What's your worst musical memory? 40 musicians answer the question.

Barcelona"What is your best music-related memory, and what memory would you like to forget?" This double question has been repeated in most of the interviews with musicians (and people linked to music) published in the ARA, especially in the last year and a half. A few days ago we published a selection of the answers to the first questionNow it's time for the worst memories. There are some about Sílvia Pérez Cruz, Mazoni, María Jaime, Cesk Freixas, Roger Mas...

Anna Alàs i Jové

"I'm going to tell you a bit of a cliché: the pandemic, what we had to go through as performers during the pandemic, how it affected the interpretation of music, rehearsal time, and everything. And I was privileged because at that time I was working in Austria, and Austria was the best country to be my bread."

Maria Riba (Pollen Allergy)

"Some Gràcia Festivals three or four years ago. We had four concerts, four days in a row, in different alleys. And to transport the instruments from one street to another, since cars couldn't pass because of the curb and the floods of people, we went to a supermarket: we gave our ID and they gave us shopping carts. What we did last year have a shopping cart as a symbol, to remember their origins."

Eva Amaral and Juan Aguirre (Amaral)

"A difficult moment was when Juan injured his hand. We were coming off a very intense period of concerts, and I suppose the stress caused me to develop severe tendonitis," says Eva Amaral. "This was back in the 2000s, when we suddenly lost our anonymity with an album that changed our lives on every level. We went from playing in venues to gigantic stages. I played the guitar with so much force with my fingers that I ended up going back to the record and broke the record, and after five or six months, I broke it." Birds in the head", adds Juan Aguirre.

Pol Batlle

"I would like to forget my first extracurricular music teacher, because he traumatized me. I suppose there are a lot of people traumatized by bad teachers. In fact, I gave up music. From the age of seven to thirteen I didn't want to know anything about music. This is the only thing I would like to forget. Or not, I wouldn't either."

Oriol Aymat (Blaumut)

"Those sleepless nights, sometimes with nightmares and chills, before certain performances, when you suffer because you feel unprepared, you haven't had the time you wanted or you're stressed and think you'll never do it well. With time you learn to manage it better, but this is something that is something."

Guillem Solé (Owls)

"I felt really bad once. It was at a concert in Mataró. It started raining heavily, and the organizers told us we had to stop. We wanted to play, but it wasn't safe because the stage was destroyed. And the next day on Instagram we had a hundred comments saying, 'Fuckers, in an hour...' I explained that we wanted to play, but there was a foot of water on the stage. And people didn't understand. We were super freaked out for a week because we kept receiving messages from people telling us all kinds of things.

Joan Delgado (Cala Vento)

"I would like to forget that I know how to play any instrument and that I know the music industry, and go see a concert with this innocent feeling of not knowing anything about technique. I think very often, because when I go to a concert, I say: "I'm already thinking about how he has the iron of the drum stuck in, how the other one has the cable plugged in, what I don't know, what I don't know, what I don't know, and how I don't know how to enjoy myself like my friend who doesn't know anything, and be innocently enjoying the music."

Jan Riera (The Catarras)

"Perhaps one of the worst moments of Els Catarres was when Èric lost his voice at the end of the tour All my principles at the Sant Jordi Club, in November 2019.

Joe Twilight

"The worst ones are especially the ones that have to do with having a bad time on stage. Once we were playing after a very famous band. We had done the sound check beforehand, but when it was time to play, nothing was playing. That feeling makes me very nervous. You involve thousands of people who are there excited."

Marc Gili (Dorian)

"The worst memory... Well, it's not that it was a trauma, but after three or four years of going after the Sónar in Buenos Aires, just when we started playing, there were about 8,000 people in front of us, a DANA-type downpour fell and made it empty out completely. And we came from the other side of the world. I'd tell you what happened to us in a Latin American country whose name I don't want to say so as not to stigmatize it. After a concert in which we did one sold out Of about 1,500 people, we were on our way back to the hotel when we were robbed with firearms, and it was very violent. They held us at gunpoint and stole about 5,000 euros worth of gear. That day was really tough, not so much because of the gear itself, but because I thought I might be going home without a member of my group and how would I tell their mother? That said, aside from that experience, all our experiences in Latin America have always been incredible. I love that part of the world and would go back a thousand times. But, unfortunately, it's a reality that everyone lives with; sooner or later it happens to everyone, getting a gun to the head."

Adrià Cortadellas (Fetus)

"Perhaps the most terrifying moment was early in my stage life, when I dropped my guitar at a concert. It was a friend's father's guitar, because I didn't have one yet, and it broke. It was a black Stratocaster."

Pau Figueres

"Airports really stress me out when I travel with my guitar, because I suffer for the guitar."

