wanted to live,” sources from its distributor, Ataque, told EFE.
The singer and guitarist was born in Avilés (Asturias) in 1955. He founded Ilegales in 1979after having passed through the groups Mortaja and Los Metálicos.
For more than four decades, he led one of the oldest and most consistent groups on the Spanish music scenekeeping its aesthetic of sharp guitars and corrosive lyrics intact.
songs like Hello Mamoncete!, I’m a badass either New times, crazy times They consolidated the DNA of a group that has never submitted to trends or the industry.
Beyond the provocative character — a mixture of sarcasm, political lucidity and elegant nihilism — Jorge Martínez was an artisan of language: his words combine humor and a fierce look at Spanish society. In interviews, he alternates incendiary diatribes and philosophical observations on art, decadence and freedom.
In 2022 the group celebrated its 40th anniversary with a tour and an album full of collaborations with Loquillo, Calamaro, Bunbury, El Niño de Elche, Vetusta Morla, Luz Casal and Dani Martín. Afterwards, Jorge looked “an asshole and impatient”, as he said in an interview with El Cultural. Talkative and energetic, he ate life in bites and did not live out of nostalgia, but with an eye toward the future.
At 66, he continues to practice scuba diving, one of his great hobbies, at full speed and in the cold waters of the Cantabrian Sea.
He wasn’t afraid to jump into any puddle, and in that he compared himself to another key figure in rock, another tough, big, provocative guy like himself: Loquillo. “Sometimes our speech is questionable or completely wrong but, of course, those who do nothing are never wrong. All these harmless artists who are so numerous today say nothing, so there is no room for error. We have to say things, even make the headlines, what the hell!” he said.
He was also not ashamed to acknowledge his past full of excess. “I piss cocaine, but not from those years, but from the 80s,” he said in another interview published in El Cultural that same year on the occasion of his latest album, young and arrogantthe thirteenth in the history of Ilegales.
“It’s curious, because “Our audience was between 40 and 60 years old, today they are between 18 and 40 years old,” I then bragged.
It was a guy as badass as cultured. One of his great sources of knowledge was the library of his grandfather, a merchant seaman, where he devoured the complete works of Pío Baroja.
Regarding his reputation for violence, he clarified that he used the hockey stick alone. “in self-defense”. “The new generations are suffering the effects of a bad education which penalizes self-defense. What we have is a people who do not know how to defend themselves, who have not done their military service and who must be in the hands of a professional army led by who knows who. Today more than ever, it is demonstrated that if we want peace, we must prepare for war,” he declared.
In recent years, her figure has been depicted in the documentary My life among the ants (2017), and another, entitled Illegal 82 (2023), reviewed the origin of the group.
Prophetically, in this interview last March, he left this message to the reaper: “If one day death approaches with his scythe, I will say to him: ‘here, take the little you have left’ and I will cut off his sleeves.”
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