Interview with Radio Paila: ‘Our next album will be collaborations with people who open my mind’

Bogotá’s riff rockers Radio Paila brought out a new duet ‘piel’ earlier this month with a brilliantly grungy bass line, seductive vocals and in-your-face drums, creating what they describe as ‘a new, groovy, electronic version of Radio Paila’.

The band comprises Godi Gaviria (vocals and guitar), Sebastian Cardenas (drums), Miguel Ángel Lasso (lead guitar) and Nicolas Alvarez (bass). Gaviria and Ángel Lasso met during Gaviria’s high school years at a gig at Ángel Lasso’s bar, where a friend of Gaviria’s was playing. ‘A friend of mine was playing there and I heard Miguel play ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and wow, could he sing!,’ Gaviria said. ‘He started shredding and doing all this crazy stuff. I met Nicolas studying at EMMAT here in Bogotá and I knew Sebastian from another band.’ Their name is a play on words, ‘paila’ means cooking pot in Spanish but takes on an additional meaning in Colombia: ‘In Colombian culture, it’s like “damn”, Gaviria laughed. ‘I wanted to sound really Colombian, so people would know we’re Colombian, I’m trying to carry the Colombian flag with me. We’re not pretty music for the radio, so it fits, it’s sort of satirical.’

‘piel’ (‘skin’), features guest vocals from Venezuelan singer Nani and is as sexy as the title suggests: ‘It’s a very sexy song, you get into character,’ he grinned. ‘Different registers bring out different things in your voice, my voice is very deep here. ‘piel’ has a very cool story. There’s an Artists in Residence (AIR) program here, a kind of mentoring with workshops. I was taking part and thought what should I do, I’m out of songs! I created a concept, more synthetic rock. We only had a month to write and record it. Nani is the mother of my daughter, we have a lot of chemistry, she’s a great singer. I’d written the melody line and I called her and said ‘I don’t know what to do” and she helped me write it. It was very organic, it was right in front of us the whole time. I wanted to do something like Gorillaz did on their last album (Song Machine, 2020), where they did collabs with punk artists, with Elton John, just so many genres. Our next album will be collaborations with people who open my mind. I’m working on a new song with a friend, Victor Martin, that’s flamenco riff rock. He plays bluesey rock, he’s Spanish, he’s cool. We went to Berklee (Berklee College of Music is a private music college in Boston, Massachusetts) together.’

‘piel’ turns out to have been inspired in part by ‘Pretty Waste’, a song by London rock band Bones UK, and when I listen to it afterwards, I notice that it has a similar grungy, fuzzy bass line. ‘It’s just two girls but they’re the heaviest, most authentic, wow! They’re so rock ‘n’ roll, I love that song,’ he said.

‘It’s my home and I have a lot of love for it but I also like to make fun of it’

In June, Radio Paila brought out their second album, Dos (‘Two’), the follow-up to their album Lodo (‘Mud’) in 2017. One of the stand out songs on Dos is ‘En esta ciudad’ (‘In this town’) about their home town of Bogotá: ‘It’s a satirical, almost comical take on Bogotá, we have the reputation for being selfish and mad the whole time,’ he said. ‘All the stereotypes – a lot of them, anyway – are true but it’s my home and I have a lot of love for it but I also like to make fun of it – the chorus says we’re all arseholes!’

It does: ‘En esta puta ciudad, ¿qué? No cabe otro malparido, hey. En esta puta ciudad, ¿qué? No cabe otro malparido.’ (‘In this fucking city, what? There is no room for another arsehole, hey. In this fucking city, what? There’s no room for another arsehole.’)

The ‘Dos’ of the album title refers to both the fact that it’s their second album and to the duality of their music, according to Gaviria: ‘There’s a great psychologist, Jordan Peterson, who says “When you try to find truth, you find chaos” – our human conduct and behaviour, there’s a lot of poetry and beauty in that.’ The fourth track on the album, ‘Calla al Enfermo’ is an altogether different track, starting off as a ballad before evolving into a hard-hitting, slightly morbid rock song: ‘The chorus is about being down the well but the ‘well’ here is death,’ Gaviria said. ‘The whole song is flirting with the idea of going down the well.’ It also features Colombian band Mad Tree: ‘It’s very different,’ Gaviria agreed. ‘It’s the point on the album where we say “Let’s get serious now”. Sebas (from Mad Tree) is so talented, he came up with his part, I was so fascinated. It was the first time we’d had a piano on a song. Sebas is very chilled, I’m very effusive, I show my emotions more than he does!’

