Demolición

For a record-cover photo shoot, the members of Los Saicos once carried a sledgehammer, an axe and fake dynamite to a railway station, and were detained by the police for it. The band had formed in 1964 in Lima's middle-class Lince district, just out of high school, and first called themselves Los Sádicos, the Sadists. Perhaps to avoid being banned, they dropped the d, and liked that the new name suggested both a Seiko watch and Hitchcock's Psycho. After winning best of the week on a television show in early 1965, they got a contract with the DisPerú label. "Demolición", released later that year, paired humorously anarchistic lyrics about tearing down a railway station with the band's fast tempos, screamed vocals and aggressive riffing, and it became one of the biggest radio hits in Peru that year. Writing all their own songs, Los Saicos are sometimes called the first South American band to record only original material. By 1966, exhausted and with their popularity fading, they split up. Erwin Flores moved to the United States, earned a physics degree and worked for NASA; Rolando Carpio did not tell his children about his musical past. The rediscovery began in 1999, when a Spanish label reissued their recordings worldwide. In 2006 Flores sang "Demolición" in Peru for the first time in forty years, and in 2010 the Spanish newspaper ABC called them the first punk band in the world. Whatever the label, a Lima garage single from 1965 is now an anthem of Peruvian rock.