Pop, techno, glam rock, new wave, new romantic, baroque, visionary, excessive, innovative, ambiguous… Both his music and Tino Casal himself received back in the 80s -land and time today mythologized by some, despised by others- an endless number of labels that tried to define or classify him. But this Asturian artist (Tudela Veguín, Oviedo, 1950) did not fit any. Or, at least, not just one of them. In him musical concerns and virtues were fused that made him a a unique and different musician. Perhaps also unclassifiable. His permanent desire to innovate and find new formulas and his own sound had already propelled him to number one on the sales charts in 1981 with Egg Shampoo. But two years later, a more mature Casal, already counting on the confidence of the harsh record market, released ‘Etiqueta negra’, which included the song ‘Embrujada’, with which he would establish himself not only as one of the singers best sellers in Spain, but as musical reference of a new style, more impregnated with Anglo-Saxon and avant-garde overtones.
Casal’s volcanic personality, his eclectic visual style, hand-sewn by his own ideas, perhaps following certain patterns based on the figure and shadow of a certain David Bowie, did not belong to the production line of any factory or to the tastes or fashions dictated by third parties. Casal was an artist in search of a work that he always considered unfinished, because his was a journey with no final destination, that of someone who knew that innovation never ends, that creations are simply intermittent stops, as if full satisfaction find yourself in a kind of Atlantis that is intended to reach unsuccessfully.
“Tino never finished the records, he didn’t finish the recordings. If you let him he kept changing things until the end. The producer had to tell him: ‘Tino, up to here’. Everything was based on internal and external transformation with what he did and with his constant art & rdquor ;, he affirms javier losada, musician, composer and producer with a long career, who was part of the recording of ‘Etiqueta Negra’ as keyboardist. He knew Tino very well, whom he considered not only a friend but “an older brother & rdquor ;.
Casal was a polyhedral creator, a complete artist. A singer, yes, but also a composer, producer, painter, decorator and sculptor. No, he was not a Renaissance man, he was a type of his time, with a catadioptric gaze, perceiving and reflecting at the same time a multicolored, polyform and multiangular sense of existence and art. Perhaps what he wanted was to be a work of art in himself, and perhaps he only admitted to himself in that 1983, just 40 years ago now, that consideration of ‘Etiqueta Negra’ that gave the title to the second album by he. Before, almost as a child, he had been a singer of The Black Sapphires; after the Archdukes, still in his native Asturias. But that restless boy who grew up in a town in Oviedo wanted to follow another path, and in 1977 he went to London to soak up the cosmopolitan creativity provided by the British capital. There he discovered that he wanted to be a bit of a Bowie. But a Bowie in his own way.
a new tino
On his return from London lands, someone thought they could make him a light song performer. He achieved, it is true, a second place at the Benidorm Festival in 1978, with a song titled ‘Emborráchate’, but Casal didn’t want to be that Casal. For this reason, in 1981 he released his first solo album and called it vindictively ‘neocasal‘, as if it were the testimony of a rupture, of a new time, as a prologue of what was to come, far from the past and paths a thousand times trodden. Someone said of him that he never wastes time looking at the past.
recorded ‘Neocasal’ in the musician’s studios Luis Cobos and featured the production of Julian Ruiz. The single ‘Champú de Huevo’ was number one in Spain, something that helped the record sector to finish intuiting great commercial potential in it.
Two years later, again with Julián Ruiz as producer, he released ‘Etiqueta Negra’, with which he ‘uncorked’ a good number of restless minds and opened interest and ears to music and lyrics that were leading the way in a society and a public still waking up from demure and sleepy times. “In the studio it was a lot of fun, but also unbearable& rdquor ;, recalls Julián Ruiz. “As I put all the new music that appeared in the world on my program Plásticos and Decibelios, we were up to date with everything. If we heard a song that we liked, well, we would follow that stylistic line”, points out the one who, in addition to being a producer, was a good friend of Casal’s.
“Tino was forming a band to go on tour with his album ‘Neocasal’. I found out that they were looking for a keyboardist and I did a casting, I think the only one I’ve done in my life. When I met him it was a kind of musical and professional crush. Tino loved to innovate and what he wanted in his sound was innovation. After that tour, he offered me to do the keyboards for ‘Etiqueta Negra’. I went to the studio and I found Julián Ruiz. He influenced Tino’s sound quite a bit. Julián was another innovator& rdquor ;, recalls Javier Losada.
For five weeks, the single ‘Embrujada’, included on this album, topped the sales charts in Spain. That catchy melody was wrapped in magnetic synthesizers and in a voice full of folds and nuances. “We based the rhythm of the song and the sequence on ‘Don’t You Want Me’, by the British band The Human League -Recalls Losada-, although, obviously, another song came out. The introduction was magnificent and the intervals of the chorus were masterful on the part of Tino& rdquor;.
