Visiting the legendary Libertad 8 café in Chueca is one of the defining moments in the life of every Madrid-born or -adopted student who prides themselves on it. At least it was for me: I was dragged to this small Madrid venue, which preserves its centennial structure, by one of my older brother’s friends, who spoke to me of its past as the seat of the PCE’s railway cell and later as a tavern where unionists, communists and other activists against the dictatorship gathered. It was also a hotbed of journalists, writers and thinkers, and in the café’s tiny stage, which began its life as such in 1976, she explained to me, some of the faces of the new wave of singer-songwriters born in the 1990s took their first artistic steps: Luis Pastor, Pedro Guerra, Gemma and Pavel, Jorge Drexler, Rosana, Ismael Serrano, Javier Álvarez, Tontxu, Amaral, Carlos Chaouen, Luis Ramiro, Marwan, Andrés Suárez…
Many of these faces were immortalized by the photographer Jerónimo Álvarez, who used to attend the venue with his brother, the singer-songwriter Javier Álvarez. “At that moment he was working on his first album and bursting into the commercial universe; I was a bit younger and just starting my professional path,” explains Jerónimo, who back then wore the camera always around his neck, for Condé Nast Traveler, where he now collaborates frequently. “I didn’t know that place until my brother and other peers from the same generation, such as Pedro Guerra and two other members of Taller Canario, Andrés Molina and Rogelio Botanz, began to revive interest in live concerts, in intimate, small venues. There had already been a previous wave with Pablo Guerrero, Luis Pastor, Sabina… this was already the sap of new life.”
What do you remember about those golden years in Madrid, in that place of first times? “I remember that some of us were fiercely young, with a lot of excitement, idealists. There was also a moment of political and social convulsions, protests,” the very stuff of that era… there hovered a sense of voices transferring from the old masters to the younger ones, a heritage from the classics such as Pastor or Guerrero, or the Latin Americans like Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez, and on the other hand other ways of understanding music. My brother Javier, for instance, tended toward a more Anglo-Saxon style, while others were more regionalist, like Pedro Guerra or Jorge Drexler, who came from Uruguay,” comments Jerónimo Álvarez, who exhibits in Libertad 8 twelve portraits of these 90s faces that made the venue their home, in an exhibition that will be open to visits until January 11, 2027.
