Return to a country and a gastronomy to pay off a debt that they have a special love for and which has always been repaid, but which has been in place for ten years. Santi Balmes and Love of Lesbian will play at Parque de Castrelos this Friday, almost a decade after the Alvia accident in Angrois forced them to cancel their participation in Vigo en Festas. The Spanish composer, writer, singer and entertainer presents “An Epic Journey to Nothingness” that returns to its roots, with the vitola of being one of the most acclaimed and recognized voices in Spanish of the indie scene.
With the release of Epic Journey Towards Nothingness, it looked like it was going to be a very dramatic album that marked the pandemic, especially with the video clip featuring the incarceration footage. Was it your intention?
We didn’t want to start the way we did, but circumstances change our view of the album. We suddenly realized that it would be good to start from something as stuffy as society is and slowly open up. So we started with a very implicit warning that it would be super sad.
However, it is evolving towards more classical songs and more experimental songs like El Paso.
Like a plant, we went with the society that accompanied us. We approach it as a journey from drama or a sense of claustrophobia to something much more obvious, like a journey towards expansion.
They pioneered with the Barcelona concert in 2021. How did that long-awaited comeback happen?
It was not pleasant at all, we had to invent a non-existent environment, it was more internal than external. We were all freaking out because it looked surreal. The feeling from the scene was great and “I hope this isn’t normal from now on”. It was the antithesis of everything a 16-year-old boy dreams of playing in a band.
It was supposed to be returned but at what price?
It was a lack of expression, a cyber concert of robots and us. Let’s hope it ends and the monkey flower doesn’t get angry.
End concert You gave it at the Mar de Vigo Auditorium in 2022 and got an 8 minute ovation at the end. How did they experience it?
It was a moment of purification for each and every one of those present, what happened was a miracle. It has been a relief for many.
And now they’re heading to Castrelos, having had to cancel a concert two days ago to coincide with the Angrois crash in 2013, leaving many fans with a thorn in their side. Was it a pending account for you too?
It was a little ugly to play under these conditions, but that issue was put on hold after many years. That was not the case and I think it will be very intense.
What kind of concert will we watch?
Every time we go on stage, we realize that people don’t forgive anymore. You’re going to have a good time, you’re going to have fun, and that’s great. I was watching Leiva listen to her repertoire on Poble Espanyol and I thought, “damn, we need to save some songs from Love of Lesbian”. Because I’ve publicly perceived what’s going on with ours: what people want right now is to have a good time.
Is Lesbian Love partying again?
We will slowly but surely release new songs. As we get a little more serious, we will look for moments of catharsis and delusion that we left behind a bit. Seeing happy people makes us very happy. If you have to make songs that you’ve done a million times, absolutely nothing will happen. When we see how people have fun, we have fun too. We will not go to death, but gradually we will take off our clothes.
They’ve always had a very strong bond with the young public and they have some generational albums, but now the fanboys are starting to go. Does it make you feel?
We see 8, 10, 14 year old children in the audience. What you notice is the absence and presence of teenagers and it is marked by price. At some euros you see people in their thirties but as soon as the price drops you see young people and we like it. This is a very popular price and we love it. We hope there are young people because there is a time when you feel lazy to go to the festival, if it happened to me, wouldn’t it happen to others? I love these popular prices.
And how eager are you to continue the show after this tour?
Until 2023, we will continue touring between Spain and Latin America, we have many cities in Mexico. There will be small festivals, but there will be more in Latin America because we will produce an album, I won’t say it’s the last but…
A great final trick?
Yes, something like that. Because we want to start other parallel projects. I don’t mean that Lesbian Love has disappeared. But we want to escape the endless loop of record-turn-record-spin, because in the end, lives pass. We want to do other things and bring LOL back in a lighter way.
Source: Informacion
