One of the mantras that Raphael has in his life is that the past does not exist. A bucolic way of saying that he still has a long way to go despite having been on stage for more than six decades, a practically unique professional milestone in Spain for someone who is still active. I am sorry to say that we are going to have to contradict the artist on his 80th birthday: his past not only exists, but is a legacy in the form of a trunk, with a collection of songs that make up the soundtrack of many people and of different generations.
Fireproof. This would be one of the qualifiers that best define the mood and career of a singer who has known how to care for and pamper his vocal instrument in an impeccable way and an unusual willpower.
Perhaps because he learned from a very young age what it was like to have to earn a living to survive. With a father who was a bricklayer and a mother who sometimes worked cleaning other houses, Rafael Martos Sánchez was very clear ever since he first discovered a movie theater that he wanted to be an artist and help his family get out of their precarious situation, which in For a moment in his life he had to go to live in Carabanchel forced by his economic situation.
Before being that Raphael with h – the letter appeared when he signed his first contract with Philips with the intention of internationalizing his name – the artist born in Linares (Jaén) had made his first professional steps as a delivery man for suits at home or selling melons. But inside of him throbbed those emotions that he had seen in that movie tent, when he ran away from home for the first time and came back, at one in the morning, his mother slapped him so he wouldn’t stop. would do it again.
Late. That child made him vibrate and dream hard. The rest was a chain reaction thanks to his tireless work to get on stage. He took singing classes and Paco Gordillo entered his life, who would be his first representative. With him he shared the success of the Benidorm festival and became the first great modern artist of the 60s.
Later, the maestro Manuel Alejandro arrived, the perfect “tailor†for the artist who has composed many of the songs in his repertoire. There was a time when the three of them lived in the same building on different floors.
And Raphael’s international fame came thanks to his two participations in the Eurovision Song Contest (1966 and 1967) and the international concert tour. In El patio, in Mexico, is where the artist dressed completely in black for the first time and stayed that way for the rest of his career.
The artist has made his gestures, his scenic strength, his vocal potential and his somewhat mannered movements an unmistakable stamp as a crooner. In Las Vegas he suffered his first major health setback with mental fatigue that forced him to stop. Raphael broke up but at that time he had the great support of his current wife, a Natalia Figueroa, aristocrat and journalist, with whom he consolidated a relationship that no one was betting on. They got married in Venice in 1972 and have formed a family with three children, Jacobo, Manuel and Alejandra. The first two are dedicated to the music sector.
His dependence on alcohol ended with serious liver problems and the liver transplant operation he underwent on April 1, 2003. The second birthday for an artist who was born again that day and, far from throwing in the towel, reinvents himself over the years to continue perpetrating the religion of Raphaelism. And the singer warns: “The best is yet to come.” Yes. Today he turns 80 years old.
