Álvaro Urquijo: "The last time, Enrique had an uninhabited body. He trusted himself"

• The final interview Álvaro Urquijo

"My brother was

. The pills are like pink capsules split in half. Usually, he took a third. That night, after smoking coca base - he no longer snorted cocaine. , because it made his nose blunt-, and after the high, he must have taken nine or 10 pills, like other times, to go back down and fall asleep. In this sense, the coroner was clear: 'Your brother did not take heroin that night . He smoked coca base and took several Tranxiliums. He had an involuntary overdose of painkillers.

Álvaro Urquijo, founder, singer and guitarist of Secrets, describes in the book

(edited by Espasa) the death of his brother and bandmate Enrique Urquijo, 19 November 1999.

is It is presented with the subtitle of "the untold story of Los Secretos" and that is, in addition to a portrait of pop culture in Spain for three decades and a sketch of an autobiography. But the portrait of Enrique Urquijo weighs heavily on the story of his brother Álvaro,

.

The most important idea that Álvaro Urquijo tries to convey is that his brother was not a self-destructive person, that his death was not a suicide, that it was not even a heroin overdose, as has often been said, and that his image of the

it is unfair. "When he was downstairs, Enrique escaped from reality with substances but it was not the substances that were serious, because he immediately recovered. The last time, his body was uninhabited because he had not consumed anything for a year. He had the bad luck that he had a stop and that the people who accompanied him did not help him. Things like this happen to people: you trust yourself, you think that you are a 20-year-old boy who can mix drugs and more toxic things, and be great the next day, then You get a slump ... He said it in a song: 'I've come out of worse' ".

"A Enrique will affect things in a different way. If my grandfather was dying, he died very old, it was very quiet, not exteriorized what he felt.

. My brother Javier passed the flu quickly and with me you never really knew if he had caught him or not. He was a very normal person, he socialized well. He was very horny, he laughed a lot and was very thug. It's true that he had a brittle fiber, a tendency to break. And from those losses came a very special sensitivity that led him to make his songs, "explains Álvaro Urquijo.

What were its complexities, then? "He was very suspicious of liking, for example, you had to convince him that there was nothing wrong with a song liking. He denied any song that was commercially successful. You had to convince him to sing

, which you also

. And there were bad streaks, but if his life had been a torment he would not have been so prolific, he would not have channeled so many emotions through music ... "

"Today", Álvaro Urquijo continues, "he will see his appearances in

, a thousand interviews ... and he will see it well. Quiet, because he was quiet, but with humor and intelligent. He

But, after a short time, he recovered and was very well. They were

that responded to moments of anguish that he did not know how to explain and that he filled with what he found at hand. : some pills, two drinks or more dangerous substances. But he was a very beautiful person. He

He never made anyone ugly.

He went through life giving away music, money, whatever.

He had his things but who doesn't have them.

Putting his personality in a mold is unfair. "

How to synthesize

?

His story of Los Secretos begins with a middle-class-quasi-bourgeois family in the Argüelles neighborhood of Madrid.

A house with

of which Álvaro Urquijo remembers two milestones.

First: the Urquijo brothers had the requirement to allocate a part of their pay to books and records.

Second: his father was, in addition to being a music lover, a technology freak who was always entangled with the first home video cameras, the first sound systems and the first computers available on the market.

The three Urquijo brothers (Javier, the oldest, was also the founder of the band) got normal grades or a little worse in a secular private school. They entered the university without much interest because music had crossed their path. They had never been through a piano class. "

" explains Álvaro Urquijo.

Tos, the band that was the seed of Los Secretos, was a pioneer among the groups of its generation: the Urquijo recorded before anyone else, played in public before anyone else and

. According to Álvaro's story, they were innocent boys who had bad luck. Their drummer Canito died in a traffic accident on New Years Eve 1980. His replacement was a great musician and a good companion, but he introduced them to his first camels. He also died prematurely. Their record company lost faith in them, the Treasury persecuted them, their manager swindled them and, later, they won a lawsuit that emptied their accounts again. It is not known how many times The Secrets were a dead band.

To all these fatalities was added the erratic character of Enrique. Some facts: hooked on heroin with his brothers, he induced his first girlfriend into drug addiction.

. Around 1986, when Álvaro was already detoxified, he substituted heroin for alcohol but it was not a change for the better. Later, he discovered cocaine. And he went into a long period of detoxification with periodic relapses. The theory is that Enrique Urquijo used those relapses to turn pages in his life.

, to end artistic projects that felt stagnant ...

One of those relapses was that of November 1999. By then, Enrique Urquijo had a daughter who lived with her paternal grandparents. He had spent a year in observation and had made one last public appearance at a SGAE awards.

. He lived a little here and a little there, sheltered in the network of friends and family that protected him. His doctor warned that the periodic crisis would not be long in coming and warned that it could be serious after his long abstinence.

When he arrived, chance conspired against Enrique Urquijo. His brother was in Zaragoza. His friends had let their guard down. "A

stayed in the house that was squatting -with k-.

: she, a prostitute and addict; and he, a lost junkie. On one occasion they described them to me and they told me that between the two they added four teeth. When they saw that Enrique was getting sick, they lowered him unconscious to the portal and left ", Álvaro Urquijo writes in his book.

It is one of the bitter parts of his story. Throughout the history of Los Secretos, con artists appear, drug dealers posing as friends, hippie bassists who parasitized Enrique Urquijo ... "

. The problem is that we were very innocent, we were schoolboys with the guitar hanging. That's right at the beginning: if later we let ourselves be fooled, it was our fault ", the author now explains.

"Enrique was a genius transmitting sensations with very simple words, with a non-metaphorical language. He undressed in the songs and did not blush. It was his way of doing therapy. He was totally self-taught; he only knew about music what we had heard at home And it

that comes, I challenge you to make a song that goes through four generations and has meaning for a 12-year-old girl today. His musical legacy, his family, the people who loved him. , his daughter ...

. All that is a legacy is much more important than the image of the person sunk in suffering that has been transmitted. "

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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