Xoel López revives Deluxe for a single concert at the Dcode festival

• Interview Xoel López: "For the first time in my life I have cried on stage"

• Music The Rolling Stones land in Madrid to prepare their European tour

"

begins a new stage after leaving

" was the headline that occupied the newspapers at the end of 2008 when the Galician singer decided to put an end to that kind of Ziggy Stardust that crowned him as

.

Influences from the 60s, rhythms from the 90s, airs of British pop and a pseudonym: Deluxe.

Months later he went to Argentina and never looked back again.

Until now.

Deluxe's ​​songs will sound again

next September 17 in Madrid at the

festival , whose line-up will be announced this Tuesday.

It will be a single concert in 2022 that Xoel López (La Coruña, 1977) offers with the repertoire of that first project with which he launched his career and whose success, he tells us, he tasted like surprises.

"I came from various musical projects and had assumed that I was not going to make a living from this; it was alternative music sung in English. And it happened to me that it started to go well for me. Suddenly I found that the results were above expectations."

As of 2005 with the album

(Mushroom Pillow) there is no longer Britpop but a new Xoel López.

A fundamental step of artistic maturity.

"I started singing in English by mimicry, copying the music I was listening to that was more Anglo-Saxon. I started to feel uncomfortable before the change, I came from behind, I had been ruminating on it and I commented on it with my surroundings that I was not very in favor.

. '

own personality.'

The reference to Bowie, by the way, comes from that need to separate the person from the character, to create an entity that speaks for itself.

"I needed a project name, I didn't feel comfortable putting on 'Xoel López' because I was still defining my own personality."

Later, he claims he made the switch knowing who he was and what he had.

"I felt like it was time to take off that last layer. But until then I needed to hide under a name."

The reason for Deluxe comes from that mixture of fear and respect.

With ventipocos the one from Coruña did not want to believe that the best was about to happen.

"At that age you don't know what your life is going to be like, I didn't want to believe this very much, I thought it would be a matter of a few years and that the reason was that I had a little luck at that time...

. I did it anyway, with doubts, and until now"'.

But why did he kill Deluxe and why is he reviving him now?

At some point the singer felt that the character was finished.

A turning point was necessary.

"It was something that I had also wanted to do before and the trip was the perfect excuse: I am going to live in another continent, I will change my name. It had to do with a necessary artistic change and also, in part, a personal one, that I was beginning a stage new and left behind certain things. It's the definitive name... when you get to your own. I feel that more than reviving it, it's celebrating it".

The idea, he says, came about during the pandemic when the band came together virtually to re-record

Xoel López 15 years ago in the days of Deluxe.EM

About his jump to the Americas, he confesses that he did it to escape from all nostalgia.

"I felt that I had a lot to discover and also that

. Changing the project, the name, the place to also change the form of music and take advantage of the physical change to make it easier to make the emotional change. ".

He thus sought the freedom of the unknown, the one who does not have the eyes of the people.

"I know that I was

. Some of them are clear to me.

, to go back to a place where no one knew me. I was running away a little from those eyes that were looking at me, which were relative because it's not that I was Michael Jackson. But what that I had conditioned me slightly, I wanted to start a new project with a feeling of total freedom that if I had done it in Madrid it would not have happened to me. Maybe I would have found it in a house on a mountain, but I went to Buenos Aires".

Those five years away from the roots and Deluxe gave him perspective.

of life and country.

The artist wrapped himself in other visions, landscapes and, he says, in metaphors.

"It was a trip that gave me a lot of things and then there is the trip back,

. Your eyes look different, your ears listen differently."

Those five years also gave him the album

(Esmerarte, 2012) whose release is now 10 years old and where that American stage is compressed.

The singer tells us that he will do a concert that he cannot announce yet and that it will be at the end of the year when he will play the repertoire to pay tribute to a special album.

As he himself calls it, "

. An album that reflects my entire journey through Latin America and that I think deserves a review 10 years later."

And, in what emotional world is Xoel López after 20 years of music and life?

"In a balanced moment. I am no longer young or old.

. I don't know what is coming, maybe it is better, but I think I like it more than what was there. I consider it my vital moment better now than before. I don't have to think so much about what I'm doing anymore. There's something more harmonious and natural."

Xoel López, Deluxe, does not say goodbye to this interview without first answering one last question.

As that song says, is it still dancing, the important thing, despite everything?

"Dance and continue. As a metaphor and as a way of life, to beautify the world that is already beautiful but that also presents darkness".

Dance and go.

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