The concert
that heralded it all

On Saturday 9 February 1980, in the assembly hall of Madrid’s School of Civil Engineering — the Escuela de Caminos — a handful of bands who could barely play staged a concert in memory of a friend. Admission was free, television filmed it and letters of complaint followed. Today it is regarded as the founding moment of everything that came after. The Caminos wears the lilac of a sky that foretells something and, on its seconds sub-dial, the coral of what was about to begin