Los Saicos: The Peruvian garage rockers who invented punk rock
Evolution, despite mountains of scientifically proven research going back over a century, is still an endlessly disputed topic. No amount of religious fundamentalists and die-hard atheists, however, can compare to the lasting debate over the evolution and origin story of punk rock, which has waged on furiously since the first rebellious young hoodlum stuck a safety pin through their ear and spiked their hair up.
Typically, though, the debate surrounding the origins of punk rock as a musical movement centres around an unshakably westernised point of view, focusing on either New York City and its East Village underground, or the damp squats of London and the Roxy Club. Admittedly, it was the sticky floors of New York’s CBGB which gave punk its distinctive attitude, helped along by the likes of The Ramones and Patti Smith, while London and Vivienne Westwood helped to establish the aesthetic of the movement. In terms of sound, though, punk’s origins stretch back to much more exotic climbs.
Sonically, the uptempo abrasion and blitzkrieg delivery of punk took the core of its inspiration from the DIY sounds of 1960s garage rock, and although American outfits like The Stooges or the MC5 amassed a lot of the credit, the garage boom stretched far and wide across the globe. In fact, some of the greatest garage records of the mid-1960s arose from the airwaves of South America, with Los Saicos flying the flag for Peruvian proto-punk.
It was the teenage rock and roll obsessives Erwin Flores and Francisco Guevara who first formed Los Saicos back in 1964, when the pair were not long out of high school, and the crack team of Roland Carpio and César Castrillón filled out the rest of the line-up.
Immediately, the band adopted a fast-paced playing style and a certain air of aggression in their performance, which set them apart from the rest of the Peruvian rock scene at that time, which, as the 1960s went on, became more and more infatuated with the spaced-out hippie rock emanating from the USA.
Even in their earliest years, Los Saicos had landed upon the kind of sound, attitude, and faithful DIY approach that would typify the punk movement over a decade later. Groundbreaking, hip-shaking tracks like ‘Demolición’, for instance, wouldn’t have sounded out of place performed in the confines of CBGBs or The Roxy, were it not for their Spanish language delivery. The very fact that the band performed garage rock in their native tongue, however, was revolutionary in and of itself.
At that time, for the most part, the rock scene in Peru and surrounding nations across South America was largely made up of – often pretty lacklustre – cover versions of American rock songs. Whereas Los Saicos always made a point of writing their own original material and performing said material in their own language, rather than bowing down to the trendsetters north of the border.
Despite their trailblazing quality – or, perhaps, because of it – Los Saicos never made a huge impact outside of their native Peru. In the two years that the band were together, the group managed to amass a cult following of like-minded garage rock rebels and even had a handful of local hits. On a global scale, though, Los Saicos never escaped the shadows of obscurity.
In the many decades since the South American outfit went their separate ways in 1966, though, their pioneering proto-punk sounds have been reissued, rediscovered, and rightly cited as predicting the later emergence of punk rock revolution. So, the sweat-drenched Iggy Pop and leather-clad Ramones might have amassed a lot of the credit, but punk rock is also indebted the the energetic sounds which emerged from Peru years prior.
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