The Hit Nobody Heard Outside Lima: How Los Saicos Spent Thirty Years Not Knowing They Had Invented Punk

In 1965, the biggest song in Peru was about blowing up a train station. “Demolicion” was a national radio hit, its band had its own television show, and its four members were teenagers from a middle-class Lima neighborhood who had never heard the American garage bands they are now compared to. Outside Peru, almost nobody knew any of this had happened. It would take more than thirty years, a Spanish record collector and a British cat food commercial for the rest of the world to catch up.

A singer problem, solved badly

Los Saicos formed in the Lince district of Lima in 1964, when high school friends Erwin Flores and Pancho Guevara recruited guitarist Rolando “El Chino” Carpio away from a rival band, Los Steivos, and then taught Cesar “Papi” Castrillon to play bass from nothing. None of them could find a frontman they liked, so Flores and Guevara simply split the vocals between them, trading lines and screaming over each other when the arrangement called for it. The habit stuck, and it is a large part of why the band sounds unhinged in a way its polite British Invasion influences never did.

Even the name was a compromise. They started as Los Sadicos, “the sadists,” and dropped the d when it became clear a Lima censor was not going to let that word near a record label. Los Saicos landed somewhere between the Seiko watch brand and a stray syllable of “psycho,” which suited a band that would soon release a song about burying live cats.

Three chords, no politics, one demolished station

Flores wrote “Demolicion” during a rehearsal in 1964, built it on three major chords, and released it through the local label DisPerU in May 1965. The lyrics describe tearing down a railway station for no stated reason, which is either a coincidence or the safest possible subject for a band writing in a country under a military government: violent, gleeful and completely apolitical. The rest of the catalog followed the same nihilistic logic without ever tipping into commentary. “El entierro de los gatos” is about burying cats. “Camisa de fuerza” is about a straitjacket. “Fugitivo de Alcatraz” needs no translation. Six singles, twelve songs, no album, and by most accounts of the period, no plan beyond the next single.

It worked. Los Saicos got a national television show, packed out a famously stiff, upscale Lima venue until the room went from silence to uproar, and then, in 1966, simply stopped. Flores has described it since as nothing more dramatic than a group of teenagers tired of being around each other constantly. There was no final show and no announcement.

Found again, thirty years later, by strangers

The members scattered. Flores eventually settled near Washington, D.C. and worked at NASA and then in pharmaceuticals, having no idea his old band’s records were quietly changing hands among Spanish collectors. A reissue on the label Electro-Harmonix surfaced their music at the end of the 1990s, Munster Records became their exclusive catalog holder in 2012, and “Demolicion” went on to soundtrack a British cat food advert and turn up in the horror-comedy “Satanic Hispanics,” which is a strange kind of afterlife for a song about dynamiting public transit infrastructure.

The band reunited for anniversary shows in Lima in 2006, forty years after they had last played together, and finally toured Spain in 2010, where the newspaper ABC crowned them “the first punk band in the world,” a decade before the Ramones existed by most timelines that matter. Flores has never fully accepted the label. “We were proto-punk, not exactly punk,” he has said. “We were predecessors to punk.”

That hedge is the more interesting story than the crown. Los Saicos were not an underground band by temperament. They had a hit, a TV slot and a country’s attention. What kept them underground was geography and timing: a genre named for them by people who found their records decades after the band had already dissolved, in a country nobody was importing garage rock from in 1965. Sometimes the underground is not where a band chooses to hide. It is just everywhere the record never got shipped.