In a bar in Mexico City, this story begins. On Saturday 27 May 1989, Café Tacvba gave its first ‘official’ performance at El Hijo del Cuervo. Not, to clarify, the bar that Café Tacvba is named after, it was an urban space that both served ice-cold beer and acted as a platform for the creative arts in the capital’s historically avant-garde neighbourhood of Coyoacán.
To this barrio, we can pinpoint the pain of Frida Kahlo’s late paintings and retrace Leon Trotsky’s last steps before he was assassinated. From these streets, Gabriel García Márquez’s wife posted the hand-written manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude to his publisher in Buenos Aires.
And it is still from Coyoacán where the gloriously moustached bassist and co-founding Tacvbo Quique Rangel speaks to me over Zoom. He lives only a stone’s throw from El Hijo del Cuervo, reminding me of how - to this day - Paul McCartney’s London residence is only two streets from Abbey Road Studios.
“We had already played some small concerts at our parents’ and friends’ houses, but this was the first time we (Quique, his brother Joselo and frontman Rubén Albarrán) performed together professionally, even though much of the audience was made up of people we already knew.”
The four boys grew up in Ciudad Satélite, an industrial commuter settlement just outside of Mexico City.
“We were in the suburbs, surrounded by factories. There was no arts scene, no museums, or cinemas. When we developed an interest in arts and music, we had to travel to Mexico City. That’s when we discovered el centro, the flea markets, la langunilla, the places where we could buy vintage clothes and shoes. If we wanted to see different kinds of films, we had to go to the cineteca. What we saw in those films, influenced the way we see music. We identified with British rock and pop from the 80s, groups like The Smiths and The Cure, but there was something missing in the way we were experiencing our life.”
Thirty years on, Café Tacvba is one of Latin America’s most critically and commercially successful bands, coming to define the essence of a brand of rock and roll that is distinctly Mexican, or more precisely chilango (from Mexico City) in spirit. Their sound – though contemporary – often glimmers of a nostalgic and wistful portrait of the great city of the past.
“We were and are fascinated by the idea of the old city,” Quique tells me. Indeed, their namesake, El Café de Tacuba, is a legendary downtown haunt where politicians and painters would gather in the early twentieth century; the place has come to be synonymous with the zoot suit-wearing pachuco culture of the times.
I ask Quique if they have ever encountered any legal issues with the café.
“Just before we released our first record, we had a nice chat with the guys who run the place. It’s a family-owned café and they said that as long as we didn’t try to go into business with food, we were ok to use the name…pretty much every year, an investor shows up who wants us to market a brand of coffee or something like that, but by now we are used to saying no,” he laughs.
In the beginning, it was not an expressly conscious decision to combine traditional Mexican musical genres such as norteño or son jarocho with rock, though that is what ended up happening. It was a natural process, Quique explains:
“Some of those influences were not voluntary, they just blended into our music from what we had been listening to at home. Once, we were rehearsing at my house, trying to figure out a song that we thought was grounded in jazz when my mother said, ‘that’s a nice bolero’, and that song was María.”
In the music video for the 1992 single, shot entirely in black and white, the band members blend seamlessly into the shadowed streets and porticoes of the centro histórico after dark, as they pine after a love lost; perhaps the loss is not of María’s love but rather of an abstract idea of the city that persists only in the memories of the buildings and pavements.
A YouTube comment reads, “Walking through Mexico City’s Zocalo at midnight while listening to this song is the most delicious thing in existence… (I should know, I’m doing it right now)”. Quique seems to believe that their music connected – and continues to connect – with people because of how their sound reflected an approximation of what it felt like to be young in Mexico City in the late 80s and early 90s.
While the band’s sound arose naturally, they has strong theoretical ideas about what their aesthetic ought to reflect, as they all came from a design background.
“Rubén and I studied graphic design and Joselo industrial design; we had ideas about what Mexican design should be. We would speak about the concept that the place where a design is developed must reflect the media, the material, everything that surrounds the place of creation. So, that was a discussion we had. We said, if this is sounding like Mexican rock and roll, we have to let it flow, to let it flood from us.”
But it wasn’t just nostalgia that fuelled the Tacvba sound, which exemplifies the two-way flow between contemporary foreign and traditional Mexican. Quique’s mother was not wrong: these suburban Mexican misfits may have been influenced by American jazz and British pop, but it is well-known that the Beatles were also hugely influenced by boleros. The influence between those worlds is mutual (even though the influence on British music is less documented).
