Twenty years of his career can be covered in less than five minutes on foot, the necessary time to go from the Sidecar room, in Plaza Reial, to the Teatre del Liceu, or what is the same, from the beginnings of Dorian to the concert that this Wednesday they will perform at the La Rambla theater, fulfilling the dream of a flagship national indie group that has made its sound a benchmark for an entire generation. With their latest album, Ritual, still hot, the Barcelona group is preparing for a performance full of surprises, new versions of the band’s classics and surprise guests such as Suu or Antonio GarcÃa, from Arde Bogotá. Days before the big event, Belly Hernández and Marc Gili meet at the Cafè de l’Ã’pera to talk about what this performance represents and discover, among other things, that it is not Belly’s first in the same place.
The one at the Liceu will not be a typical concert
Belly: It’s a long concert, we don’t do a representation of our entire career, but some songs we represent in a different way, in a more acoustic or more classical way. We have a string trio, we have a percussionist, an extra guitarist… We released an album a few years ago entitled “Ten years and one day” which was already an acoustic revision of our most representative songs, it will go around here a bit, but we also make songs in electronic format and more Dorian.
M: I don’t like the symphonic applied to pop, but it is possible to cover the songs in many ways. In this concert we propose a musical journey through Dorian’s repertoire with special arrangements of strings or percussion, but which will end with some electronic Dorian, typical of Belly, and electric with the entire Liceu dancing, a journey that will begin very low and end very above.
Where did the idea of ​​performing at the Liceu come from?
Marc: We knew that sooner or later someone would ask us to play at the Liceu, I don’t know why I had the intuition, but this moment came sooner than we thought.
Have you performed there before?
B: I sang at the Liceu when I was little, worst of all, I didn’t remember until we went in to take the promotional photo. Then I remembered that with my music school we had performed a song from The Magic Flute on the Liceu stage.
It’s a special stage
M: It is very imposing, when you are on stage the vision is impressive. The five floors of the Liceu are upon you, but what comes upon you the most are the decades and decades of music history of the highest level that this space accumulates.
What does it mean for Dorian to play there?
M: It is a consolidation of a proposal, we are an independent music band, we started very close to here, in Sidecar, and now we are on the other side of La Rambla. If you draw a line between the Sidecar and the Liceu and all the places in l’Hospitalet, de la Verneda or Cornellà where we started playing, you will draw the story of a band that has spent 20 years fighting for its proposal, which has been consolidating it on the sidelines of the laws of the market, of the large budgets that the large multinationals have.
This consolidation is achieved through experimentation
B: It arises from our need, naturally. If you listen to our records, despite the fact that there is a lowest common denominator, a Dorian sound that defines us a lot, you see many colors. We are restless people and we like very different types of music, we like to play and try things, and we are very lucky that in the end it always sounds like Dorian, it is a much more malleable sound than it seems.
It’s what you do in your last job
M: In Ritual we take Dorian’s music towards sounds close to urban in a song called Dual. We have also worked on a song based on an Argentine jacarera, Libre, which we have sung with Lido Pimienta, one of the greatest innovators of Colombian cumbia from Barranquilla. And we have a dream pop song like Universal, with Suu. You find all these faces and also the most electro and dance Dorians, we are very happy to keep intact the ability and desire to play with music for so many years.
The new generations tend to mix all kinds of genres
B: We had more niches, if you listened to sinister music you listened to sinister music, if indie music the same, the genres were not touched much. There were tribes, people dressed in a certain way. Now it’s nice because people have a much more open mentality musically, they don’t resent anything and this gives you a lot of richness.
Another habit of young people is that they work more alone, from home
B: It’s a sign of the times, they’re more individualistic but it’s not a bad thing, they do beautiful things like collaborating with very different people. Maybe they don’t have this bond of a band, something that is of our generation, but they collaborate with a lot of people to grow and experiment, and this is also very good.
M: We are at a time when the record industry is betting a lot on individual artists, a single artist. Because? Because one guy only gives less trouble than four, that’s very clear.
From indie to individualism
M: It’s much more fun sharing the trip with a band than doing it alone.
B: An artist who doesn’t have a band has told us that it’s hard because you have to make all the decisions by yourself. And having travel companions with whom to be able to decide things, to rest when one is a little weaker, is also interesting.
Is it better to have a band live too?
M: We’ve been doing talent shows on television for 20 years where the most important thing is the singer, the performer, and the music is always canned. People have been used to this for so long that they seem to care as long as you put a few dancers behind it.
B: There are also different types of shows, and some may have the strength elsewhere; As long as they reach people, it’s fine. It is true that, sometimes, you see these artists who are on very large stages and you think: you, who have all the money in the world, could do something more musical and visual, a show that is somewhat more interesting from a more intellectual point of view.
Kendrick Lamar played at Primavera Sound with hidden drums and bass
M: It’s a perfectly valid option, Madonna used it on more than one tour where she had dancers, a big setup, and the musicians were hidden. You don’t have to teach the musicians, but the music has to be there, the public notices the energy that the band shoots live.
B: And it comes from different people, sometimes more imperfect, because an engraved base is a very perfect and very powerful thing. But what is happening at that time, which will not be repeated, which is new, is very interesting even if it sounds worse.
You were pioneers in combining electronics with instruments
M: In Dorian’s genetics is the Nitsa club from Barcelona, ​​Apolo. In the lower part you would listen to techno and electronic music in general, and in the upper part you would listen to hip hop, electro and indie. We made a synthesis and turned it into Dorian. At first we didn’t have it easy, but over the years the trends got closer to what we had been doing. A certain poetic justice was created that allowed us to reach a very wide audience since independence, without ceasing to be ourselves.
You were also pioneers when singing in Spanish
M: When we started playing, many bands and soloists sang in English and it always seemed like an imposture to us.
B: The Spanish indie that has worked has done so largely because of the lyrics, because people can sing the songs, understand them and live it.
M: We are also adding more and more pieces in Catalan to our repertoire. In this last album we have a song, Universal, and for the next one we already have some well-rounded pieces in Catalan that people will like, because it is also ours. essence and we want to claim it. Popular or pop music only has credibility when you are talking about what happens in your environment, on your street, in your family, in your sentimental life, whatever, but with your language and your slang, with your way of explaining things, only this is that it has credibility and power.
What remains of that indie generation that was in the Sidecar?
B: There are bands that have evolved and we have found a live scene that is the one of the festivals that we visit year after year. It’s huge, we never would have thought of this in life, we come from very small venues and that this could become a national phenomenon, that so many people go to these festivals consuming independent music, is very strong.
It is the fruit of labor
A series of bands from a generation of which we are a part broke the prejudices towards independent music, they demonstrated that with it you could reach very wide audiences without the need to go through commercial radio stations. The seeds that were planted in the 2000s spawned an ecosystem that is still growing and continues in the form of other sounds and other types of scenes, but was planted then. There are bands or solo artists that right now are coming out of the underground and playing at festivals born thanks to the explosion of this scene 15 years ago now.
Are you working on a new record?
M: We’re working on some new music coming out next year, but this Ritual still has a lot of juice left. After the Liceu we have a summer where we will play at about 15 festivals in Spain, and in September we will go to Latin America for a few weeks to tour Colombia, Peru and Mexico. This ritual will end here and, presumably, in 2024 we will have a new Dorian album.
