His tour officially begins after the summer, but in order to fulfill his tradition of presenting each new album with a “special evening somewhere in Madrid”, Rubén Pozo is going to take the stage at the Café Berlín tonight to premiere ‘Vampiro’ , his fourth solo album after the end of Pereza. Whoever buys the album in physical format and takes it to the door, will enter for free until full capacity is reached.
Almost everyone is saying that it is their best album.
And I say so too (laughs). We musicians always say that every time we release an album, but this time I feel a special joy, I feel very comfortable with what I’ve done.
It is a short and manageable album, with ten songs. It is not a brick.
The initial plan was for it to be acoustic, but…
I almost always tend to change my plans. It was going to be acoustic, but I couldn’t (laughs). I’ve had to put the electric in several places, but it has a very acoustic spirit, very wooden, analog. Compositionally, it is the album that has taken me the least time. Almost all the songs I have done in one day, which is very rare for me. It usually takes weeks, months, even years. And sometimes when that happens, the initial impulse that led you to start it is lost. That hasn’t happened to me on this album, because I wanted to capture the initial sensations that each song gave me.
They will have come out in a day… or in a night, right? Which vampire?
Yes. Since I was a kid I have had insomnia problems. Once I fall asleep I’m already a log, but falling asleep is hard for me. Curiously, with the pandemic my vital rhythm has been adjusted and at twelve I am ready to go to bed and get up the next day at eight without setting the alarm. I think it’s because I’m already a bit tall (laughs). But yes, there are songs made at night, with the same idea of leaving what came first.
The first song, ‘Gente’, talks about not self-flagellating too much. Do you dedicate it to yourself?
Yes, I have been like this all my life. I don’t forgive mistakes easily, and heck, you can’t be like that. What the song says is ‘uncle, forgive yourself, you have killed no one of us, you are not a criminal, you have made a mistake like everyone else’. We all try to do the best we know how, and sometimes we slip. It’s okay to reflect on mistakes, but life is lived in real time and there is no rewind button. So you have to try to improve, but you also have to know how to forgive yourself. Also, in this song my son Leo plays the drums, and every time I listen to it I have to clean the drool that falls on the floor.
The great Miguel Ríos collaborates in ‘Abel y Caín’, what a luxury, right?
Total. We met in the time of Pereza, when she invited us to play ‘Rock and roll boomerang’ with him in Granada. My producer José Nortes is his right-hand man, and one day he showed up at the Black Betty studio. He was recording ‘Abel y Caín’ and the lightbulb went off in my head: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to sing this with him, and make the joke that one is Abel and the other is Cain?’ I proposed it to him, and he only made it a condition that he not be Cain (laughs). It was an act of generosity on his part. All of us who rock in this country walk the path that he opened, so it’s a great honor, a little gift that life has given me.
The tour starts in October, what afternoon isn’t it?
It has been impossible to find venues to present the album before the summer. So I’m going to autumn, which is also full of shit! Although I have moved around a lot with just my guitar during the pandemic, there have been two years of hiatus and now, when the season opens, there are many of us wanting to recover everything we have lost during this time. And of course, everything is screwed up. Besides, people don’t have the money to see everything they want. It’s going to be difficult to put up the ‘no tickets’ sign.
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