Spanish music has lost one of its most singular figures: Jorge Martínez, leader of Ilegales, has died at the age of 70, leaving behind him an artistic void that is difficult to measure. The news shakes the cultural scene because he is leaving behind a creator who combined hardness, lucidity, political incorrectness and an uncommon sensitivity. His absence leaves an orphan to a genre that he shaped in his own image.
Behind that tough guy appearance, capable, as it was always said, coexisted the cultured musician, the born provocateur, the explosive guitarist and the writer of lyrics that marked generations. His lanky and unpleasant appearance, as pointed out by those who knew him, accompanied him for more than forty years on the stages of Spain and Latin America.
A brilliant lyricist and an essential figure of Ilegales
Martínez was always a classic frontman, owner of a scenic attitude that turned every concert into an artistic battle. “I’m not afraid of the whims of luck/ The certainty of death or what I might lose/ And I’m not afraid of the fickleness of fame/ My life among the ants doesn’t make me good or bad,” he sang in Mi vida entre las hormigas (2017), a song that perfectly portrayed his character and gave title to the documentary about his life.
Born in Avilés in 1955, raised in Gijón and settled in Oviedo, Jorge Martínez was much more than a musician: he was a multifaceted, free-spirited character, alien to molds, fond of collecting tin soldiers and a descendant of the historic Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. But that ancestry did not lead him to conventional paths: he chose transgression as a way of artistic life.
With his brother Juan he started in Madson, went on to join Los Metálicos, and in 1983 founded Ilegales with Íñigo Ayestarán and David Alonso. The group’s impact was dazzling: they landed with force in the volcanic eighties, marked by an unprecedented cultural explosion. With Tiempos nuevos, tiempos salvajes, Yo soy quien espía los juegos de los niños or Hola Mamoncete, Ilegales built one of the most solid catalogs of national rock, accompanied by an already iconic image photographed by Ouka Leele.
A long career, reinvented and without giving up attitude
Over the years, Ilegales accumulated titles such as Agotados de esperar el fin, Todos están muertos, Chicos pálidos para la máquina, El corazón es un animal extraño or Juventud, egolatría. There was also a break to explore other musical territories with Jorge Ilegal y los Magníficos, a project that recovered the orchestras of the forties and fifties with guarachas, tangos and chachachá. In 2011, that adventure showed his breadth of vision and his refusal to be pigeonholed.
The rocker, however, never left completely. With new lineups, and despite such hard blows as the death of bassist Jandro Blanco in 2016, he kept alive a band capable of continuing to fill venues and conquer audiences inside and outside Spain.
When he turned forty years old on stage, far from looking back, he decided to renew himself with La lucha por la vida, an album of unreleased songs with Loquillo, Josele Santiago, Andrés Calamaro, Luz Casal, Dani Martín, Enrique Bunbury and Iván Ferreiro. A sign of the almost unanimous respect he aroused among his colleagues.
His ideas on music, life and art
In 2021, he explained the validity of rock as follows: “Rock doesn’t get old because it appeals to human nature itself“. For him it was a tribal and cathartic question, as well as an ethical one: ” We live in a culture of money, but we are artists, and art is our priority. We have not taken the risks of all these years to do what everyone else is doing. We are the good ones. And you have to be very hard to be one of the good guys. “.
His relationship with musical creation was as visceral as it was unpredictable: “They’re bitches, the songs come at any time. At four o’clock in the morning, when you’re asleep at your best, I get up and pick up the guitar. And other times they call me when I’m at the height of the party and I have to leave. You have to do it that way, because the songs, if they go away, never come back again. “.
In one of his most memorable reflections, he summed up his life without regrets: “I have done everything I have wanted to do and I have been very successful in life“. And when he celebrated his four-decade career, he left another phrase for history: “I’ve done everything I wanted to do and I’ve been very successful in life”. I would ask for an extension, I would start over. It’s like with concerts: you leave with so much energy that you want to go back to the beginning. “.
