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From album
Yendo de la cama al living
Charly García · 1982 · Track 7
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The story behind
In Peluca telefónica, Charly García isn’t singing about an object, but about a state: the blend of artificiality and urgency that defined Buenos Aires in the early 1980s. The song sounds like a parade of overlapping sounds, with a bassline that circles endlessly and a drumbeat that strikes where least expected. It doesn’t linger on the anecdotal; instead, it builds an atmosphere where the mundane—a telephone, a wig—becomes a metaphor for something larger, as if the city’s noise had barged into the studio uninvited. That tension between the domestic and the epic is what makes the track feel less like a song and more like a moment frozen in time.
He recorded it in August 1982, amid the final year of Argentina’s military dictatorship and just after the Falklands War. The ION and Panda studios bore witness to these sessions, where Charly mixed at ION with Amílcar Gilabert. The album Yendo de la cama al living was released that same year, featuring names like Luis Alberto Spinetta, Pedro Aznar, and León Gieco—the latter credited as "Ricardo Gómez" due to an exclusivity dispute with another label. The song wasn’t an immediate hit, but over time it became a track many Argentine musicians cite when discussing how to sound in the 80s without sounding like anyone else. In 2009, it earned him the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Premios Clarín Espectáculos, and in 2010, the Buenos Aires Legislature declared him an illustrious citizen.