Punk Rock in Spain

In Spain, the punk rock scene emerged in 1978, when the country had just emerged from forty years of fascist dictatorship under General Franco, a state that “melded state repression with fundamentalist Catholic moralism”. Even after Franco died in 1975, the country went through a “volatile political period”, in which the country had to try to relearn democratic values and install a constitution. When punk emerged, it “did not appropriate socialism as its goal”; instead, it embraced “nihilism”, and focused on keeping the memories of past abuses alive, and accusing all of Spanish society of collaborating with the fascist regime.

The early punk scene included a range of marginalized and outcast people, including workers, unemployed, leftists, anarchists, queens, dykes, poseurs, scroungers, and petty criminals. The scenes varied by city. In Madrid, which had been the power center of Franco’s Falangist party, the punk scene was like “a release valve” for the formerly repressed youth. In Barcelona, a city which had a particularly “marginalized status under Franco”, because he suppressed the area’s “Catalan language and culture”, the youth felt an “exclusion from mainstream society” that enabled them to come together and form a punk subculture.

The first independently-released Spanish punk disc was a 45 RPM record by Almen TNT in 1979. The song, which sounded like the US band The Stooges stated that no one believed in revolution anymore, and it criticized the emerging consumer culture in Spain, as people flocked to the new department stores. The early Spanish punk records, most of which emerged in the explosion of punk in 1978, often reached back to “old-fashioned 50s rock-n-roll to glam to early metal to Detroit’s hard protopunk”, creating an aggressive mix of fuzz guitar, jagged sounds, and crude Spanish slang lyrics.