Ricky Gil

He joined the first batch of musicians at La Cova del Drac in the mid-eighties, after soaking himself in blues records during his adolescence and attending a concert by Memphis Slim and JB Hutto & The New Hawks at the Palau de la Música. By that time he had already founded with his brother Albert the band of his life, Brighton 64, whose first album was entitled precisely Barcelona Blues. Since then he has been hooked on African-American music: “It became an obsession. I have been a blues performer only intermittently, but all my projects have had strong bluesy roots.” Caught by “the rawness of the music and of the lyrics, the sound, the stories and the biography of its performers”, after more than four decades treading the boards he is still in love with a music that has given him practically everything: “A parallel world, an infinite well of knowledge that makes me intimately happy.”