hurrengoa
bide ertzean: talking at the side of the road    I  txo!? We were at the last concert on the Don Inorrez tour. We’d wanted to write about Bide Ertzean for a long time. As the group’s name explains (“At the Side of the Road”), it’s one of the few groups
making a type of music which has been isolated and ignored here over the last few years. Many things have changed. As far as music’s concerned, many frontiers have been broken and many
walls have been knocked down. But Bide Ertzean is still true to its name. They’re still on the road that they chose, they don’t go where fashion tells them to. Live, it’s great to hear a group
which doesn’t use the mixing-table effects and pre-recorded instruments that so many groups use nowadays, just good musicians giving a good, clean live show. Bide Ertzean are like that.
We didn’t want to do this interview before the Don Inorrez tour ended. It always seems that the media aren’t interested when there’s no product to promote. Now the tour’s finished, after so many concerts, what’s it like relaxing and decompressing?

It’s great to have a bit of time off and clear your head. We usually write our songs when we’re relaxed. And we haven’t had time to look at any new ideas recently. It’ll be good for us to spend a bit of time apart, too, so we’ll really enjoy getting back together again later on.

It’s been fourteen years since you formed the group. For those of us of a certain age, Bide Ertzean was formed by former members of Deabruak. But Bide Ertzean has been a longer, more rewarding project. Have those continual references to the previous group got in your way?

You introduce your new girlfriend to your friends. To your surprise, most of them say: “Your previous girlfriend was nicer and prettier”. You can all get lost!

Bide Ertzean has broken many moulds in Basque music. You went against the tide of hard music and brought us an innovative new offering. Acoustic pop, American sounding rock, carefully sung not-too-fast songs ... It’s a clear option today, but do you think what you were doing was understood at first?

Sorry, but I don’t think we’ve broken any moulds! We haven’t invented anything. We haven’t innovated anything and we’re not very original. Not when we started, not now either. We’ve
tried to create our own style over the years. I don’t know if we’ve managed to do it or not. The context, and maybe you’re right about that, wasn’t the same as today. All of a sudden, we weren’t allowed in to play in some of the places we’d been as members of Deabruak Teilatuetan. So people said we were too poppy or commercial. Stupid things like that. But I wouldn’t pay much attention to that. We’ve always been very well received. A few people have liked our music from the start; another few have come to like our songs later on. But many people have never bought our disks. That’s to be expected, anyway. At the end of the day, it’s all about what you like.
About the last part of the question, Basque music has diversified in recent years. As far as style’s concerned, I mean. There are many different things on offer now, and we’re happy to be alive right now.

You started off as a threesome – Jon Ubeda, Imanol Ubeda and Karlos Aranzegi – and later on Fran Iturbe and Joserra Semperena joined up. What does each one of you bring to the group?

Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to anyway: I don’t know any bass player like Karlos Aranzegi around here. He knows how to play hard, how to create a hypnotic atmosphere ... And he’s just like a metronome! Like Karlos, Joserra and Fran, too, are musicians with a lot of resources. They have a lot of influences and have played with many different musicians and have a lot of experience. You can hear all of that when Bide Ertzean plays. And they have another very important thing in common: they put each song before any type of individual limelight. Perhaps Jon, our bass player, has come on the most since 1998. It’s been good for him to play along with Karlos. As he’s played well throughout the tour, we let him turn the amp on at our last concert, at the Kursaal.

As well as the music, another of Bide Ertzean’s identifying symbols is good lyrics. As well as your own lyrics, you’ve also used many other writers’ words (Jose Luis Otamendi, Kirmen Uribe, Mikel Ibarguren….). In your lyrics, as well as being poetic and avoiding over-simplicity, you also keep clear of falling into pamphlet-style dumbness …

It’s one of the group’s symbols. We try to get close to poetry. If people read more, they’d realise that some great texts are being published. And that brings something else with it. Having to write your own texts. We try to make sure there’s not too much difference between the poems and our own lyrics. I think it’s worth making the effort. And there are good people around us to give our lyrics a last look-over. We’ve never been afraid to own
up to that. They’re very strict, and we’d often like to cut their heads off. After showing them our lyrics, we have to go home and write them all over again, which it a tough experience, sometimes you despair. But it’s almost always a good sign. Because the final result’s always better.

You also work hard on the audio-visual things you use in your concerts. Have things moved forward in that sense in the Basque Country?

I’d say they have. Even so, who had a video projector a few years ago? This technological tidal wave has brought some good things with it. It’s much easier to get hold of some technical
resources now. If you use them well in a show, they can be great compliments.

One one time we lived in a musical ghetto. You couldn’t put a Duncan Dhu sticker on a school folder which already had a Kortatu one on it. What’s the picture like today?

I don’t know what to say. I haven’t been to school for a long time! I don’t have children and I don’t know what things are like now. But I imagine some kids will have Berri Txarrak stickers
and others will have Justin Bieber ones. It’s also down to the age, to a large extent. But then again, maybe nowadays music philies and phobies are not as radical as they used to be.

What way do you think Bide Ertzean will go from here, or are you going to leave that up to fate?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind... We’ve been going non-stop since 2009. We brought out Leidor Sessions and Don Inorrez one after the other and we’ve enjoyed both records immensely. But, right now, we need a bit of a break. We want to get into our rehearsal studio and get down to the new ideas we’ve got in mind. And the rehearsal studio will tell us when we’re ready to return.