As a child, Mario Silvestre's great passion was hockey, a sport to which he dedicated himself body and soul until one day, at the age of fourteen, a new obsession entered his life and changed everything. "It was at a friend's house and I don't know why we put on the MTV gala that he had recorded on a VHS tape. Then those three guys appeared dressed normally, without curly hair, without leather wristbands, without expensive motorcycles or blonde girls in bikinis, without all the paraphernalia of show business. Simply three guys who could be you or me. The singer leaving his throat with a scream that was not musical, but animal, atavistic. The drummer furiously pounding the drums. The bassist throwing his instrument into the air." At that moment, watching Nirvana live, Mario's life took a turn. "Music had just become my passion."
Leaning on the bar, savoring a mid-morning Estrella to the rhythm of the Posies, the guitarist, singer, and composer recalls his entry into a world of notes and measures. "Since the late 60s, my uncle Sebastián played the guitar, making protest songs and folk. One day, I simply asked him to lend me a guitar to learn to play it and he lent it to me." From that relative for whom he holds a memory full of affection, the musician inherited a taste for singer-songwriters like Cohen, Dylan, or Elliott Smith, or what was the shared fetish group between them, Simon & Garfunkel. "Defending a song with just your voice and an acoustic guitar is the ultimate test of what that song is worth, of its essence. Something I am now daring to do in some concerts." The album that for him would unite the taste for noise with that of the stripped-down and acoustic song ---"the middle ground between my uncle singing acoustically and the Sex Pistols or Sonic Youth making noise"--- is, of course, the Unplugged of his beloved Nirvana.
"My first band was Mantra, which I joined when I was in high school and we lasted a couple of years with them. Later I formed The Solenoids, with whom, in addition to playing guitar, I decided I was also going to sing. We lasted five years with them until 2011. Then came Playa Ángel, where I went back to playing guitar and started writing some of the repertoire's songs. We lasted another five years with them." Finally, in 2016, Mario wanted to start a more personal and untransferable project, singing, playing guitar, and composing, and thus The Deathlines were born. They have just released their debut album Interzone (Kraken), in each of whose grooves one breathes a love for Kurt Cobain's band and other 80s and 90s rock bands like Hüsker Dü, R.E.M. or No More Lies.
In addition to being in the full presentation phase of the new artifact in different cities, the parishioner writes about music for headers such as Ruta 66 and is currently immersed in writing, with several hands, a book "that covers and explains a very specific stage of a singer and songwriter I like very much." Activities to which he adds a "very vocational" job as an English teacher in a high school in Santa Perpètua de Mogoda and a newly premiered fatherhood, that of his daughter Greta, who has just turned one.
Many worlds that are of this one
When he was eleven years old, Mario went with his family to Mexico. "My parents had never left Spain and suddenly there we were, a family from Vila-seca crossing the ocean to live two years in Veracruz, where everything was so different. That made me realize two things: the world is not that big, nor should you be afraid to travel. When I returned to the town at thirteen, everything was already different. I was no longer the same," he recalls.
Years later, already as a teenager caught in the maelstrom of music, the local would visit the tourist bars in Salou, where bands he was interested in performed and no one spoke a word of Spanish, let alone Catalan. "It was a feeling of getting into other worlds within this one. On those nights, I established the link between music, leisure, and the English language. I studied English to properly understand what those songs were saying!" Falling in love with literature at that vital moment meant an almost inevitable squaring of the circle that led him to take a bold step. "After two years studying a metal mechanization module, I told my parents I wanted to quit because what I really wanted to study was English Philology. And they trusted me again. That step defined every subsequent stage of my life, until today."
For all this, the musician is especially proud "of having stumbled so many times in my life, of having fallen and having known how to get back up."
A full relationship
For a kid from Vila-seca in love with music, Barcelona was an obvious destination from many points of view. "I remember that the six thousand pesetas they gave me for winning a short story contest at my high school helped me come to the Palau dels Esports to see Bob Dylan," he recalls.
--- I imagine there came a time when you came to the city much more often.
"Yes, it was around 1999, with the boom of Scandinavian bands like Hives or Hellacopters that often came to play here. I went to many of those concerts and wove a circle of friendships linked to music," says the local before sipping a drink of beer. "It will soon be thirteen years since I've lived here ---he continues--- and now I can say that my relationship with the city is full. It's no longer just festive, based on the musical offerings, but I can say it's my home."
But, like all homes, there are aspects that fail. "I don't like the way Barcelona is sold as a cultural model, when the truth is that many of its minority expressions lack spaces to express themselves. Nor do I like it when I see dirt or violence in some areas, which seems to take the city back to a past I didn't experience," he reflects, finishing his beer as the first bars of the Flavour of the month by the Posies fill the air.
--- What you can experience is our gastronomic offer with the following beer. We have combo dishes, sandwiches, menu, à la carte, tapas… And all outstanding.
Mario Silvestre fixes an expressive blue gaze on the displayed dishes and, after taking the first sip of the next beer, decides on a portion of tripe.
--- What my father and I always order when, in summer, we both go through the neighborhoods of Tarragona to have lunch in workers' bars--- he explains in allusion to those unrepeatable vital moments, in which the most beautiful emotional memories linked to good flavors are cemented.