Spotify stirred up a 20-year-old memory for me this past week, and I thought I’d share….
In 1998, London dream-pop outfit Drugstore had only a debut album behind them when they called on Radiohead’s Thom Yorke to sing alongside frontwoman Isabel Monteiro on what turned out to be the band’s biggest single of their career, “El President.” The song’s reference to killing a leader referred to the 1973 death of Chile’s Salvador Allende (the world’s first Marxist elected head of a liberal democracy) during a coup inspired by our own CIA.
“El President” cracked the top-20 on the UK chart as the leadoff single on Drugstore’s second album, White Magic For Lovers. 15 years later, Drugstore included the song on a best-of set, coincidentally reworking the original video to include footage from the actual coup that inspired the song:
