One of Raphael’s mantras 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 the fact that he has been on stage for more than six decades, a professional milestone practically unique in Spain for someone who is still active. I feel that we should bring the contra to the artist on the day he turns 80: his past not only exists, but is a legacy in the form of a trunk, with a collection of songs that form the soundtrack of many people and of different generations.
non-combustible This would be one of the qualifiers that best defines the temperament and trajectory of a singer who has known how to care for and nurture his vocal instrument in an irreproachable way and an extraordinary willpower. Perhaps because he knew from a very young age what it was to earn a living in order to survive. With a bricklayer father and a mother who sometimes worked cleaning other houses, Rafael Martos Sánchez was very clear, from the moment he first discovered a movie theater, that he wanted to be an artist and help his family get out of their precarious situation , at a time in their lives when they had to go live in Carabanchel, forced by their 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 taken his first professional steps as a delivery man of dresses at home or selling melons. But inside him were beating the emotions he had seen in that movie theater, when he first ran away from home and back, at one in the morning, his mother slapped him so he wouldn’t do it again it
Too late. That boy made him vibrate and dream hard. The rest was a chain reaction thanks to his tireless work to get on stage. He took singing lessons 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 sixties. Later came Maestro Manuel Alejandro, the perfect “tailor” for the artist who has composed a large part of the songs in his repertoire.
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 wore all black for the first time and remained so for the rest of his career.
The artist has made his gestures, his stage power, his vocal potential, and his slightly 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 was broken, but at that time he had the great support of his current wife, Natalia Figueroa, an aristocrat and journalist, with whom he consolidated a relationship that no one would bet 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 on 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. 80 years ago today.
