Snippets from Spain

The Gipsy Kings and Who?

As soon as Fabio saw the advertisement for a Gipsy Kings concert in Madrid, he bought tickets. The last Gipsy Kings concert we’d attended was in 1999 at the Beacon Theater on Broadway in Manhattan when I lived on the Upper West Side and he in Bogotá. It was a special date given the 2500 miles that separated us. We looked forward to this evening in Madrid almost as much. The group was going to play at a small outdoor amphitheater where, in the past two summers, we’d seen Colombian rock stars Juanes and Carlos Vives. In this venue, we looked forward to sitting in the garden before the concert on beach lounge chairs drinking a beer and washing away the heat. We’d never heard of the second band, Los Manolos, but we didn’t care. We were there for the Gipsy Kings and memorializing twenty-five years together with no distance between us.

Enjoying a beer in the beach chairs before the concert, testing another kind of chair, "Long Live Music in Nature," Gipsy Kings back in the day (our day)

We were surprised to see the Gipsy Kings were to come on at 8:45. Usually the top billing plays the second act. Maybe the musicians are now so old that they had to play first because they would be too tired for a later show. It had been twenty-five years since we’d seen them. We certainly had not aged like they had.

We clapped and sang to Gipsy King hits, including Bamboléo, Volaré, Vamos a Bailar, and Bem, Bem, Maria. They sang in Spanish and French their blend of flamenco mixed with Catalan rumba, Western pop, and Latin salsa. The music speaks to their history and family members who were gitanos, the Spanish Romani people. They had escaped the Catalonia region to France during the Civil War when soon-to-be dictator Francisco Franco cracked down on non-Catholics and others he didn’t tolerate. Beginning in 1978, the group traveled so frequently throughout France playing at weddings, parties, and festivals that they changed their name from Los Reyes to Gipsy Kings.

Their third album with Bamboléo remained on the US pop charts for forty weeks in 1987. The band has sold over sixty million copies of this album. They included a version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” called “A Mi Manera” on this album. “Volare” became a top song internationally in 1989, on an episode of “Dancing with the Stars.” They did the Eagles’ “Hotel California” with a flamenco beat. “Toy Story 3” featured Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” in Spanish, “Hay un Amigo en Mi,” also in flamenco style. Getting hip, they recorded a song with Spanish rapper in 2021.

Packed venue, Gipsy Kings in Madrid

At the concert in the garden, when the audience yelled “Otra, otra,” (“more, more”), the band performed one final song and bowed to a standing ovation until they left the stage at 10:00. Most of the audience cleared out of the amphitheater. With few people remaining, Fabio and I deliberated leaving. But the night was still young! We might as well stick around for a few songs from Los Manolos. Then we could go home for our beauty sleep.

When an announcement rang out that Los Manolos would be on in five minutes, 10:45, spectators poured back into the venue. They had been enjoying a drink in the lounge chairs and around the high top tables. The house filled up.

Los Manolos dressed in bell bottoms, fake sideburns, mirror sunglasses, unfashionable hats, and green and white striped, pale yellow, pistachio green, and black paisley suit jackets with oversized lapels jumped and skipped onto the stage waving their guitars and drumsticks.

We had to stay.

Los Manolos

There were two drummers, two bassists, several Spanish and electric guitarists, and percussionists. The group, all from the same neighborhood in Barcelona, has been playing together since 1989. Like the Gipsy Kings, Los Manolos are known for Catalan rumba, a music style that developed in Barcelona’s Romani community in the 1950s and 1960s. It comes from the flamenco of Andalucia, Cuban music, and rock and roll.

Within three years of their founding, they signed on with multinational RCA. Their version of the Beatles’ “All My Loving” hit number three on the Spanish pop charts in 1991. They performed for the closing ceremony of the Barcelona Olympics and the Paraplegic Games in 1992. They did a rumba version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Friends Forever” “Amigos Para Siempre” at the Olympics which reached number three in Spain. Los Manolos have performed all over this and other countries.

Even though it was 11:00 and we should have been sleepy (given our age and all), we got out of our seats to dance, clap, spin around, and laugh at the videos on two giant screens. Except for “All My Loving,” we didn’t know any of the songs but everyone around us did. They sang at the top of their lungs while rocking out and dancing rumba steps.

Snippets from the concert (credit: Fabio!)

Fabio and I stopped dancing, clapping, and singing to lyrics we didn’t know at 12:30 when the concert ended. So much for leaving early. We filed out of the garden and walked forty minutes home singing “All My Loving,” which was why we had come to the concert in the first place.