Cesk Freixas

"My most unpleasant memories have to do with the threats and rejection I've received from the far right. And from the far right of all stripes, because I've received and continue to receive threats from Spanish fascists and also from Catalan fascists. It always causes you a certain amount of concern to be threatened, or to receive letters from this type of person. These are always the most difficult moments, when you see that your physical integrity could be affected or compromised. But, well, over time you learn to put it into perspective, and it's part of having such a committed political agenda."

Raquel García-Tomás

"Surely any entrance exam to the conservatory."

Pau Serrasolsas (Broom)

"When we were about to release the previous album, there was a period of bureaucratic and record label disputes that we had a really hard time with. It was very complicated, it wasn't up to us, we had a lot at stake, and we suffered a lot due to record label negotiations."

Clara Gispert

"The castings. Going to castings. Before I dedicated myself to music and got paid exclusively for being a singer, I did musical theatre. And to do musical theatre you have to go to castings all the time. I've never had such a bad time as I did at the castings. I prepared really well, but I'd get there and have the feeling that they were thinking about me: "They don't even know that I sing, those people, because my voice hasn't even come out." The worst moment is entering a theatre with four people in the audience, the music starts and... That was horrible."

Natxo Tarrés (Dogs)

"The lawsuits part. Lawsuits and all that nonsense. Managers who screwed us. People calling you and saying, 'We want to sign the Dogs, but not with your manager.' In 1996, our best year, we played more than 80 gigs, which we played more than 80 gigs, which I used to play more than 80 gigs. Internally... screw-ups."

Guillamino

"All this stuff about playing at 5 p.m., so to speak, or a kind of mistreatment or inferiority scheme at certain festivals, where you're basically a quota. This has happened to all of us. And it's a bad feeling. More than once I've found myself saying: I'm not going to do this again, I won't go back to that one, I won't come back being used as a Catalan quota. This feels pretty serious to me.

Maria Hein

"Musicians suffer a lot because of social media. Sometimes I feel like if my project left social media, it would stop working, and that makes you feel tied to social media, where you often get comments you don't like. It's something I don't like about music. Like the comments I received when I was just starting out as a solo artist."

María Jaime

"The worst part has been having to constantly encounter certain guys who, no matter how much they see Maria Jaume playing, will talk to my partner before they talk to me. It's downright sexist, trying to belittle me. Please, let's get over this, because I want to go places and be treated like you would treat a man, basically."

Juliet

"Having problems at a show, being on stage and not being able to control what's happening, because there you can only get by, keep going and sing, and things can go wrong."

Lia Kali

"Especially when music and business come together and everything starts to shake. You start to feel like it's an obligation, instead of what it's always been, an emotional need. And then the anxiety, the rush, the blockages appear. This has been the worst part."

Karlos Osinaga (Lisabö)

"Once we were treated really badly at a festival. The organizers treated us like shit, plain and simple. In fact, I was so pissed off that I almost stopped playing. It was in 2012. Disgusting. They treated some bands from the Basque Country who had been booking badly so they could collect a subsidy from the Basque government.

Maika Makovski

"I'd like to forget a story I had with a manager that was very, very, very hard. It's very easy to be taken for a ride in a profession where you trust people like family. And that was really hard. Twelve years later, I sometimes say: oh, that's still healing. But I learned a lot, a lot."

Roger Mas

"More than with music, it has to do with effort, the struggle to find your place in the sun, on the stage, or in the audience, or whatever you want to call it. This struggle is heavy, it comes into conflict with family, with other things that are also emotionally important. And this point of having struggled a bit like 19th-century men struggled with things. There's this thing. cowboy Solitary... I've wanted to do things this way; I don't like groups, I don't like negotiating. If someone wants to work with me, either I'm in charge or they are; I need it to be that way. My generation still inherited this Hollywood myth of cowboy lonely, if you want you can. But you leave things behind, and it's a selfish struggle."

Jaume Pla (Mazoni)

"A concert in Reus from the album tour 7 songs for an endless night (2016). There were only eleven people in the audience, and I thought, "Wow, I've played at the Palau de la Música, Primavera Sound, La Mercè, Música Viva, I've released a ton of albums, and it's like I'm back at the beginning, like nothing's happened." I had the feeling of, "Maybe I should fold." At the time, I saw it very much like that. Meat, bones and everything included, which came out very often, saved me a bit... It was a pretty quick album to make. Sometimes urgency puts pressure on you and you handle things poorly, but in this case, urgency was good because I came up with a lot of songs, and it was like starting the second phase of Mazoni there. But that day in Reus, I thought that everything I'd done had been for nothing."

Nilo Molinero

"It would be absurd to tell you that I want to forget something. But when I was 11, I had a music teacher who said some very ugly things to me. He made me cry, and I never did solfeggio, musical language, again from that day on. I love music, but I had attention deficit disorder (ADHD). But I was only 11, but I was only 11, but I was only 11, but I was only 11. Luckily, I was able to continue playing drums and guitar with two teachers who really encouraged me, Marc and Armando, and I began to regain my love for music."

