Alén Ayerdi owes his name to his mother’s passion for Alain Delon. The lady arrived at the Pamplona registry and asked: “Name?” “Alén, like the French star Alain Delon.” The mother, an Extremadura courageous who went to live with 11 years to Berriozar (Navarra) with relatives, died in 2010 with 63 years. It was in the five -year Ecuador that emotionally demolished yesterday. In 2007 he stayed a widower. The couple’s boy had only one year and a half. In 2012, heart problems began that took the operating room five times. They evicted: You will never be able to perform physical exercise. To all the setbacks was replaced, giving meaning to the term resilience: ability to adapt a living being in the adverse situation.
Today, yesterdaydi (Pamplona, 50 years) is the most powerful person in Spanish rock: it represents Robe and Marea, organizes tours with full pavilions, directs a record (Dromedario Records) who dispatches thousands of physical specimens and touches the drums In two groups, cyclonautas and tide. After listening to a summary of his future, Alén shrugs and says: “Life is like that, hard things happen to you and what you have to do is face them.”
The alén alarmus rang today at 7 in the morning. Breakfast, gym and trial to the little rocker at 10 am. Today with Ciclonautas, the band that formed in 2013, where it touches the battery, and that these days start a room tour to present their fourth album, Ecdisis (For sale on March 14). Tomorrow will rise at the same time, exercise the muscles in a pool and then go to the place with Marea, where he also takes care of the drumsticks from the formation of the band of the charismatic Kutxi Romero, back in 1997. In the afternoon, he goes to The Office of Dromedario Records, a record company that directs, three floors located on the outskirts of Berriozar, four kilometers from Pamplona. It is where we are now, in a large room with bottles of water on top of a large white table. All similar to any multinational office, except for an element: a marshall amplifier -shaped fridge, an unequivocally rocker aesthetic detail. “Kutxi gave it to me,” says the boss of all this, a company of 13 workers, from Benjamina Avril, 27, to the veteran Oscar, with 58.
Yesterday studied and ended the Economic career at the Public University of Navarra. The title looks in his office of El Dromedario. “I was good for the numbers. I combined the race with jobs such as newspaper delivery man or in a laundry. Then I worked on a tax advice and a bank, until the tide became serious, ”he explains. The musical poison was transmitted above all his uncle José Luis: he went home to listen to the vinyl of the Eagles, the Rolling Stones, Santana … but also of Franco Battiato or Kojón Prieto and the Huajolotes. In the institute he discovered the group that changed his life. “We all wanted to be like barricade: set up a band and play rock. In addition, they were from Pamplona. ” Then he listened to more urban rock, Rosendo, the soft, extreme … when he met Kutxi Romero, he was already right -handed with the drumsticks. When Marea starts Kutxi proposes the battery post.
But in February 2007, Alén stopped the world. His partner came out with some friends. She was the only one who didn’t drink, so she was in charge of driving the car. When he left at three at home and returned his home, a car in the opposite direction was stamped with his. The driver tested positive for alcohol test. Alén learned of his wife’s death while waiting for her at home with the couple’s son, Ian, a year and a half. “I had no grief or almost time to look inside and analyze how I was going to face that. Because he had a mission: take out a child forward and do it in an environment as happy as possible and full of love. Tide was already very high and I didn’t know what I had to do with the group, whether to leave it or not. But my parents, blessed, told me: ‘Don’t worry, continue with the group that we help you.’ And so it was, ”he says. Ian (name in tribute to Ian Astbury, singer of The Cult, a favorite band of her parents) grew without memories of her mother, since she was very small when she died. As he grew, he discovered how he died. Today, Ian is 19 years old, he maintains a magical relationship with his grandfather (“You would have to see them together,” Alén is excited), likes the rock of Foo Fighters and the rap of Natos and Waor, and studies business administration and management.
