Mauricio Redolés

His first stage was one of the dictatorship's prisons.

This is how he has told it: in 1975, in the old public jail of Valparaíso, a political prisoner sang in public for the first time on a borrowed guitar. Three songs, none of them his. He was in there because he had been arrested, beaten and tortured for belonging to the Communist Youth.

That prisoner was Mauricio Redolés, and over the years he would become one of the most singular, sharpest and best-loved voices in Chilean culture. Also one of the most poorly told.

Twenty-two months

He was born in Santiago in 1953. At twenty he was a Communist militant and a law student in Valparaíso, and he was already writing.

The coup split his life in two. At the end of 1973 he was arrested by men who identified themselves as inspectors of the Naval Intelligence Service. From there began a twenty-two-month journey: the hold of the ship Lebu, the Silva Palma barracks, the Melinka camp, the Valparaíso jail. He was tortured. His first poems were born in there, written in that confinement, which is a fact best left unadorned: his writing started where everything else had been taken from him.

In 1975 an exile decree removed him from the country. He landed in England, like so many others who left with no choice, and stayed ten years.

What London gave him against his will

Exile was a punishment, and it was also where he became an artist.

In London he studied sociology at City University, and above all soaked up a city that was boiling in those years: newborn punk, the reggae of the neighbourhoods, rock. He wrote, he sang, he self-released his first cassette of songs and poems.

And there another door opened. In 1983 the poet and critic Soledad Bianchi included him in her anthology of young Chilean poets, Entre la lluvia y el arcoíris, alongside names who at the time were also young and largely unknown: Raúl Zurita, Gonzalo Millán, Roberto Bolaño. Nemesio Antúnez illustrated a book of his poems.

London gave him, without his asking, a world.

The interrupted sentence

He came back to Chile in 1985 and settled in the Yungay neighbourhood, in the same house he had left behind. Like someone picking up a sentence interrupted halfway through.

He put together a band, Son Ellos Mismos, wrote enough to reach a contract with the Alerce label, and in 1987 Bello Barrio came out, on cassette. That record turned him into something that had not existed in Chile before: a cult poet-rocker.

He defines himself simply, and his definition is the best one available: a poet with a great admiration for rock.

Out of that crossing came his unmistakable mark. Poetry, rock, tango, blackest humour, and above all Chilean speech — the exact way people talk in the street — raised to poetic material. Redolés taught Chilean rock that you could be deep and streetwise at once; that Chilean idiom, swearing, jokes, the melancholy of the neighbourhood, were as worthy an artistic material as any other. While others sang in code out of necessity, he found that the code could simply be talking the way people talk.

The man he passed on the Alameda

There is one song of his that paints him whole, and it gives you chills: "Triste funcionario policial" — sad police official.

He wrote it, by his own account, after passing one of the men who had tortured him while walking down the Alameda, years later, in democracy. He did not run at him to hit him or push him under a train. What he felt, he said, was a mixture of terror and a terrible curiosity to get closer, to confirm that this monster was also a human being. He went home to his flat, picked up the guitar, and pulled the song out in one go.

That is Redolés: looking at horror head-on and giving it back transformed into bitter humour, into a poem, into something you can sing that still hurts.

He never sold out

And that is half the reason for the cult.

He wrote that his songs would never trouble the charts, and that they were fine as they were, small and independent. He always alternated albums and concerts with literature workshops, several of them in prisons: the same kind of place where he had first sung, closing a circle few artists dare to close.

In 1996 he recorded ¿Quién mató a Gaete?, produced by Álvaro Henríquez of Los Tres — Chilean rock recognising him as one of its own. The album ended up among the fifty most important records in Chilean music according to Rolling Stone. He won Altazor prizes in 2009 and 2014, and the Presidential Music Prize in 2022. He survived a serious accident that forced him to learn to walk again. He did not stop.

And in 2022 something else happened, which is not a prize and weighs more than all of them. The Chilean courts ordered the state to compensate him with a hundred million pesos for the torture he suffered under the dictatorship. Forty-nine years after they took him down into the hold of a ship.

It is time

Mauricio Redolés is alive and still writing and singing in his Yungay neighbourhood. In 2024 he released Redolés Lavanda, with unpublished poems from his exile years and settings of Roque Dalton.

If you have never heard him, today is a good day to settle that debt, because he is one of those artists Chile has and never quite looks at. Go and find Bello Barrio.

You will find a man who went through the worst a country can do to a person, and who instead of turning bitter came back with a guitar to tell it with humour, with tenderness, and in everyday language — ours.

He taught Chilean rock to speak Chilean.

Sources

Luis Mauricio Redolés Bustos (Santiago, 6 June 1953), Chilean poet and musician. A militant of the Communist Youth and a law student in Valparaíso, he was arrested in late 1973 by men who identified themselves as inspectors of the Naval Intelligence Service and spent some twenty-two months in detention — among other places, on the ship Lebu, at the Silva Palma barracks, the Melinka camp and the Valparaíso public jail — where he was tortured and wrote his first poems. By his own account, his first public performance took place in 1975 in the Valparaíso jail, with a borrowed guitar and songs by other writers. Exiled to England in 1975, he lived ten years in London, where he studied sociology at City University, connected with rock, reggae and punk, and self-released his first cassette. Soledad Bianchi included him in the anthology of young Chilean poets "Entre la lluvia y el arcoíris" (1983), alongside Raúl Zurita, Gonzalo Millán, Roberto Bolaño and others; Nemesio Antúnez illustrated his poetry book "Tangos". He returned to Chile in 1985 and settled in the Yungay neighbourhood, in the same house he had left; he formed the band Son Ellos Mismos and in 1987 released the cassette "Bello Barrio" on the Alerce label, which established him as a cult poet-rocker. He defines himself as "a poet with a great admiration for rock". He has said that "Triste funcionario policial" was inspired by a chance encounter, once democracy had returned, with one of his torturers. "¿Quién mató a Gaete?" (1996), produced by Álvaro Henríquez of Los Tres, appears among the fifty most important records in Chilean music according to Rolling Stone and among the six hundred most significant of the twentieth century in Latin America. He won Altazor prizes in 2009 and 2014 and the Presidential Music Prize in 2022. In 2022 the Chilean courts ordered the state to compensate him with a hundred million pesos for the torture he suffered under the dictatorship. He survived an accident that forced him to relearn how to walk. In 2024 he published "Redolés Lavanda", with unpublished poems from his exile period and settings of Roque Dalton. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, MusicaPopular.cl, PortalDisc and Chilean press coverage.