Namina

"I remember going to concerts when I was a teenager and being attacked by someone in the audience. They groped me and no one did anything. It was really brutal, because it was very aggressive and it even hurt, and when I turned around, there was a void about a meter wide around me."

Judit Neddermann

"There are people who are very concerned about showing that they have done incredible things. It is very common that you arrive anywhere and everyone tells you about their past glories. It seems so strange to me, so unnecessary... When you arrive somewhere you can ask how it is and do what you have come to do, because it is very worthy and so precious that you are there. There are many people who need to situate themselves. And it is terrible.

Joan Oller (general director of the Palace of Music)

"You learn from everything. But I'll tell you one without telling you who was performing. We invited someone to L'Auditori who, due to age and circumstances, could no longer perform the concert he did. And that was a moment when I thought maybe we had made a mistake. Although it was a huge success, I secretly thought we didn't have it."

Rita Payés

"Things I don't like at all related to music: airports. I hate them so much. Or that music playing right now in this cafe, which I also hate so much because it makes no sense to play music right now."

Silvia Pérez Cruz

"I had gone to see a boyfriend of mine in New York. I played the saxophone, and we would go on the subway to play long notes with a friend who was a trumpet player. I was 18. And suddenly, a person dressed in military clothes with an alto saxophone got off the subway. We were in the place where he played, and then a fight started. The musical argument of my life. I didn't want to fight, and I ended up crying on the floor."

Joan Pons (The Little One of Cal Eril)

"The worst thing is a recurring dream I have: I dream that I arrive on stage and nothing is working. And it has happened to me many times. We arrive late, nobody knows the songs, I don't remember the lyrics, the cables don't work, the amplifiers are stopped... This happens to me and it lasts a long time, and it's horrible. I've spoken with other musicians and I'm not the only one who has that dream. I know it's not something real, but it is something that disturbs me and that I would like to forget."

Xantal Rodríguez (Remedy of Ca la Fresca)

"Sometimes I cross myself out on stage. I love being on stage, but when I think about people watching me, at first I was really, really embarrassed and had a bad time. The other day we were at Konvent, which was full of friends, and since it was the first time we'd played some new songs... it was worse."

Sara Roy

"At some shows, I've encountered male technicians making nasty comments and disparaging my work, as if I couldn't even plug in a guitar. Maybe I would tell you these things, which I get criticized a lot, but at the same time, if they hadn't happened, I wouldn't be so vindictive and want to fight against it."

Rozalén

"A painful memory... I'd say none, but there are things that have helped me learn. For example, there's something that made me write the phrase "Never want to get off a stage again." They took me to one of those music markets in Buenos Aires, with all the people looking at you and judging what you're doing. I was small. I felt like nobody was listening to me. Other times, in bars, nobody listened to me the same way and I ended up getting on people's nerves.

Marc Ros (Sidonie)

"Let's see how I can explain it, but at the Rolling Stones concert [where Sidonie opened] I didn't have a good time as a musician. Firstly, because the Rolling Stones taught us a lesson and swept us off the stage, which I think is wonderful. So, far from wanting to forget it, what I want to forget, what I want to forget, what I want to forget. remember it. And, in fact, Sidonie's album is also marked by that. They beat us up badly... That day I decided to quit smoking, and I'm still fighting; I'm so brutal that the album and the songs come from there."

Xavier Coca (The Tyets)

"That Festiuet... Now we have the budgetary possibility to bring a complete team, to bring duplicate things, so that nothing fails us technologically, but before everything went so well for us we had many technical problems. I remember that day, when we hadn't even taken out Coti x cotiIt was one of the first times we played at a festival with people we admired like Oques Grasses and La Fúmiga. And we played for five minutes. Everything fell apart, and we had to sing. a cappella in front of 5,000 people. But luckily, we've always had a strong following and a great capacity for improvisation, and we pulled it off. But it was a real blow. It was a turning point for me to say: guys, we have to get serious because these things can't let us down."

Gorka Urbizu

"Perhaps I'd like to alleviate or forget about the extra-musical side, which is necessary but you have to know how to manage it. This sometimes affects musical romanticism, because you're not in a multinational company; you do everything yourself and you have to take care of everything, and all of this takes up a lot of time that you don't dedicate to what really matters, which is creating and tone. I could do everything without that part."

Pau Vallvé

"There have been some very unfortunate moments, those moments when you feel super uncomfortable: when no one is listening to you, when no one wants you to be there but you have to play at that festival because I don't know what. Many, many concerts of saying: do you mean we have to do this? Or moments of thinking: I have I don't know how many albums, people come to the concerts, people come to the concerts, people come to the concerts, people come to the concerts, I've become so fat that I can't work on anything else at the same time; therefore, I should quit music. I quit music. And that's when all the good things started."