Puts Marie

There is the story of Mariachi musicians, generations of human juke-boxes selling their music and their souls in the darkness of Mexico City, on Garibaldi square where drug traffickers are sung like new Zorros. Elsewhere, it is a waiters’ race in the streets of the old town, vestiges of a time when “waiters were still classy”. There are patches of grass eating the pavement and deep blue diving boards in Barcelona, Olympic relics crushed by the Catalan sun. Singer Max Usata picks his topics like polaroid pictures from his memory. “I was ten in 1992. On holiday in Italy, I watched a ping- pong match on TV. Sometimes, that’s enough to write a song a quarter of a century later.”