For years, Loquillo’s life has been between poetry and rock. 30, to be more exact. Double life, two characters that feed back into the same figure. What began as an escape from the Trogloditas in 1994 has turned into six albums that will continue this year with an album dedicated to the Luis María Mesanza National Poetry Prize. Poems set to music that are now collected in the compilation Transgresiones (Warner), a title that defines Loquillo’s intention to enter a space where no one expected him and where, as he claims, many have never wanted him. He is now preparing for a tour that will take him to the Liceu for the first time on May 17 as part of the Millennium festival.
Why a compilation?
To highlight a job of 30 years, it started as an alternative project and has become a career. I feel very proud that I have never received help from the Ministry of Culture, the Author Foundation or the Institut Cervantes, which would be the most logical, promoting culture in the Spanish language.
The problem is that culture is confused with entertainment?
Both can coexist, it is important that the private developer is well taken care of because he risks money, and I tell you this because I am one. It is important to have a tool such as the artist statute or the patronage law, which has not been approved even though it has been claimed for 25 years in Spain.
Are the Loquillo rocker and the one who sings poems complementary?
I need one character to build the other. I left the tour in October because I was physically and emotionally exhausted, I couldn’t do the character anymore. This is the first time that a rock band will take the repertoire, it will be the first time that the two worlds will meet.
Maybe one of the two Loquillos disappears.
No, because they feed back. What is difficult is not going from the character of an auditorium or a theater to rock, but the other way around. Going from externalizing to containing is a more complicated actor exercise and needs a process, a few months.
How did you start setting poems to music?
I liked the versions of Paco Ibáñez de Brassens, I came up with the idea of ??bringing this to rock, and I saw myself doing the version of La mala reputación.
I up Life ahead in 1994.
It was the end of the Troglodytes. After five years of touring, totally exhausted and destroyed by drugs, I needed to escape. I was fed up with the world of rock, Peterpanism, Guns N’ Roses wannabes, so I threw myself in the pool.
He will perform for the first time at the Liceu.
Filling the Liceu is a dream, when I was 16 I played at the Tabú cabaret, among American marines and ladies of life, and we saw how the anarchists threw tomatoes at the bourgeois, still Francoist bourgeoisie, who entered the theater. Now I’ll play, it’s a road.
Do you have other scenarios left to step on?
I have two places left, the Grec and Plaça Monumental de Barcelona, ??to inaugurate so that it can be dedicated to the culture of our city. I have the audience record in Barcelona, ??125,000 paying people at the PSUC parties. I’m sorry, it was me and not Coldplay. But in 47 years of my career I have not touched the Grec, they have always taken it from me.
What was Barcelona like in the seventies?
The Cúpula Venus was more important than the Bocaccio, that must be said once and for all. Enough with the gauche divine, where the transgression really took place was at the Cúpula Venus, there everything happened at the end of 78 on the Rambla, from Rubianes to Loles León, Pavlovsky, Ocaña… It was the freest place I had ever seen in my life, I don’t understand why this place is not claimed as the temple of the transition to the Barcelona of the seventies.
Popular culture has been forgotten.
It is an endemic problem, it is carried even in the DNA. When they ask me, I say that I’m a citizen of the world, I was born in Barcelona and that’s why I’m a citizen of the world, I make it very clear here [and points to the city’s coat of arms, tattooed on his right forearm]. Barcelona was the capital of the world until someone decided it was the capital of Catalonia, but I was lucky enough to live in that city that changed the world.
