I was sixteen or seventeen. It was one of those teenage nights when going out was not a plan; it was the only plan. Almería, Friday night, the pub district, the usual friends, a few beers and cigarettes, drifting in and out of places without quite noticing when we had changed bars. Carried along by the night, we ended up at Vértice, the legendary pub on Cuatro Calles that is still open more than thirty years later.
Despite all the fog and thickness with which those drunken nights surround the memories, I am able to remember with absolute clarity the exact moment of crossing the door and feeling how it closed behind me.
Something passed through me.
I was left in a state of shock, stuck two meters from the entrance, as if someone had suddenly cut the rope that held me together with the night. Everything became a blur: my friends, the people, the alcohol, the walls. Only that thing was left ringing, filling everything: space, my head, my senses, my lungs.
I didn't know what it was. I didn't know who was singing. I didn't know where that strange mixture of fragility, rage and beauty came from. I also didn't mind not knowing at all. For a few minutes I stood there, suspended, dreaming within a song, within a sound, within vibrant and electric notes. As if that were not playing in the pub, but somewhere much deeper, in the very center of something I never understood.
When it was over, I returned to the world a little and the night fell again like a curtain of lead.
But I was left with a very simple question floating around:
What the hell was that?
I found out later—I no longer know whether it was days, weeks or months. It did not matter. The song was Radiohead's Creep.
Looking back, the curious thing is that discovering a song was not what mattered. I already listened to plenty of music; I already had my bands and my songs, many of which I still love. Music was not opening itself to me for the first time. I thought I already knew my way around it.
It was a different kind of door.
That night, one way of listening died. The song opened a crack. It taught me that something could play in any pub, in the middle of any night, and still pierce you at point-blank range, without warning, like a punch to the stomach—as though it had been searching for you for years.
It wasn't just pleasure: it was physical. The sudden suspicion that music could disorder me, turn me upside down, leave me suspended, split a night in two.
My adolescent way of understanding music did not die. That would be unfair: that stage was beautiful, intense and necessary too. Something else died—the way I placed myself before music, the way I confronted it. Another way was born: more exposed, deeper, far more honest and also more dangerous.