Xavi Font went to live in Ibiza at the end of the eighties. He wanted to be a clothing designer, but his exotic models of wide and very colorful shoulder pads inspired by dragons just didn’t work out. She was accompanied on the Ibizan adventure by her best friend, Lourdes, and her partner, Manolo. The trio didn’t have a hard time, but they soon discovered a way to have fun: they settled in a farmhouse in the countryside and set up a kind of commune where they made designs and organized endless parties.
It didn’t take long for them to get lucky. The KU nightclub, the best in the world at that time, hired them to set the scene for their endless night. The group, which had grown with the addition of Jaume, Carlos and Luis, Xavi’s younger brother, had a trump card: they danced to the rhythm of huge fans and dressed in the colorful designs created by Xavi. They were so successful that even Freddie Mercury paid tribute to them.
But there was still much to live for. One night the music producer José Luis Gil stopped by KU and discovered the most outlandish group of the moment. He decided to catapult him to fame. And he succeeded. Locomía was a hit adored by countless fan clubs in Spain and, especially, Latin America, but drugs, orgies and infighting put an end to its power.
Kike Maíllo has now brought the story of the rise and fall of these boys to cinema in Disco, Ibiza, Locomía, which will hit cinemas in May, but which has already passed through the BCN Film Fest. Jaime Lorente gives life to Xavi Font, the soul of Locomía, who was removed from his own project by the producer José Luis Gil, played by Alberto Ammann, in a film full of good music and lots of color that recovers the spirit of the late eighties and early nineties.
“I have spoken with all the former members of Locomía and with Gil to write the script for the film. They are very grateful for the revival and now they are only surviving because it is difficult when you have had such a dazzling success to return to anonymity”, explains Maíllo in an interview given to La Vanguardia during his visit to the BCN Film Fest.
Maíllo admits: “I was never a big fan of the group, but I was of the era”. “When I read a news story that talked about the internal history of Locomía, told a lot of anecdotes and raised the existence of two characters as charismatic as Font and Gil, two very pronounced egos competing for the group’s paternity, I understood that there there was a movie”, he adds.
Later, investigating the past of the singers, the director understood that “the issues on the table were very close, since they had to do with the fight for success, the search for fame at all costs and that lost paradise that supposes to have found a place where you can show yourself as you really are and then it disappears”.
Because Locomía contributed to the acceptance of the gay community at “a time when neither the country nor the music market was ready to accept certain things”. Locomía triumphed more than thirty years ago, but Maíllo thinks that “the themes raised by the film are fiercely contemporary and can interest the younger audience, because its LGTBI discourse is still very much in force”.
