If history has always been written by the winners, in the case of Spain’s youth music of the late 50s and early 60s it has basically been told by the records, first by the few that were actually released, and finally by the lucky ones that enjoyed certain success and critical appreciation. Set aside as marginal, the rest have been left ignored due to the debatable and apparently set in stone statement that the history of Spanish rock starts with the legendary festivals at Madrid’s Price venue promoted by musician Pepe Nieto, then drummer in Los Pekenikes. Without wanting to reduce in the slightest the importance of those shows as a revitalizing element of our rock scene, the start date of those famed Madrid matinees (end of 1962) doesn’t respect the fact that at the end of the 50s, and at the pace that the autarkic Spanish society of the time allowed, the foreign young rhythms slowly reached our country with the healthy intention to stay and make us dance. Obviously later than their in the US (and even other European countries), but since the mid-50s until The Beatles appeared, raised their fingers and altered the route map, a string of fascinating rhythms and music styles such as mambo, jive, fox, jazz hot, cha-cha-chá, rock & roll and other variants provided the Spanish teenager of those days with a dancing frenzy that has never ceased. Dance, dance and dance, that seemed to be the way. Despite the insufficient development of our music industry, those years enjoyed an abundance of international record releases. Dozens and dozens of splendid EPs with stunning covers of new youthful images that soon found their obligatory Spanish counterparts. But above all, valuable records often ignored for decades due to a rushed view of history and the cruel supremacy of some genres above others. Today, there is hardly any doubt that the enthusiastic Spanish scene of the late 50s and early 60s was as broad and varied as was to be expected, and it’s not hard to understand the tremendous excitement of a generation of musicians that started travelling fast along a road which no fellow countryfolk had crossed before. The spectacular arrival of twist in Spain in 1961, undoubtedly one of the few tolerated cultural revolutions of those years, would prove to be a valuable turning point. Apart from its musical weight, twist was easy to dance to, bursting with rhythm and not strict on the age of its followers; besides, it could be danced to in pairs without touching, pure contemplative hedonism which would herald the coming of the mod aesthetics. Twist’s popular explosion was so big that some of our early music journalists declared that its tremendous success would end rock & roll… Truth is, after twist came other dances and rhythms almost at a monthly rate (just quickly enough so that nobody would get bored of the same moves) such as surf, the madison, the monkey, the hully-gully… Compiled by the passionate expert Miguel “Sr Patilla”, “Pippermint Twist” is born with the will to dig deep into that obscure period of Spanish rock history. As obscure as well hidden: the huge majority of the tracks chosen for this compilation were featured on B sides. Nuggets that were frequently placed there by the record company and sometimes even by the artist, still unsecure about the appeal of this new music. These 24 tracks gloriously present the sense of newness, strength and youthful dignity which made them possible during some musically uncertain years. Vicente Fabuel