Adrià Gual: Pure 'underground' ethics

"My father used to tell me that I had to dedicate myself to what I liked, because when you do what you want, even when things go wrong and you go through difficult stages, you always get a reward. And it's true: being able to dedicate yourself to what you like, to what you want, has its price, but also its great rewards". The musician and composer Adrià Gual reflects aloud at the bar, in front of a decaffeinated cortado and a Vichy water without lemon. Outside, night has already fallen, as nocturnal as this Barcelona native, great-grandson of the famous playwright of the same name, who sometimes finds it hard "to go to sleep before dawn, because at night you work very well".

In the background, silence, "which so many people are afraid of, but which kills no one" and, ahead, the rich conversation of someone who owes at least part of his great rhetoric to bar counters.

"I have done many things. I studied for a few years to be an architect and then three in Law, but finally, at 24, I opted for graphic design at Elisava. For a while I was dedicated to that work, while playing in various amateur bands in the city". Thus, Adrià was a member of bands, some as transcendent and remembered as Los Soberanos, Los Walkysons, Kongsmen, Waldorf Astorias or The Fabulous Ottomans, while developing his career as a graphic designer in various agencies. "I really enjoyed my job, but then the 2008 crisis came and everything changed. I became unemployed and went to interviews with agencies, from which I left with the desire not to be hired. It was then that I decided to set up a professional musical project together with Dani Segura". Thus, The Excitements were born in 2010.

An anomaly in the Barcelona music scene

Articulated as an R&B and soul band, The Excitements started strong, "with an average of 100 concerts in a good year and about 70 in a bad year", and traveling throughout the country and abroad, "doing things well, even though we all came from the underground, or bounced from music schools, which has always been seen as a kind of anomaly by the city's professional music scene".

---Although you did not belong to the musical establishment, you had previous experience with countless bands.

"It may be that, and above all it is also the fact that, despite being in a professional circuit, we have never stopped supporting the fandom base", he replies regarding small festivals and concert halls and vocational promoters, "because the people you meet when you go up, are the same ones you meet when you go down, and that is the truly loyal audience, the one that will always be there. Forgetting them is betraying yourself". Pure underground ethics.

The arrival of Covid meant having to put the handbrake on for the band, which has restructured, with a new singer, Kissia San, and no longer with Dani Segura. This process has been reflected in the album Keepin' on (Satélite K), the band's fourth and with arrangements by the prestigious New York musician Neal Sugarman, and continues its course in the search for new concerts to return to a level of activity prior to the pandemic.

In parallel, he is part of Los Perlas, a rumba band in a punk key, with which he has just released two seven-inch records for the Family Spree label.

"Meanwhile, I am also working on a humorous novel that I have well underway", announces the local who concludes, taking the multiplicity of his passions with humor, with a quote from the cartoonist José Escobar: "man of many trades, poor for sure".

A city with an incendiary soul

There was a time when the musician Adrià Gual detested Barcelona. "I only saw its negative aspects, its inferiority complexes in wanting to be a more modern city than it was, all that I didn't like". He then went to Madrid for a season, where he had already spent some years of his childhood, and there he worked and enjoyed himself. "Until one day I had to come here for a work matter, and I found myself in Gràcia, which is not even a neighborhood I love, but I was in that bar, on a splendid spring day, with the light streaming through the window, and I realized that I missed this. So, without ceasing to drag my affection for Madrid, I decided to return".

---That was in 1999. How do you live your relationship with the city now, almost a quarter of a century later?

The parishioner smiles intelligently, while slowly drinking his sparkling water and searching for words. "I'm not going to get into the hackneyed topic that everything about the Barcelona of before was cool, and now nothing, because it's not true. But I believe that the city has worsened in many aspects because of various city councils that have been molding it in their image and likeness, and not according to the real needs of the people of Barcelona. The 'City of success' crowed by Clos to tell us that it was a city for the rich where the rest of us had no place, and now, with the current city council, which is making a city for people like them, who have nothing to do, who don't have to work, for example transporting and unloading goods from one place to another."

---Perhaps, it's that we don't protest enough.

Adrià Gual doesn't lose his smile under his white goatee. "Every so often, Barcelona runs out of patience and its streets burn. The city has been the scene of revolts, from the Jamància or the La Canadiense strike, to the riots in Urquinaona square. In fact, I believe that this incendiary character is the main point of integration here," he replies, and finishes his drink before concluding, almost with a complicit wink:

---And I like that.