“Joselo had the idea of making the group an acoustic one. I traded my electric bass for an acoustic upright bass, or a tololoche as it’s known as in norteño music; we added an acoustic guitar and a mouth accordion [played by Emmanuel del Real]. But we used an electronic drum machine to have a mix between traditional and contemporary sounds. Joselo and Rubén love techno music and the idea of someone clicking on a machine against the acoustic instruments, and that was Café Tacvba.”
Their hit album of 1994, Re was ranked first on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of “Greatest Latin Rock Albums of All Time”. On it, the light-hearted funky tune El metro imagines a Kafkaesque scenario in which a character is trapped on Mexico City’s underground for months, unable to leave at due to the sheer number of people pressing against them – a song that might strike a chord with Londoners.
So how exactly does Quique feel about The Underground?
“Sometimes it’s scary when you are changing platforms and there is a crowd around you, then you feel that somebody is trying to sneak into your pocket.”
We drift to the subject of the ongoing situation of violence and crime in Mexico. From his perspective he has been lucky.
“I’ve only been robbed once in my house when I was living in La Condesa. The only thing they stole was half of my CD collection. So, at least I know that those kids got some free music.”
“Did they know they were stealing from Café Tacvba’s bassist?” I ask, trying to hide my envy of the looters’ spoils.
“I’m guessing they had no idea! I’m sure that either they enjoyed listening to those records –I doubt it– it’s more likely that they sold them at El Chopo, the music market where everybody is exchanging vinyls, cassettes, and CDs…”
Going back to the issue of crime, Quique says: “it’s a very complicated issue; there’s something that’s not working. I can’t see how this will change unless young people are provided better alternatives than joining narco gangs. It’s very sad. But at the same time, I can see that people from all over are coming to Mexico and enjoying the experience in the streets… the flavour, the food, the music.”
Arguably, Café Tacvba were one of the first bands to embrace the highs, lows, differences, and diversity within Mexican culture. Theyalways had a clear message of inclusion; Rubén’s wardrobe always challenged and subverted supposed binaries of gender and sexuality. Plausibly, the group’s body of work represents a social good, although it’s a world away from the narcocorrido, an increasingly popular and divisive Mexican music genre that details the exploits of drug-traffickers on both sides of the Mexico-US border.
“What’s your opinion of narcocorridos?” I probe tentatively.
“On the one hand, you can say that this is the voice of people singing about the reality of communities that live in that culture, which is violent, but they have their reasons for being that way. On the other hand, you can argue that it’s an apology of crime and that you (recreational drug users) should boycott drugs because they are tainted with blood and corrupt our society, every little thing that adds to that destruction should be banned.”
“Is it art? I guess it is. There should be some freedom of speech tag, that says, if they want to sing about that, it’s ok. When I listen to narcocorridos, I enjoy some of them because they are constructed with nice verses, there’s something there, in the artistic approach. But eventually, I tend to get bored; there’s always death and someone bragging about being the biggest capo of the neighbourhood. I didn’t grow up in that culture and I see it almost as a tourist; it’s interesting, how they talk about pick-up trucks and how many kilos they smuggle from one place to another. It’s not for me to decide whether it’s good or bad.”
“If not narcocorridos, what have you been listening to lately?” I asked Quique.
“A lot of K-Pop because of my seven-year-old daughter,” he declares with a chuckle and a grin. “She’s also discovering reggaetón. She’s been listening to Rosalía; that’s one of the most listened to artists in my house right now. I’m very proud that my daughter is enjoying good music.”
“Is your daughter aware of how big Café Tacvba are? Is that something that she’s conscious of?”
“I guess she wasn’t until three weeks ago when we played at the Auditorio Nacional, and she came with my wife and a lot of our friends. When she realised that Rosalía is going to play at the same venue where her dad was playing, she said, ‘ok, now I get it. You are kinda big’.
And so to London, where Café Tacvba arrive in September. Quique recalls how blown away he was by London’s Latino community the last time he was touring over here:
“We played at the Shepherds Bush Empire. That was amazing. We always knew of people going to London to study or to develop musical projects, but I didn’t know there was such a great crowd from different places across Latin America and from Spain also. It’s a very interesting community. I really like London…discovering places over a thousand years old across from a building that was made only yesterday. And in terms of music, the city is so alive.”
Café Tacvba will play at Electric Brixton on 13 September. Tickets available here
