Heavenly Barcelona has lost its angel, Victor Jou, who passed away this Tuesday in the company of his family, his wife Lourdes and their two daughters, leaving his traveling friends orphaned by his presence at that Zeleste club that revolutionized Catalan music and Spanish during the seventies. Discreetly and together with Pepe Alpuente, Victor Jou set up a venue whose legacy continues to influence the musical world of Barcelona. “He was the inventor of Zeleste, the rest of us could work and be very involved, but he invented Zeleste,” explains Rafael Moll, his partner and his partner in the adventure.
Born in Plaza Reial, the life of this engineer changed after a trip to London. He was 30 years old and working as a consultant at the College of Architects when he discovered the world of Soho clubs, such as the Marquee, a haven for counterculture and rock, a model that he wanted to transfer to his city. The place chosen was an old wax factory, chapel and cloth store located on Argenteria street, at that time called PlaterÃa and located in the dilapidated neighborhood of La Ribera.
Its name, Zeleste, made reference to one of Babar the elephant’s friends, chosen by Silvia Gubern’s son to name the new venue, whose brand arose from the little boy’s calligraphy. “He was a visionary about the Ribera neighborhood when it was deserted,” Rafael Moll points out, “and he was a visionary about Poble Nou long before the Olympics, when he decided to move there.” Its intimate setting, designed by Silvia Gubern and Jordi Masó with curtains leading to a room decorated in velvety red, became one of the venue’s emblems since it opened in 1973.
For a long decade, the venue on Calle Argenteria was the melting pot where Barcelona’s counterculture met, a point of exchange that gave birth to the Ona Laietana musical movement, that mix of progressive rock, folklore, flamenco and jazz fusion that gave rise to a multitude of artists such as Jaume Sisa, the Companyia Elèctrica Dharma, Secta Sònica, the PlaterÃa orchestra, Pau Riba, Carles Flavià , Toti Soler, Máquinaâ€â€¦ An endless number of names in which Gato Pérez cannot be missing. Together with them, great jazz names such as Bill Evans, Tete Montoliu or Chet Baker also performed. A musical success story that, however, did not bring financial benefits to its founder, who was more concerned with reinvesting the money in promoting music than in making money.
But above all, VÃctor Jou built a base from which to catapult the careers of dozens of musicians who not only had a place to perform. Zeleste was available after closing at dawn as a rehearsal space, as well as giving its name to a record label that gave rise to musicians like Sisa or La Dharma, as well as a music school and a Management company to make it easier for groups to perform more beyond the venue Without forgetting the fundamental role he played in the creation of the Canet Rock festival, whose first edition in 1975 brought together more than 25,000 people in an atmosphere of freedom with Franco still alive. “The groups of the Zeleste team spread around the peninsula with triumphant performances in the main capitalsâ€, explains Manel Joseph, singer of the PlaterÃa orchestra, “and that was thanks to his initiative and the vision he had of the businessâ€.
Shy in character, the figure of VÃctor Jou remained in the background and only opened up to a small circle of collaborators including Dani Freixes, Pere Riera or Josep Mas, Kitflus, the latter an example of the musicians who came out of the Zeleste environment. “He knew how to attract a wide variety of people at a time when there was no single truth, so dialogues were very important,” recalls Pepe Ribas, former director of Ajoblanco magazine. At Zeleste’s tables “people built a great movement from many fragments, with the awareness that the individual alone is the fodder for authoritarianism.” And in the midst of this magma of words and music “he had many complicities with the waiters, with the police, with censorship, with money, with the building that suddenly fell down on himâ€, explains Pepe Ribas. “He was a hard worker, he was not a talker, mysterious and very organized like a good engineer.” For his part, Rafael Moll remembers him as a person “who did not show himself, shy, discreet, that is why I took so much prominence”.
Physically reformed in 1979, Zeleste underwent the cultural transformations of those years in which Barcelona lost its musical influence to the benefit of the Madrid Movida, a transformation that began at the end of the 70s with the irruption of punk, a style that was never liked by the celestial circle. . In 1986 the room moved to Almogà vers street, in a Poble Nou as soulless as the Ribera neighborhood was before Zeleste’s arrival.
Perhaps without the magic of the original location, it started a second life with three stages and a much larger capacity that led to the arrival of international artists to the city, such as Paul McCartney, Björk, Radiohead, Massive Attack, Oasis, PJ Harvey, Héroes. del Silencio or Juan Luis Guerra, among an endless number of names that, between the big stadiums and the small venues, found in the new Zeleste that corner that made Barcelona an obligatory stop on their tours.
After the transfer, VÃctor Jou left the management of Zeleste for a few years, a time that he took advantage of to participate in the creation of the Mercat de Música Viva de Vic and direct the first two editions of it. His return in 1995 was marked by the debts of the venue, which five years later was condemned to close. Like those vocational politicians who know how to take a step next to him, Jou abandoned his passion for music to return to his previous job as an engineer, working at the Roca sanitary company. He did so disappointed by the lack of help from the public powers, and by the loss of the historical archive, including his vinyls. Zeleste closed definitively on October 9, 2000 to reopen a month later under the name of Razzmatazz, with which it is still in operation today, a legacy of VÃctor Jou as is the memory of Canet Rock or the creation of a school, which from the Laietano sound, turned its students into studio musicians for great artists.
