Before starting the concert, Dani Martín published a long text on his social accounts from which we extract this: “I’m not a shark, so it’s impossible to please everyone. It took me a lot of personal work to understand it. El Canto del Loco and me: this is who I am, those songs, that speech, that respect for myself and these 25 years together.” This reflection largely defines what his recital last night was: a review of the musical and life history of this guy (he always seems like this despite his 48 years) nobility and with musical flaws mitigated by the abrasive candor he exudes, the contagious passion he transmits, his unfiltered speech, the ability to reach people with basic ideas, the assumption of his flaws with sportsmanship and the not boasting of his strengths.
The singer completed the first of his ten evenings at the Movistar Arena (Madrid). Indeed, a dozen concerts between November and December, something that an artist has never done in the Madrid pavilion. Joaquín Sabina will also have ten dates this year at the same venue, but for a longer period of time, seven months. Martín announced the recitals a year ago, when the venue was still called the WiZink Center, and tickets flew out within hours. 170,000 tickets, 17,000 per evening, some tickets at 39 euros for the cheapest. An indisputable merit of the artist from Alalpardo, who organized the tour 25 fucking years, and he puts the asterisks, not us. He celebrates a quarter of a century in music, because it all started for him with the first album El Canto del Loco in 2000.
Martín appreciated it from the beginning. Still without the band or him on stage, the lights went out and one of the most moving songs in history played, no matter how many times we heard it, Imagine, by John Lennon. The lyrics were shown in the main video so that people would sing along and hug each other. What to do after you start with the hymn of hymns. Well, tap Gym shoes, clear. Then? We’ll be back. And after? You kiss. All the songs from El Canto del Loco. Bold is an understatement to describe this beginning after hearing Lennon’s voice and piano. The repertoire was 70 percent built by the Madrilenian with songs taken from El Canto del Loco, a show designed to unceremoniously sink one’s head into nostalgia, for the happiness of an audience of different generations, with mothers and fathers with their daughters, groups of girls and boys and many forty-year-olds.
What happens with the songbook of his former group is that it is sung almost involuntarily, because even if you haven’t heard it for 20 years, it emerges from the cranial cavity where it says El Canto del Loco and the songs gently say: hello, we’re back. And you sing them, because there were some years when the compositions of this band could be heard everywhere. With this successful script, all that was missing was for the protagonist to behave like Dani Martín. And he did it. He showed his usual disheveled and rude style, filled the concert with euphoric “applause”, with the “fuckin’ hands up” variant, and left some hasty instructions: “Welcome to a safe place, no one judges anyone here”. It’s what you expect from him: a guy who gets on stage, moves his arms and 17,000 people imitate him. Either you have it or you dedicate yourself to something else.
He created a simple stage, with three screens and repeated tongues of fire emerging from the ground. A group of seven musicians (three guitarists, two keyboard players, a bassist and the drummer) proposed an awkward sound that suited the music presented very well. In addition to the abundant material from El Canto del Loco, he also focused on his latest work, The last day of our lives (2024), the one in which he attacks social networks and current music, which he does not consider his own. One of these pieces is named after News Friday, who furiously intoned last night: “I don’t see a living soul in the digital age. / I don’t see love or desire to fight. / I feel nothing for today’s music. / We’re half dead copying that model. / Go work your ass off. / What are you saying, you’re the ones making popular music now.”
His songs with simple melodies and messages as naive as they are unappealable resonated with an audience that remained speechless. We could ask for a little more subtlety, both on an aesthetic, philosophical and musical level, but then it wouldn’t be Dani Martín, it wouldn’t fill the halls and it wouldn’t seem so real to us.
It was difficult for him to reach the tone in some songs, such as the challenging ones No, he’s not coming back, but overall it was solid throughout the two hour show. For two of the recital’s ballads, The luck of my life AND Peter Pan, He emerged from the side of the stands and performed them among the people. Some girls nearby were crying while filming with their cell phones. Even then the level of emotion had reached high levels with a speech that he called “chapa” and which I allow myself to reproduce almost in full because it accurately defines the character: “This is what made you come to the call, the songs, what comes from my stomach and my heart. It doesn’t matter if I’m fat, if I’m thin, if I’m more beautiful or uglier, you are always here… Music saved my life, and 25 years later you continue to save. I also wanted to save my life and in these last years I have given myself the space, the time to resort to many things in life that are not just applause: my parents, my friends, love, kisses, making love again, chocolate ice creams, pizzas, French fries, Athletes… Being with the people I love, because I have less and less time left, so every fucking second of this fucking life I promise to live it as if it were the last.” The “oooo” and the applause filled the room.
For the last one, unbearablealso from his former group, he wore a T-shirt that read: “El Canto del Loco and I are alive.” If he survives the nine concerts he left in this same place, perhaps it should be printed on another T-shirt: “I survived ten Movistar Arenas”. It’s just an idea…