Alén believes that his heart problems had something to do with the stress situation that he lived when sending. “Maybe, because it was just when I saw that we had raised the child well; I relaxed and everything came out. Although it can also be genetic. I will never know that. ” In 2012, the stairs that lead to the Marea store jumping the steps of two by two, as always. He had to stop four times. He breathed with difficulty and noticed that the heart ran at high speed. Arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation, thrombus … medical terms with which Alén was familiar. An eight -hour intervention operated three times, but failed to solve arrhythmias. They told him that he would always have to live with that problem, that he had to medicate for life and limit physical exercise. Of course, nothing to touch the battery. “I was practically a retirement. I was desperate. And in the three months I went admitted I started investigating. I read an article that said that the Department of Cardiology of the University Clinic of Navarra had acquired a machine they had used with very good results in Boston. So I tried. ” Dr. Ignacio García Bolao “insisted” to cure Alén, and got it after two more interventions. “I no longer have symptoms. I have left even medication. I can tell you that my brands running and in swimming are better now than when I was 20, ”he smiles.
With the heart in the process of recovery, in 2013 he decided to set up the Dromedario Records. “With a previous group, Calaña, had had a negative experience with a multinational. We had paid the album and we were going to tour, so I went for records to the record of the record record to sell them in a year in concerts. They asked me 11 euros plus VAT for each one. But how is it possible, if I have paid it. Before, in exchange for a lot, companies gave you things, but now in exchange for everything you no longer receive anything. The artist pays the crisis of the little sale of records. I realized that this model was not viable. How an artist is going to develop if you get your feet and feet, ”he explains. He started studying all the paperwork to create the company, with the help of his knowledge during the economy career.
In 2014, the first cyclonauts album edited with Dromedario. Soon, a fortune arrived that was dodge so much: Extremoduro ended the contract with a multinational, Robe was aware of how the dromedary worked and decided to edit with them his first solo album, What flashes in our heads (2014). “Suddenly, a record label that I had mounted to manage small groups, it arrives and triggers everything. It is when I create a bigger infrastructure to steal and incidentally for when it came tide, which ended a contract shortly, ”he explains. In addition to editing the discs, Alén assumes the representation of the two bands.
Robe, who recovers satisfactorily from a pulmonary thrombus, explains to El País: “Alén has a record house, a hiring office and, in addition, he is a concert promoter. But, above all, he is a musician and thinks as a musician. He will not get rich with his businesses, but he sweats it. And when he doesn’t think as a musician he thinks as a spectator and wonders what he would like to see or listen to him. I usually say: Let’s see, uncle, that people are not so Friki Like you. And the ass is split. It is a great guy and I do not say it because it is my friend. I say it because it is legal and good person to the stubborn. Naburro, as he says. ” On Robe’s last tour, 310,000 tickets were sold, in Marea, 260,000. Both organized by Alén. They are numbers that do not reach any Spanish rock band. More difficult numbers to get in a digital industry: the dromedary has sold 50,000 physical copies of Robe’s latest work, The air takes us, and 30,000 from Marea, The foals of time.
Perhaps because of these large numbers, Alén is an awkward element, the head of a company held in a small town (Berriozar, 11,000 inhabitants) that the system cannot control within a sector where emporiums controlled by investment funds abound. Alén says they have made offers, but does not sell, and wants to fight against sector practices that seem harmful. “You cannot put a price of an entry that cannot pay the greatest fan of that group. We have to take care that music is not elitist, ”he says. And he continues: “The idea is sold to the groups that you have to hit a ball, and I think it should not be so. I trust evolutionary races. As many albums are not sold, the industry prefers to take only digital music, where the cost of production is little, because in many cases there are no musicians, and that seems the worst of the time we are living. It is the darkest era in the history of music. ” Most of the bands of their seal are rock, some of them young, such as cowards or lineage. But it also touches other styles, such as the one provided by a startle girl. Alén does not go from obtuse rocker: he positively puts the cases of C. Tangana or Dua Lipa, which he has seen in concert and “offer amazing shows with scandal bands.”
When leaving the office, already with the afternoon on top, Alén usually meets Kutxi Romero, his great friend and tide voice, to take a wine. They are cited in the Kutxitril, the fall of the singer’s house in Berriozar. The day we spend with him, when we arrived, Kutxi has put a live album on the records. Evaristo’s voice is heard while opening a bottle of wine. After a while, Mai Medina arrives, cyclonaut singer. “His work capacity is overwhelming; his will, unwavering; his resilience, inspiring; his passion, untouched; Its codes, immovable ”, Piropea Kutxi on Alén, which blushes. And he adds: “His father, every time he sees us together, he always says, joke: ‘Host, Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, I’m leaving.” The two laugh. An image of loyalty and friendship that summarizes the life of a man who rose a steep hill to seize the flag of Spanish rock.