Julio Lobos

Passionate, impulsive and vehement, both on and off stage, he first performed in public when he was ten years old, on the ship that carried his family from Chile to Spain, and since then, according to his official biography, he has played with more than 350 bands or artists and long ago passed 5,500 concerts. His musical training (he studied music theory, piano, accordion, harmonica and percussion), together with a temperamental view of music and of life, and an explosive stage presence, have made him one of the most personal and unclassifiable artists on the Barcelona blues scene, a genre he prefers “hard-fought and not overworked”. He explains that his blues revelation came at the age of thirteen, when he saw Ray Charles on television and the spark flew: “Shortly afterwards I bought a double album of his on vinyl, and since then that record has been my personal bible.” He first stepped onto a stage in 1978 and has never stopped since, with projects of his own or accompanying musicians such as Carey Bell, Manu Chao, Jimmy Page or Raimundo Amador, to name but a few reference figures.