The San Sebastian musician rescues some painful moments from his adolescence, such as when he accompanied his father to the funeral of one of his friends.
Pablo Benegas, member of Van Gogh’s ear, has published Memory (Plaza & Janés), a story of his young years marked by the presence of ETA in the Basque Country, as well as a memory of the beginnings of the band that gained popularity with songs like The beach or Paris.
“There is part of the hatred and fanaticism that was generated with ETA that is still there, because hatred was the origin of everything and a part of society continues to maintain it. That part is the one that has to reflect, because if not, it will be very difficult to look into the future,” said the guitarist in an interview with Europa Press.
Benegas, son of the socialist leader Txiki Benegas, has regretted that this hatred is “transmitted between generations”, and asks for a reflection. “In addition to having destroyed the lives of many people and many families, theirs and those of his families have been destroyed, and it was for nothing,” he lamented.
However, the San Sebastian musician is optimistic, convinced that one part of Basque society has always been generous and will continue to be integrated by the other part. “But they have to get the latent hatred out of there,” he pointed out.
In the book, Benegas rescues some painful moments from his adolescence, such as when he accompanied his father to the funeral of one of his friends. When burying his father after his natural death on the same street as the cemetery, Pablo Benegas remembered the intensity of the pain he had felt when burying him years before after his murder at the hands of ETA. “It seemed unfathomable to me,” he confesses.
That is why Benegas, who recognizes that the friendship of the group before being a group was “reinforced” in demonstrations that were the seed of the platform Enough is enoughconsidered the rehearsal space as “a refuge” to escape from the situation in the Basque Country.
“It was a place where I felt safe, like a refuge where nothing but what we wanted came in, right? It was a place that made me enjoy music, my friends, without worrying about anything else,” he defended.
The pro-ETA hoax
It also refers to Memory at the time when a rumor began to circulate that they were a pro-ETA band and that this had been the reason for a cancellation in a program that Pedro Ruiz directed at that time.
“It was very painful, because look there have been hoaxes about us that we have all taken as a joke and as a joke, but this was very painful where we came from and what my biography was. I remember it as a very difficult moment for the group, because there were also no social networks and yet this spread very quickly,” he noted.
Pablo Benegas mentions Amaia Montero, the band’s former vocalist, in the book. They both maintain a good relationship and she has been his advisor to recover some fragments of “individual memory” that did not coincide with the “collective memory.”
“As soon as I had something presentable to read, I went to his house to read it, because I needed his opinion. And he also has a very good memory and he told me several things that he didn’t remember: he has supported me from the beginning,” he highlighted. Of course, he maintains that one of the few things that they have not been able to remember is who was the first to decide that the name was going to be that of Van Gogh’s ear.
