Well.
For once, I do have something of an excuse reason for another lengthy absence,
I’m currently fulfilling a long-held dream of staying in a foreign city for an extended period. I’m currently in Madrid, living life like the Spanish people, doing what the Spanish people do, so to speak… I’ve been here nearly a month and will stay another month.
To be honest, it’s weird, stranger than I imagined. I’m having fun, don’t get me wrong, seeing loads of beautiful stuff (impossible not to in an elegant city like Madrid) and getting lots of practice with my Spanish (half time report: still pretty poor). But still it’s weird and at times tricky to get used to.
Obviously, there’s been some record shopping – Madrid is a city where they still have record shops, loads of them – and I’ve been to a couple of gigs.
Fruko
The first gig I went to was a band called Jenny and the Mexicats who looked good on YouTube and the venue was pretty close to where we are. It was … OK. At their best they sounded quite like Calexico without the vast, expansive vision but never quite got hold of the audience. In fact, the audience will be my abiding memory of the night.
Now, I’ve been around Spanish and Latin people enough to know that they do like to talk, and quite loudly. But my previous gig experience, up in the VIP area for Weyes Blood had not prepared me for quite how much and quite how loudly they will talk through a gig. Right through it. Beginning to end. To be fair the ratio of excited young things to curmudgeonly old gits was quite a bit higher than normal, but it was still something of an education.
Not to worry, my second outing was likely to be a different affair with the ratio a little more in my favour, the main protagonist being genuine living-legend and classic star of Colombian salsa and cumbia, Fruko.
At this point, I’ll pretend I have always been intimately acquainted with a back catalogue that goes back to the seventies and give you a chance to catch up:
All good?
Much as I’d like to live my life on the set of seventies variety show, the actual set up was not quite like this on the night, Fruko’s “Tesos” are, I believe a thing of the past and the current series of performances (plus an album) are the result of a collaboration with a group of classically trained musicians called Classico Latino, led by Colombian pianist Ivan Guevara and British cellist Graham Walker. They have a webpage and a number of records, the last of which is a tribute to and collaboration with Julio Ernesto Estrada Rincón, better known as King of the Salsa, Fruko.
The venue itself, Sala Villanos, was pretty special too, apparently quite an old one with bars down both sides and unusually quite a set of tables and easy chairs in the front of the stage, with space for dancing in the back. The seats were generally taken by an older set of punters for whom Fruko must have been the sound of their roaring years. I sat at the bar.
The man himself rationed his appearances pretty carefully with walk on parts in both halves of the evening. A little fragile he may have looked, swathed in wraparound sunglasses, glittering jacket and a James Brown-style wig, his lively fingers, however, gave a real swing to the evening as soon as he picked up the bass.
Having been pretty quiet for much of the evening, rather sweetly, at a number of points, the noise level increased as the seated folk at the front joined in the songs in spirited fashion – clearly the sound of years were rolling gently back. It was not a little moving. And for once even this flinty-hearted old git put aside performative eye-rolling and passive-aggressive tutting and smiled indulgently.
A lovely evening
Partly Porpoise 