Alan Bike

At sixteen, Álvaro Martínez Maluquer was already performing at the sports facilities known as Picadero Tomás, and two years later he began playing regularly. “In 1976 and at those glorious university parties”, as he remembers them, before passing through some of the most legendary Barcelona rock bands of the early eighties. Imaginative, cultured, irreverent and ironic, by then as Alan Bike, he began to distil a highly personal style, a cross between a modern urban troubadour and an early rural bluesman, at a time when telling stories was as important as playing. His ability to connect with the audience, to make an impression on them and to wrap them in a particular imaginary that begins in a fictional childhood in Antequera, Mississippi (recounted in his book Alrededor del compás), turns his live performances into a unique and often delirious spectacle, always with an authentic and forceful blues whose essence attracts him, the “jondo” quality, in his own words. A unique artist who discovered the genre on a Quincy Jones record and decided to play it because, tired of bands, it was something he could do all on his own, and which also offers him “the chance to tell lies”.