Ska-P hail from Val­le­cas (Mad­rid), Spain, and were act­ive from 1994 until 2005. In 2005 the band took a break to work on side pro­jects, but reunited in 2008, and released their sixth album in Octo­ber that year. The name of the band comes from, obvi­ously, ska music, but also is a play on the Span­ish word escapar (to escape), and is sup­posed to be pro­nounced “es-kar-peh”. The band have a huge fol­low­ing in Spain and Latin Amer­ica, and a smal­ler, but still sig­ni­fic­ant, fol­low­ing in Europe and North Amer­ica. El vals del obrero, their 1996 record released on RCA pro­pelled them into the pub­lic eye with their song “Can­nabis”, their most fam­ous track by far, account­ing for almost twice as many last.fm listens as any of their other tracks.

The band’s lyr­ics often address polit­ical issues such as, as with “Can­nabis”, the leg­al­isa­tion of marijuana, but also racism, cap­it­al­ism, sup­port for Palestine, the death pen­alty and bull­fight­ing in their nat­ive Spain. The band are broadly left-wing anti-establishment lib­er­als, but they have come in for cri­ti­cism due to their being based on a major label (Sony BMG), and per­form­ing at events such as the Pepsi Music fest­ival, which seems to con­flict with their anti-capitalist atti­tude. How­ever, they have also per­formed at a vari­ety of anti-globalisation and altern­at­ive festivals.

Lágri­mas y gozos, their most recent album, was released in 2008, and was sup­por­ted by a small tour of West­ern Europe and South Amer­ica, how­ever the band have been tour­ing through­out 2009. They will be play­ing at Szi­get as one of a num­ber of European fest­ivals this year.

Spo­tify

Image was found here, released under a CC-BY-SA licence by Andrew