Rafael first enter and then the light is made. He lights it up with his divine gesture: raise your arm, turn your wrist, screw in the bulb and only then lower your arm. This time, on their tour concert’Victoria’ at the Palau Sant Jordi, It happened at six minutes and 58 seconds. And the people went crazy. I wish there was a world where even the lamp workers received that love for that action.
Before, the concert started with the usual prologue: his three backup singers, his two drummers, his pianist, his two guitars and his bass playing the instrumental version of ‘I am that one. And then ‘that one’ enters, that is: Raphael, who one day said: “Many look like me, but I don’t look like anyone.” So if he is that one and he doesn’t look like anyone, that ‘that one’ has to be something similar to God, which is how everyone who came tonight sees the artist. And then, about 45 seconds after eight p.m., the scheduled start time, he appears, dressed in a silver lamé jacket, Elegant Albaland the people, of course, standing.
‘The night’
Raphael, with a voice that can be described as dignified without paternalism or hyperbole, with less vibrato, but without abuse of reverb, then attacked ‘The Night’. And then the first single from her new album, titled ‘Victoria’. The song is titled ‘Of so many people’. And all those people, the 6,000 people she gathered at Sant Jordi in an amphitheater format, already knew it. And at the end of this, screw in the bulb and American out. The man in black. With occasional multi-screen projections of that one, that is, of Raphael in recitals from decades before, when Janis Joplin or Jim Morrisonof the same age, were still alive.
The string of subsequent hits was amazing, especially because many of them were played by in a dance key, with versions of his album ‘Resinphonico’. This is what ‘Say What They Say’ and ‘My Big Night’ sounded like. This last one was sung more by the public than by him, but it is absolutely understandable, because: a) When you wear 60 years on stage, your songs are your fans’ more than yours; b) It was a good night para Raphael, but it was a great night for his fans.
Big fans
A little detour in this transcript. The best artists have great fans: the last time this chronicler wrote about him in Sant Jordi he even found one who I owed Raphael a bottle of whiskey (he won it by imitating him in a pub in Badalona). By my side, Juan Pablo, a Colombian who has lived in Barcelona for 20 years, tells me that Raphael is “a life script” for him. His father, bohemian and problematic, was devout, until Covid took him away. Now his son gives video calls to his aunt and also to his grandfather, who sing these songs on the little screen from his house 8,033 kilometers from here.
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Like ‘The Work Song’, in the chronicler’s opinion the first ska song of Spanish pop. But also other ballads and mid-tempo songs like ‘Provocation’ or ‘Apunto de besarte’, designed for a piano bar and, for some strange reason, ideal in an Olympic pavilion. Raphael, very successful, did not cause any shame, but he made a few people cry even with songs from his latest album, such as ‘My shoes know’, composed, like the rest of the album, by Pablo Lopez. But he also caused dances with the Beatlesque arrangement of ‘Day tripper’ in ‘I was in love’. It’s Raphael, of course, who at 80 years old ended a cappella, without miking‘A que no te vas’ (the audience would not have let him leave either).
One more day at the office for Raphael, a great night for his fans, who had a stop at the ‘Tamborilero’ (here Christmas begins when he, and not the King, says it), which bordered on the same with ‘Escándalo’ and which ended with ‘How I love you’. As much as the public loves him. One leaves a Raphael concert wanting to use the ‘ph’ for everything: to eat a ‘phalaphel’, to write that it is ‘phantastic’, ‘phenomenal’, ‘fabulous’.