Let me think for a while...it was so long time ago!
Well, it was 1986 or so. I was a young boy just discovering the pleasure of music. By these time, I was in love with The Cure's "The head on the door", Peter Murphy, The Sisters of Mercy... and a lot of bands you could call "afterpunk", "pre-goth", or "goth" (if you like so).
One day I was watching a music program on the spanish TV and a new band appeared. It was The Essence playing "The cat". I liked the song, but I thought: "It seems like a Cure clone. The voice of the singer is like Robert Smith's, and the music is quite similar to Faith."
I didn't mind about the band for two years. One day I was at the disco and an incredible sound started playing. Everybody said: "Oh, a new Cure's song!". I remember I thought that the song sounded like The Cure, the voice seemed Robert Smith...but there was something different. So I went to talk to the DJ. I used to talk with DJs at discos, pubs, and asked them about this and that band. He told me that I was right, it wasn't The Cure, "It's a new band called The Essence, and the song is called A Mirage". Suddenly I remembered "The Cat", two years ago.
I used to go to Valencia two or three times a year for medical reasons. As I lived in a village without a record store, I took advantage of the travel to look for Essence records. I found the album "A monument of trust" but...oh, fuck! I hadn't got enough money to buy it. So I bought a spanish edition of "A mirage" called "Un Espejismo". All the credits appears in spanish and there are two versions of A Mirage sung in spanish. At high school, a friend recorded a tape with two songs: "The swaying wind" and "From my mouth". And that is all I got from The Essence until I went to university.
I went to Barcelona in 1990 to study a degree on computer science. There are a lot of record stores here, and I use to do a record stores tour every saturday. I found all the albums and singles from The Essence. Listening to the whole discography you can see that the band have a really special sound, nothing to do with The Cure, except as a starting point (and the voice of Hans, of course). In 1991 I bougth "Out of grace", and the band disappeared. I couln't find new records from the band in any record store. I thought they've splitted.In 1994 appeared "Dancing in the rain - the best of The Essence". This confirmed my fears about the end of The Essence.
I gained Internet access at university. I looked for information about the band and found nothing. So, I started building a page about the band. I contacted with some fans around the world, and this was quite pleasant.
But one saturday in 1995 I saw "Glow" at a record store. The band was still alive. Only Hans remained from the original band, and the sound was more powerful. Somebody told me about the official page of the band, and I began mailing them.
I only had a wish, to see them on stage, that have become true this month. Really great!