‘My idol is Chris Cornell, we all wish we could sound like him’

I say that on some songs, most notably on ‘Pesimista Sociedad’ on Lodo, he sounds uncannily like Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder and he grins: ‘It’s funny, I get that a lot,’ he said, sounding thrilled. ‘These guys are my idols, if I sound like him, it’s a huge, huge compliment. It’s funny, when I started singing, I didn’t know Pearl Jam and someone said I sounded like him and I said “Who, what?!”. I’m very grungy, there’s a whole aesthetic to that style, it just sits right with me. My idol is Chris Cornell, we all wish we could sound like him. I cannot compare myself to Eddie Vedder – he’s up there (he gestures above his head) and I’m down here, still learning. The story with Chris and Eddie gets even cooler. Chris Cornell writes ‘Say Hello 2 Heaven’ for his band Temple of the Dog (as a tribute to his roommate, Mother Love Bone singer Andy Wood, who had recently died from a heroin overdose). Around that time they found this shy kid in Seattle to sing ‘Hunger Strike’ with him, that kid was Eddie Vedder. Every word in that song means something to me, it makes me feel very real.’ I ask him if he’s covered it: ‘I’ll cover it in my room but we haven’t played it live,’ he said.

Interestingly, he’s not such a fan of ‘Pesimista Sociedad’: ‘I feel like I was really immature, composition-wise. I was running with whatever was on my mind, it’s whiney!,’ he joked. ‘Conceptually, it’s about society being apathetic and I see that reflected in myself and others, the idea of being born into a privileged family and to be blessed. I never needed anything and I think I’m carrying around the pessimism and the guilt of being privileged.’ Other songs, such as ‘Todo Es Normal’ have been inspired by well-known songs, such as Nirvana’s ‘Polly’, which is about the abduction and rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tacoma, Washington, in the summer of 1987. ‘In their song, he has her sequestered, he’s raping her against a very pretty melody. There you have that duality. For us, it wasn’t an easy decision to write about murder and kidnap but I wanted to do something like that, it’s meant to sound very sexual, this guy who feels guilty because he wants pleasure. You think at first that our song is about sex but it’s actually about the ‘pleasure’ of killing someone. It’s his normality, his family and co-workers don’t see this side of him, they think he’s a normal guy. There’s the line “My mother is calling me, if I pick up she’ll hear the screams” (‘Mi madre llama ahora a saludar. Si contestara oiría gritar.’). I was so in love that no-one knew what the song was about but the video makes it implicit.’ (It does, in it, you see a man bind another man’s wrists and pull his covered body across the ground.)

As the track kicks off: ‘Olor a ser humano, placer a corto plazo, pincel va coloreando, el iris ya desdibujado.’ (‘The smell of a person, short-lived pleasure, brush is colouring, the iris already blurred.’)

Behind him on our Zoom he has an array of guitars, so I ask him if he has a favourite and he grabs it to show me, a Mexican Telecaster: ‘I’ve been playing it since I was 11,’ he said. ‘I’m an engineer, I studied sound production at Berklee, so I’m super techie in some ways but not with gear (laughs). Everyone who plays it says it’s insane. It’s the same guitar I play on ‘Parece’ (from this year’s album, Dos). I have a solo in the section in the middle with riffs and odd meters.’ Despite its inherent rockiness, ‘Parece’ (‘It seems’) has a distinctly bluesy feel, I tell him. ‘A lot of our songs have that bluesey character. When you play the blues scale, a #4, it’s an unusual note, I use it in everything, wait, I’ll show you.’ He plays a minor scale and I see what he means. ‘That note – here, it’s an F# – creates so much tension.’

‘I want to dive into their world and create something weird to listen to!’

Gaviria is mulling what shape the next album will take and who he’d like to collaborate with on it. ‘You want to work with people you admire but it’s also about compatibility, personally and musically. I’ve reached out to a few but they can’t or won’t. We’re not Gorillaz (laughs), it takes a lot of time. I want to dive into their world and create something weird to listen to! We all have our ghosts, a melody or a riff.’

Radio Paila have been hugely influenced by Seattle rock band Alice in Chains, according to Gaviria: ‘Everything about them has inspired us, the mood, they’re non-pretentious.’ He is also a fan of Guns ‘N’ Roses, Aerosmith, Tesla and AC/DC. ‘It explains our love of big riffs because my parents don’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll at all,’ he laughed. ‘My cousin and teachers shaped my creative head.’ If he could go to a gig tonight, there are several bands he’d love to see: ‘Boca de Serpiente, they’re so cool, or La Sociedad de la Sombrilla (both local rock bands), they’ve been around longer than us but we’re the same age. Consulado Popular, they’re the biggest party band! They put on such a show, my mom could go to their show, not like rock but love it. Seis Peatones, they had an album out in 2016, they’re sooo good, I really like their style. The Crash Kings (an LA rock band who haven’t been active recently and who may have disbanded) are really good, check out their song ‘All Along’ on their Dark Of the Daylight album (2013).’

Bogotá’s independent scene is very varied: ‘There’s acoustic, hip hop, rock, electronic and some punk bands,’ he said. ‘There’s also reggaetón, salsa and vallenato (which typically tells a story), which is a bit like mariachi in Mexico. I’m not a music snob, I don’t hold any grudges, man, people should listen to whatever they want.’

If he could hear one of their songs on any TV, he goes with Charlie Brooker’s TV series Black Mirror: ‘It’s scary, it makes you think, we’d fit in,’ he grinned.

(Photo from left to right: Miguel, Sebastian, Godi and Nicolas.)