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Interview
2 October 2022 2.00 h

Adrià Gual

LEADER OF THE EXCITEMENTS

“Even Beethoven spoke about playing with attitude, it’s not just a Stooges thing”

Founded in 2010 by Adrià Gual – who we interview here – and Dani Sure, The Excitements have become one of Catalonia’s foremost soul and rhythm & blues bands

“We wanted to evolve into something a little more soulful, with more weight” “WHEN YOU TRY TO PLEASE SO MANY DIFFERENT AUDIENCES, YOU END UP PLEASING NO ONE”

Cat­alo­nia has never had a rep­u­ta­tion for being a cen­tre for soul and rhythm & blues, but The Ex­cite­ments have be­come one of Cat­alo­nia’s fore­most out­fits play­ing these mu­si­cal styles. The septet, which last year re­leased their first album with French singer of So­mali ori­gin, Kissia San, will per­form on No­vem­ber 5 at Sala Apolo in Barcelona.

It will soon be a year since you re­leased Keepin’ On, your first album with Kissia San as lead singer. Is los­ing a lead singer, com­pared with say a sax­o­phon­ist or a drum­mer, a trau­matic ex­pe­ri­ence for a music group?
Yes, that’s what it was like for The Ex­cite­ments and I can imag­ine it’s like that for every­one. The lead singer is the per­son who gets no­ticed the most. In fact, there are even media out­lets that are more re­luc­tant to give you in­ter­views like this un­less you bring the lead singer along.
You are from Barcelona but the singer is from Paris.
Ex­actly. She speaks a lit­tle Span­ish, but we usu­ally com­mu­ni­cate in Eng­lish. Dur­ing the lock­down, she de­cided to learn Cata­lan and asked me to send her an on­line course, but I re­ally should make more of an ef­fort with my French, as France has al­ways been a coun­try where we play a lot.
Has the ad­di­tion of Kissia led to changes in the band?
Yes, in fact we al­ready wanted to make changes that the pro­file of the pre­vi­ous singer [Koko-Jean Davis] pre­vented us from mak­ing. Ba­si­cally, we looked for some­one who would fit in with what we wanted, which was a singer with more weight, who was more of a singer. Changes like this are usu­ally del­i­cate, and it’s nor­mal for peo­ple to come to see us at con­certs who are du­bi­ous about the changes we’ve made. Yet there are also those who tell us, with­out dis­parag­ing the pre­vi­ous singer, that they have al­ready for­got­ten about her.
Did you have more op­tions on the table?
Yes, we tried out five or six peo­ple. Singers from here, from Madrid, from abroad... Two even came ex­pressly from Lon­don, which given what hap­pened later with Covid and Brexit, would have been a prob­lem if we had cho­sen them. In all cases they were ar­tis­ti­cally very valid, but they couldn’t com­mit to The Ex­cite­ments 100%, which is a draw­back. There are groups that, de­pend­ing on sched­ules, do con­certs with three mu­si­cians or with six, who share the band with a thou­sand other pro­jects and who change one of the mu­si­cians if they can’t do the gig. For us, how­ever, these things are im­pos­si­ble to do.
What new paths have you set out to ex­plore?
We didn’t want to get stuck in the clas­sic thing that we’ve made our own, and we wanted to evolve into some­thing a lit­tle more soul­ful, with more weight. What we’ve been doing until now has been very up­tempo, but over the years we’ve re­alised that it’s not nec­es­sary. We had a lot of dis­cus­sions about whether it was re­ally nec­es­sary to play so fast, which is not the same as play­ing strongly. We changed pro­duc­ers [the new album was pro­duced by Neil Sug­ar­man and Marc Tena], and they in­sisted on the idea that what was needed above all was to sound com­pact. If you lis­ten to many clas­sic al­bums, you’ll see that the mu­si­cians don’t play so fast but still have ex­tra­or­di­nary strength. If you want to play strongly, you have to play strongly, not just faster.
Did the pan­demic jeop­ar­dise a pro­ject like yours?
The sit­u­a­tion was very messed up. Some mem­bers, like Dani, had to leave, which for me was the most painful de­par­ture in all these years, be­cause he was there from day one and set up The Ex­cite­ments with me. The rest, in­clud­ing some who teach and oth­ers, like me, who got one of these self-em­ployed grants, were more or less able to hold on, but the whole thing was dif­fi­cult. We can­celled quite a few con­certs, like those in a Eu­ro­pean tour that we had to push back.
I re­mem­ber hear­ing the his­toric Cata­lan con­cert pro­moter, Gay Mer­cader, once say that the big names in soul have never worked out well in south­ern Eu­rope. Smokey Robin­son or Gladys Knight, for ex­am­ple, never stop over here when they tour. And when Al Green per­formed for the first time in Barcelona a few years ago, ticket sales were ex­tra­or­di­nar­ily poor.
