CHARLIE There’s something that happens every two or three months, after hours spent in front of a screen, trying to fix dates that I already know that will never get fixed: the thought and want of quitting it all, from records to concerts and go back to a life without too many ideals, back to seven years ago and its rhythm, just listening to music, going to bed early, and maybe hanging out again with the same girl of that time. After letting it out and cursing with the friends that have followed me in all this time, there’s an idea that’s stuck in the same place, convincing me to go on, towards an objective that doesn’t even exist. An idea that has grown slowly in the last eight years, fragile and distant when you don’t think about it, strong as steel when you frame it. It’s an idea about people at first, I mean friends, that I’ve met along a road to which records and shows have been a great soundtrack; for the few that stay and for whom its always worth, for those punk is just a way of keeping a relationship alive, and maybe without the feverish emails or the anxiety of not having enough entrance money at the end of the night it would become apathetic or, even worse, normal. Punk is the illusion that this can go on forever, it’s knowing that the situations in which you lost money and felt fooled around may be missed one day; because the community that revolves around us in its thousand figures, its nothing but a cross section of the very same society from which we wish to distinguish ourselves, and irresponsible, unfair and hypocrite persons exist here just as in the rooms of a corporation. Punk gives you the illusion of not thinking or believing it, the years make you think about friends, and concerts become parties, a way of seeing each other while a band plays: a while back I got in the car to see the band, now I move (when laziness gives me a break) for friends and the distance that keep us apart falls past quickly when the night ends with a hug and a smile. If one day I’d quit it all, probably I’d loose the long hugs and chance would become memory and regret and it doesn’t matter if this happens every month or once a year. What I know is that it’s there, and I can reach for it, records and shows give me the chance that all this may happen again next year. What matters are emotions that have connected me with some folks from my hometown; make-you-a-mixtape thing, ordering stuff together, talking about this or that record have been a starting point, but the finishing line was somewhere else, years ahead, in a city I love but where there’s nothing and indifference is evil. Punk is a smile that stays on the face after the last hug given before getting in the car, and the day after nor the train being late or rain can make it fade away. - In the end it’s just a beautiful idea. Hadn’t it been for that tape passed on by a friend, that strong hug, all those eyes in which we got lost found again, maybe this record would have never seen the light of day and all the words written would have remained in the wind, quickly becoming regret. Things will continue to change, but I’d never want to wake up without that idea. “I can still look up And vanish in the sky While I shake together with a stream …and think about the steel which ties us These years are running away You feel them approaching as crazy cars You turn around, and they’re far already… You wonder what has happened The anger of those days still burns inside But maybe so much poison Is with us again The others are still laughing… And we are here, to look inside ourselves No it’s still me You will not change what I have inside Maybe I have another face Have more scars than before I smile a bit less Perhaps I think more Don’t ask me if I won or if I lost” Kina, 1987