Within a few weeks of its launch ‘haunted‘ It became one of the most danced songs in Spanish nightclubs. The television sets were, then, stage and catwalk at the same time for that Casal who created his own wardrobe, influenced by the immense admiration that Bowie aroused in him. From this, of course, he took a chameleonic image and a scintillating aesthetic sense, but it was always an ‘autochthonous’ adaptation and interpretation.
Spanish modernity
That visual magnetism and his modernist designs drew attention in the days of the remembered and idealized Move. However -says Losada-, “he has never appeared in a documentary about the Movida, isn’t it curious?, when many of those groups went to his house to see what was brewing on his new album. He was always a reference & rdquor ;. “Tino fled from the shabby shop and one thing he couldn’t stand was envy. AND Tino was a very envied person& rdquor ;, adds whoever was his keyboardist in those years.
But in the case of Casal, behind what seemed to represent the role of simple aesthetic appearance, an authenticity achieved with his own ideas and concepts was hidden. Those who knew him best always remember that he did not go out without spending a lot of time dressing, combing his hair and painting himself. That empire of aesthetics was presided over, however, by a unique voice and musical creativity in its time. And that was what he took precedence over all other things.
“Tino liked all kinds of music. People today are not as eclectic as before,” says Julián Ruiz. Casal was not one of those voices that hide behind a facade. He could reach high pitches within the reach of very few or fall into deeper tones and, at the same time, in the seriousness of lyrics that had little or no imposture. “Singers like him today in Spain? There are none. No way. It’s that he had almost four octaves. Find me one. Is that you listen to the themes of black label and you are still perplexed today& rdquor ;, the producer replies when asked if there is someone similar to Casal today.
The verses of the Asturian artist, his compositions hid rebellion and nonconformity, and responded poetically to his concerns and reflections. ‘Charmed’ was his great commercial success, but If there is a song in ‘Etiqueta Negra’ that strips Casal of his clothes, of that eye-catching visual empire that always accompanied him, it is ‘Los Pájaros’. In that song he was able to show that skill and immense creative capacity and take advantage, paradoxically, of the darkness of his lyrics to shed an immense beam of light on the intransigence, on those who judged him with an inquisitorial look full of incomprehension.
“It is one of the most personal. People believe that Tino was frivolous, but no, Tino had a heart of deep feelings, and he was capable of synthesizing everything that happened to him, marvelous,” says Ruiz. “It was very difficult for me to sing it like that. He told him ‘Don’t sing like Camilo Sesto or Nino Bravo, sing it as if you were an Anglo-Saxon’ & rdquor ;, acknowledges the producer.
And Casal sang it with cracked and dark words: “Waving their wings / they live behind the back / of any society. / Like wounded hawks / they look for their nests / among freedom. Acratas of the night / Post-war stigmas / on earth, / they don’t know how to forget, / they don’t want to forget, / they can’t forget& rdquor;. And implicit in those stanzas was an artistic, fully human counterattack against that intolerance, against ‘good manners’ and ‘what is correct and appropriate’. With ‘Los Pájaros’ it could be said that Casal flew into lands dominated by darkness to illuminate the freedom of that new time that he was born with the end of the dictatorship in Spain.
The album also included songs like ‘African chic’, where tribal and electronic sounds were combined, and the melodic Poker for a loser, in which Casal performed magnificent vocal turns. ‘Fear’, ‘Etiqueta Negra’, ‘Malaria’, ‘Azúcar Moreno’, ‘Legal e ilegal’, and ‘One more minute’ completed the list of that recording.
Later, more number ones would come with ‘Pánico en el Eden’, from his album ‘Hielo Rojo’ (1984), which was the tune of the Vuelta Ciclista a España that year, and ‘Eloise’, an exceptional version of the song by the British singer Bryan Ryan with a superlative arrangement, included in ‘Lágrimas de crocodile’ (1987), which many considered the Asturian singer’s masterpiece.
What would have happened to Casal today? Javier Losada is clear about it: “Knowing him well, since he didn’t like the shabby stuff at all, I think he would have given up, I probably would have left the musicbecause in Spain during the last forty years music has been regressing & rdquor ;.
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On September 22, 1991, the car in which Tino was traveling with some friends crashed into a lamppost on the Castilla road, in Madrid. He was not wearing a seatbelt. The accident cost him his life. “When Tino dies, in Spain it is as if a lighthouse had gone out & rdquor ;, she sadly points out Losada.
Casal died while being airlifted to a hospital, almost as if the lyrics of Birds it would have been a dark and tragic premonition: “Awake. / The daylight has already gone. / wake up / Wrap yourself in darkness. / wake up / The claws of the cold night. / wake up / For once more they will catch you. / wake up / And see that a new day begins& rdquor;.