It could be. It de­pends on the mo­ment, I guess. Irma Thomas sold out a few years ago and Martha Reeves too. Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley also pulled in quite a few peo­ple, but it’s true that for there to be a scene be­tween the groups here, we’d all have to be in­ter­con­nected and get drunk to­gether. And it’s not like that.
How do you see things com­pared to when you started 12 years ago?
There is a sec­tion of the pub­lic that’s grown up, which is a fact. Al­though every place you go is dif­fer­ent. In France, for ex­am­ple, con­certs are still at­tended by a lot of young peo­ple. But young­sters are gen­er­ally in­ter­ested in other stuff. It’s the way it is and there’s noth­ing wrong with that, it’s nor­mal!
In one in­ter­view I read, you said you have noth­ing against trap.
Of course not! I have noth­ing against any type of music. Some you like more, some you like less, but every­one should do what they want. I don’t like reg­gae­ton or elec­tronic music. And trap... well, not much ei­ther, but it does have one thing, which is that it an­noys old peo­ple, which is what it’s sup­posed to do. I have friends who will say that trap is rub­bish, but I point out to them that they’re using the exact same words as the peo­ple who com­plained about punk. They say it’s not the same thing, but of course it’s the same! It’s all about rub­bing old peo­ple up the wrong way. The thing is that we’re now the old peo­ple!
The Ex­cite­ments have never strayed from the clas­sic line. Have you ever felt tempted to play with elec­tron­ics or urban rhythms or some­thing?
No, no... If in ad­di­tion to hav­ing an in­se­cure job, we also had to do things we don’t like doing... Also, when you try to please so many dif­fer­ent au­di­ences, you end up pleas­ing no one. I re­mem­ber when, poor guys, they made Ser­gio and Estíbaliz sound more like rock­ers... It was grotesque.
Were any of your fore­bears mu­si­cal?
My grand­fa­ther’s sis­ter was a piano teacher. My poor fa­ther was no mu­si­cian but he did spend a sea­son pro­duc­ing Gay & Com­pany con­certs in Madrid, at a time when we lived there, when I was very young. Gen­e­sis and Jethro Tull con­certs... all those types. He was also Pau Riba’s man­ager for a fort­night, or some­thing like that. As a child I re­mem­ber see­ing him around the house, with one nail painted with a Bic pen, and think­ing: “What a strange man...”
James Brown fined his mu­si­cians when they missed a note. Is this sort of dis­ci­pline nec­es­sary to make a soul band sound flaw­less?
For starters, we’re not James Brown’s band! But, yes, for a time we had to issue fines, but not for play­ing wrong notes but for being late to re­hearsal, which ended up being a prob­lem that upset us all. As for notes, I’m not wor­ried about a mu­si­cian mess­ing up. I’m much more con­cerned when there’s no at­ti­tude. I see many bands with a cer­tain rep­u­ta­tion, and I won’t name names, who play per­fectly but when they’re in front of you on stage you feel that noth­ing spe­cial is hap­pen­ing. The fault, I think, is the type of ed­u­ca­tion given in many music schools and con­ser­va­to­ries. I re­mem­ber hav­ing a gui­tarist who often told us that at the con­ser­va­tory they teach you a lot about play­ing but not so much about being a mu­si­cian.
There is an anec­dote about when Tete Mon­toliu was played a record in which the mu­si­cians did every­thing per­fectly, and when asked for his opin­ion he said: “Yes, it sounds good. It sounds so good that I don’t like it at all!”
Of course. Even Beethoven spoke about play­ing with at­ti­tude, it’s not just a Stooges thing. A mis­take is tol­er­a­ble, but a lack of at­ti­tude is not.

in­ter­view music

15 illustrations for 15 songs

Keepin’ On, the album that The Excitements started recording exactly one year ago at the Mercat de Música Viva in Vic, marked a turning point for the group. It was not only the debut of a new lead singer but also that of a new producer. In an interdisciplinary exercise uniting music with visual arts, The Excitements have now commissioned Jordi Duró to carry out a project in which 15 illustrators (including Adrià Gual himself, who is a former design student at the Elisava School) will embody their interpretation of the songs from The Excitements’ latest album in a series of 100 signed and numbered screen prints. Sabrina Gabrielli, Kavel Rafferty, Maria Picasso, Paco Alcázar, Santiago Sequeiros, Jordi Duró, Error! Design, Ivan Castro, Miguel Bustos, Gemma Berenguer, Alex Hanke, Rubén Hervás, Mariñe Pérez and El Marques are all taking part in the adventure.

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