Rock unites Argentinians, Brits on Falkland Islands

Nov 8, 2009, 7:30 GMT

Buenos Aires - The 1982 war with Britain for the Falkland Islands - which Argentina still calls Islas Malvinas - left deep wounds that persist decades later.

However, the shared dream of a London-based rock band and an Argentine veteran of the war is an example of fraternity that is on its way to the archipelago in the southern Atlantic.

'Not all things are solved through politics, through governments. There are other things we can do, one by one, face to face, acknowledging each other. Music has to do that,' Gabriel Sagastume told the German Press Agency dpa.

A veteran of the 1982 war, Sagastume discovered an Argentine- British band two years ago in London that showed in its drums a logo of both flags mixed together. That is how his dream was born, that The Draytones might take their music to the Falklands.

He did not know at the time that the band - with an Argentine singer and three British musicians - had set itself a similar goal when it was formed seven years earlier.

The dream is close to fruition: the Draytones are in Argentina, set to travel to the Falklands to play their music from November 14- 21 in the towns of Darwin and Saint George, an unusual leg on their Friendship Tour.

Many emails and phone conversations after that initial show in London, all those involved met in Buenos Aires in an emotional setting that cast generation gaps aside.

'When we formed the band we joked and said, 'We have to play in the Falklands.' Those things you say, which are not going to happen anyway, you dream of something that cannot happen,' singer Gabriel Bocazzi, 33, recalls.

An Argentine who has lived in Britain for seven years, Bocazzi hugged Sagastume in Buenos Aires as he braced himself for an even more meaningful experience.

'I still cannot quite believe it. It's very surreal, it's a dream come true. (Playing in) the Falklands is a top thing, it's something I wasn't expecting, something that was never going to be real,' he said.

'I feel we're taking something very good to a place where there was conflict. We are going to take music and smiles.'

Bocazzi said he expects a warm reception from Falkland islanders.

'It's simply music. The message is music. I think the Falklands make obvious a message that already exists since the band was created, that of friendship between Argentines and Brits,' he said.

Sagastume was 19 and a conscript soldier when he was sent to fight in the archipelago a week after the start of an invasion that Argentine dictator Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri launched on April 2, 1982.

Sagastume fought on Wireless Ridge with the Army's Seventh Regiment, and he stayed in the Falklands until Argentina surrendered on June 14, to end a war that killed 649 Argentinians, 255 Brits and two islanders.

After the end of the war, he spent several months living in a hospital to recover from his wounds.

'That was nothing compared to what other comrades endured,' Sagastume recalled.

'On the islands we all used to think that we were going to fight the English. We were 19, and our musical idols were Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, who were all English,' notes Sagastume, currently a public prosecutor.

He recalls that, during the war, the Argentine dictatorship alternated songs by The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and others with Argentine music.

'And that made me think that it was amazing how music can unite people,' he said.

That was how he came up with the idea that he passed on to The Draytones many years later.

'Hopefully you can go and play in the Falklands some day and be part of a pacification and integration process between both cultures,' he told them.

Many years after the war, The Draytones' music seeks to bring together Argentinians and islanders.

'It is very exciting. It is going to be an example of friendship, that we can sing together, be friends,' says drummer Luke Richardson.

Like his fellow Brits in the band, Chris Le Good and Andy Pickering, he had not even been born when the war was fought.

The Friendship Tour is set to take their music - with strong influences from the Mod movement, The Beatles and The Who - not just to the islands that Britain and Argentina both still claim but also to several venues across Argentina.