"I am a person in love with popular culture. I could have been a terrible comic book artist, designer, photographer, writer, or filmmaker, but a rocker uncle involuntarily dragged me into music. I started writing songs and I'm still at it today. It's what I like most and, although I don't know if I'm good, I don't have a plan B." Long as a day without bread and shielding a smile behind his characteristic mustache, musician and composer Lalo López is leaning on the bar of the Bar and orders "a glass of cold milk, like Archie Goodwin, detective Nero Wolfe's assistant in Rex Stout's novels. Reading it made me proud to be abstemious!" And, by the way, he turns off the FM "which is a torment for me except for honorable exceptions. Better put on some mixcloud session of any style of Afro-American music, I don't care about the era."
When he came of age, Lalo discovered funk "and that changed my life." The next thing was to create Fundación Tony Manero with another illustrious regular, Miguelito Superstar. "I had the immense luck that that first project worked like a charm, which allowed me to dedicate myself fully to music and try to set up our small Motown with my friends. This is how parallel projects like Chocadelia Internacional, Los Fulanos, or Cardova were born."
--- Indeed, that was a real boom of bands and projects.
--- "Yes, but after the boom we had to manage the descent, which, truthfully, was an intense job for us, personally and as a band. We diversified: we produced other groups, we made more or less lasting collaborations with other creators, we played and toured with other people, and we have not stopped releasing original material, increasingly trying to reflect in our music who we are in real life," replies Lalo, who takes a few seconds of silence before speaking again to finish: "Something exciting."
Do something else, Lalo
On occasion, it happens to creators that the incentives come more from negatives than from feeling encouraged to undertake their activity. "A key moment was when I showed my first demo with my own songs to someone very important to me and they told me not to dedicate myself to music. That it was too hard and they didn't see me mentally prepared. I didn't listen to them! But I have always kept that opinion very present, and it has made me aware of how privileged I have been, of not doing many foolish things and being a saver. And of never stopping working. It may not work, but the mere fact of continuing to work makes it worthwhile," he adds. Lalo sips some of his drink and winks before adding: "I don't know if I'm explaining myself."
Happy "to keep living... well, surviving from music, without making big concessions," the regular shows pride in all the happiness distributed at the helm of his musical projects, "which is very cool, because our intention was to spread the joie de vivre associated with disco music, that communion around dance that we felt with funk or boogie. And I think we achieved it. With the amount of darkness in the world, that seems like something remarkable to me."
In addition to Fundación Tony Manero's farewell tour, for this 2022, Lalo has a new album ready. "A blues and spoken word album, Lalo Malo, which will be released in February. I am also articulating another contemporary funk project, the Lalo López Limited Orchestra, with which to continue giving an outlet to my fondness for danceable rhythms from a more personal perspective," he explains. Separately, the regular remains at the helm of Tobacco Road: "A program about the past and present of Afro-American music on Ràdio Gràcia every week."
A Barcelona without an escape route
"As a child, my mother taught me to love this city and I have never stopped being surprised by its different faces. I have walked it from the upper area to Ciutat Meridiana, passing through El Chino or Horta, I have delved into its popular past, into its architecture, into the Barcelona underground... I cannot escape this city!" asserts the musician.
Look back to build, with memory, a patch of concentrated Barcelonian purity: "My grandmother Ofelia's house on Parlament Street would be the epicenter of exciting moments in the city's history. A 30-square-meter house with a family of nine Murcian emigrants, who arrived in the late 20s, with Uncle Manolo in the PSUC and Uncle Pepe in the CNT, and fleeing to France after the war and becoming a smuggler, the post-war encounter between my two hungry grandparents assaulting a grain silo, my parents organizing anti-Franco demonstrations, my uncle Lope playing guitar in the Raval to the rhythm of urban rock, paella Sundays, and the little one, sent for horchata to Sirvent...".
The musician finishes his glass of milk, before resuming the thread of the conversation to emphatically lament aspects of Barcelona such as "the unstoppable housing speculation and the expulsion of people from the neighborhoods. And predatory tourism. And souvenir shops and mobile phone covers. And the disappearance of the 'charnega' Barcelona, how the recent past is torn down and an aseptic present is built under the modern European standard. It seems that we have to be the most modern in everything and that produces anomalies like an Encants Vells whose spirit does not correspond to the structure that houses it. Why can't it be a normal, somewhat shabby place like Les Puces in Paris? Can't we be a city with multiple layers and strata and make them coexist? Can't we reconcile past and modernity?".
--- To that, we can add the question of whether you'd like to eat something, as there's everything here and it's very tasty.
Lalo López then casts a lustful gaze at the pastries, before uttering:
--- Sweet! I am what Aragonese call morrudo. And I'm quite cheesy, so sweetness is my thing.