The reality is that Robe would have spit in the face of half of those who mourn him today. The other half would just laugh. And rightly so, because this guy was not the pastoral poet they sell us today, a kind of … Archpriest of Hita deceased by Bukowskilyrical muse of mainstream and feminine sensibility, but exactly the opposite, that is to say a marginal character, a slum dweller and gigantic charisma lying in a ditch, among vomit, syringes and a Gibson SG with a broken string. Robe was the antihero of our youth. Until him, we were used to rock stars with arrogant postures, leather jackets, sunglasses and the provocative attitudes of those who looked at the world with defiance.
But El Robe arrived, from Plasencia, and filled the rock with the life of the margins, with the raw defeat and the losing fatalism of the rural world, full of drugs, unemployment and poverty. Those who today believe that the 90s were an idyllic place where people went hand in hand to mass, bought a house in five years and where children had parted hair don’t know anything about it. Spain was a contaminated, violent and narcotized country, with rehearsal rooms transformed into narco rooms, behind this foam rubber covering which isolated them from the noise and the future. That’s why they don’t understand Robe and confuse it with some kind of Benedetti of Extremadura. None of that, Robe was a Shane MacCowan conflicted, someone who needed a lot of drugs and a lot of love, who generally couldn’t find one thing or another and who, instead of lamenting with tears, did so with irreplaceable intellectual violence. And so, he was too punk to be a poet. But too poetic to be punk.
I knew Deltoya because I stole the tape from a guy in Vallecas. Then I stole his girlfriend. From there to “Where are my friends?” » then go back and forth, buying everything. Until while on tour, Robe met you and Platero and together they destroyed both bands. Iñaki ‘Uoho’ Antón completely changed Extremoduro, first producing Agila and then joining the group to give birth to another, with the same name, but with very little to do with the previous one. This brought Robe closer to the masses. And the masses received him as the Messiah. Extremoduro then stopped being this underground bar band consisting of calimocho, joint and ‘El Jueves’ at the bar and started being something else, something that eventually led them to become a cult band loved by not only the bad boy, but also his classy girlfriend. And together, they made Robe a secular saint who today is walking towards beatification, at which he would have laughed out loud: the same society that led him to degradation elevated him to the altars.
Life wanted him to leave on the same day as Jorge Martínez, leader of the Ilegales and another of the idols of my youth, a gust of sonic wind, a prodigy of insolence and a completely different attitude, but united with Robe in musical quality and fundamental aggressiveness. And in the scourge of drugs. But that’s what rock is, my boy, it has nothing to do with the dictatorship of the good guys but with people who talk about the same things as always – the only subjects are love and death – but who look life in the eye, lifting their chin, accepting that we are going to lose, but warning that we are going to fight until the last moment, without wasting time writing regrets or listening to applause. And from there to the hole. Like the courageous bull: mouth closed and dignity intact. Almost nothing else.
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