Still from 'The Encounter' by Amaia and Alizzz
Through the streets of a town in Alicante cars continue to pass with musicote. Are the steppe wolves who once belonged to a movement. At dawn when a churrero sold "churros" in a parking lot, in the trunk of the Ford Fiesta someone was always traveling and the music of machines redefined an era that imploded on its own. The cantaditas until dawn, the clubbers who did not know they were and today they are known as “flip flops” in a derogatory manner or discos eroded between orchards that once knew better days.
talk about the famous Bakalao Route (or Ruta Destroy) means doing it in a way of life that verges on the taboo: a circuit of nightclubs spread throughout the Valencian Community, especially around the road to the saler , where the machine music It was the religion of a legion of followers who ended up getting out of hand. However, to understand this phenomenon (and claim it) you have to travel a long time ago, to some glorious 80's in which Valencia was avant-garde rather than purgatory.
Josie Warden of Vicious Pink and Soft Cell
Once upon a time in Valencia
In 1981, Valencia began its awakening as the capital of the clubbing from Spain. The need to flee disco music , added to the impact of The Madrid scene , displayed an insatiable curiosity for new rhythms and forms of nightlife in the Mediterranean capital. The barracks nightclub was the pioneer and home of Juan Santamaria and Carlos Simon , call DJ “white music” defined by groups such as Depeche Mode, The Cure, The Clash or The Fall, referents of the new romantics in the United Kingdom. Exotic and unknown rhythms for the general public that came from the towns of Valencia to be someone between neon and entertainment.
"Many of those who came were the most modern of their towns," he tells Condé Nast Traveler Joan M. Oleaque , journalist and author of the book In Ecstasy (Berlin Books) , whose second edition will be launched in early September. “In fact, people in the capital took longer to find out about it. Its charm was also that, in many aspects, it was something far from the metropolis, linked more to the counties.”
Above the sex factor that inspired the night scene of other corners of Spain, in Valencia the future slipped in and predominated music, art and the new : highlighted the performances , the incursions of drag queens like La Faraona, or groups like soft-cell playing in the town of lombai in 1983 and simpleminds in Valencia the same weekend of 1986 that they reached number one in the United Kingdom. Europe wanted to be part of that hedonistic oasis and Valencia was the window to an avant-garde world.
Cover of the book 'In Ecstasy'
“Valencia changed leisure: until its establishment, the discos they were just for hitting, flirting, clowning, etc. With them, it was established that some could be real escape places and mental transformation during the weekends”, continues Oleaque. “For years the Bakalao Route has been talked about in a negative way, ignoring that in the 1980s it was perhaps the most relevant and important thing that happened in part of Europe. Valencia was first. It is a matter of timing, and of Social impact.”
And the acid house arrived
In the mid-1980s, word of mouth and support from shows like TVE toccata either TV3 Pop Stock turned the nightclub circuit Valencian women in the Holy Grail of the Spanish night. Spaces attended by young people from the rest of the Valencian Community, Madrid, Barcelona or Murcia. It was him breeding ground for a germ that could topple the house of cards from within, and that germ was acid house.
By 1987, guitar music met a wider legion of electronic music fans than ever imagined. The DJs of the golden age of Valencian clubbing they tried to build bridges with this new current through hip hop or pop, but the monster was already too big. A new form of leisure nurtured by the endless hours , the travelers who were now tourists in search of the pack dance-paella-sangria and one style, the EBM or machine music , born from acid house in clubs like Chocolate or Spook Factory , where Invincible Spirit, Fini Tribe or Renegade Soundwave played. By the early 1990s, emerging figures such as Chimo Bayo , 'messiahs' of this new movement, confirmed a transition too far from the beginning.
Chimo Bayo
“The advent of acid house in the late 1980s changed the soundtrack of avant-garde venues; the songs disappeared, so to speak, and were replaced by a different electronics , more hypnotic, more linked to a kind of trance,” continues Joan. “Batches of new people arrived as customers who did not have or want sophisticated music, but pure party . In addition, very commercial music began to sneak into the clubs at the beginning of the 90s, linked to euro dance , and even dancing little elaborate thing that a lot of local DJs started doing.”
The paradigm of the change of generation was fulfilled, as Joan points out: in the 80s, the route was a cult of extreme experimentation and to the absolute inclusion in which Valencia manufactured new models. However, in the 90s people wanted madness and party At whatever price; the music had faded into the background until it became a verbena.
The crime of the Alcasser girls in 1992 it became the turning point for media lynching. By 1995, the cod scene was a redeemed subculture to a few sanctuaries where the 'cantaditas' were a refuge for their survivors, from Planet Valencia until Central Rock , in Alicante.
And there, on the horizon, Ibiza he had done better. The Balearic island was inspired by the best of the 80s in Valencia to create “Ibiza dream” , a place to find the impossible and in whose nightclubs music shared the limelight with fantasy: being the island to which they traveled Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss to alternate your cocktail in Pacha with his basket of esparto grass on the beach. Ibiza knew how to create the dream that Valencia could not.
In the pre-pandemic world, there were still clubs in which the spirit of the last years of the Bakalao Route survives: parking lots full at 7 in the morning, well tuning and the tracksuit like uniform. A wild world born from an eclectic one, with better intentions. of a world that was paradise before prejudice.
Cherries, symbol of summer and party.