• PAUL GIL

    Madrid

  • PHOTOGRAPHS: JOSÉ AYMÁ

Updated Tuesday,30May2023-21:25

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The boys don't want to be Andres Calamaro anymore.

Before, 20 or 30 years ago, all the boys wanted to be Andrés Calamaro, dress as he covered, speak as he sang and do the things that his legendary figure projected. They were fantasies shared by the entire social arc that goes from the lumpen to the bourgeois elite, all united by the aspiration to look like the perfect hooligan.

Now the boys don't even know who he is or understand the grace of his fanatical love songs, disheveled individualism and free will with Los Rodriguez or solo.

Probably, even he doesn't want to be that Andrés Calamaro anymore, at least not entirely. It's impossible to know for sure because it's hard to get into your head. It is difficult to get into any head, of course, it is true, but in yours it is more difficult because you prefer to answer interviews by email, which should not be understood as a way to put a barrier, no, but simply to control the message. Not to get hot. Because Andrew gets hot and then he can regret it. In that he is still Calamaro one hundred percent. In that and in a legendary inability to not sit still.

Like salmon, it is still moving against the tide and is difficult to catch. Now he has 21 safe appointments that he will surely not miss: the singer from Buenos Aires walks his 61 years and a thousand songs on the stages of half of Spain in a huge tour that will last until September, 21 concerts from brand new theaters to outdoor festivals. The show is already underway, the questions were launched in an email and, one day, the answers appeared on the tray:

In 2022 you offered 38 concerts, I think it's one of your years with more concerts. Now you have a Spanish tour of 21 concerts. How has your relationship with the stage and with the act of playing live evolved throughout your career? I think that now I have acquired some bullfighting concepts, it is not something easy to explain in a few words but that's how it is. As a singer I am in sinuous evolution and I assume that not all concerts will be equally inspired. All the time.What can you not miss on tour? Good shoal.More or less extravagant requests from the rider? I have almost no requests, much less extravagant. Nothing exclusive for my personal use or consumption. We have available good snacks and dinner for the team of professionals and colleagues. I get to the gang yard, taste the ham and go out to sing. I am teetotal, I ask hot water for mate.¿How is your sentimental relationship with Spain? To what extent do you feel the country as another homeland? I am a musician and citizen, I toured Spain many times to play face to face with people who arrive with expectations and desires. It is a relationship that has nothing abstract but perhaps consists of a certain identity, private, human and personal attachment.

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"I had to be Latin American, but before I had a different thought about my origin"

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"I had to be Latin American, but before I had a different thought about my origin. Institutional indifference is resounding, abstract criticism is placed above the works it has to contemplate. What laziness! After the songs are presented one by one or releasing an album every two years and I have many recordings left out of the circulation of music on discs or stream. It is not a minor issue because we have a lot of permanent music and there is no system that makes it easier for me to release that volume of recordings with relative immediacy. We are elaborating an open library of recordings because listening to them alone is interesting but overwhelming a bit. In June, however, we released a live album mostly recorded at the Razzmatazz room in Barcelona, in 2010 [Carnival of Brazil is published this Friday 2]. Right now we are with several fronts underway, there are several albums planned and I usually go to the studio when we are not on tour. In June we are also going with a new edition of Tinta Roja. Other albums I have in my folder are: Huracán Milanesa, Jerry, Larrosa Songbook, Descarga Delgado, Salmón Sashimi Licencia Para Cantar and reissues of El Palacio de Las Flores and Grabaciones Encontradas. Then I start another year with honorable participations in albums: Abuelos Review, Miranda, Arcángel, Los Auténticos Decadentes, Pignoise, Javier Batiz and more. You compulsively compulsively compulsorily composed 20 or 25 years ago, you seemed to be constantly hunting for songs, how is the writing exercise now? A few years ago I was writing films and similar projects: a police written as a film script and the sketch of something more ambitious: a biblical, ideological and metaphysical choral dialogue. Then I wrote Creole verses for a whole year (2020), every day: thousands of verses, quite funny. I have content to expand Parachute and Laps and edit the book of bullfighting photography. I've been listening to my archive of recordings for a few months, which are thousands of things, literally. I have a special album planned but I prefer not to comment on what kind of recording it will be. A singer's challenge. It's hard to synthesize into an album, AC/DC did it very well. They had it much clearer, well advised by the older brother, virtuous, Scottish and with so many clear things that they did not even need to say them. I try to apply myself more in reading than in writing.What do you think has been your contribution in the cultural field of your time? A contribution is ambiguous, cosmopolitan, iconoclastic. Musicians contribute without asking for anything in return. We will be anonymous. The fate of singing is as it is. It was said and predicted. My contribution to popular music is modest, but I also do things for specialists, for other musicians and intrepid listeners. Let them work it out. And I would like to ask you to do self-criticism: what is left over and what is missing from your music? What have you done wrong? I didn't know how to imprint on a handful of records my genuine identity as a musical artist. I am a rock musician, to be a singer you have to give up many things. I was raised in the experimental avant-garde and instrumental rock. An accidental singer. I'm never going to fully deploy. It's not bad: I make music for music, then in concerts I always empty myself. Andrés Calamaro next to the bar La Esperanza, on Calle del Olmo in Madrid.José AymáWhat do you admire most about bullfighting? Bullfighting is studied and learned. Then it is admired – and excited – when it was learned. I admire the stillness, the improvisation, the purity, the bravery of the hard livestock, the Sevillian garbo, the simplicity, the temper, doing things slowly, going the other way than life and honor. The concept of honorable art that they have, which the old masters and writers, essayists and poets try to explain. The class they have with junk, seriousness, knowledge and courage.What is the best today, the one you most want to see? Do you choose the themes of your songs or are the themes that choose you? What do you learn from your dreams, do they relate in some way to your songs? I don't have great aspirations or spiritual paste. However, I grant the songs spiritualistic and prophetic qualities when they read the future, even if they detach themselves from any commercial, popular, sonic regulations: the recorded sound, rather than songs. Music exists in the embroque, the encounter of nothingness and the following, in real time. It's an individual thing, occasionally we go and do it in public. Sometimes it becomes a creative and demanding craft. It is also the huge ice beneath the crust of the sea.What is your most valuable possession? I don't have anything really valuable. A few guitars, good records... I would not mind giving everything away and keeping what is necessary.Do you accept your age? Yes, I accept it. Age made me a better singer and lover. The years have polished me a lot. Do you have faith in any political philosophy? I have an interest in reality. Faith is something abstract but enviable. Of all the men you wanted to be, which one frustrated you the most not to become? Jorge Ilegal Martínez.La concern about politically correct language, does it affect you in any way? I'm more affected by other things. I think today's world is what we do, what we read and the feelings we have. I do not adhere to news as an urgent, constant, biased and fallacious piece of information. There are as many worlds as there are people. In recent years Argentine rap and trap have exploded artistically and commercially, is it something that interests you, attracts you? Yes, quite a lot. I love Dillom, I also like Trueno.Is rock time running out? Will rock remain like jazz, as a vestige of another era remembered by nostalgics? Rock and jazz are unbreakable, ephemeral and eternal. There are always so many things to discover and study. You have been an artist for more than 40 years. How do you see art and culture now in relation to the 80s or 90s? Interesting. I'm not addicted to nostalgia.What's the biggest misunderstanding there is about you? It doesn't matter. I'm not a famous person, stars are songs that last three minutes. No one knows me.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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