Mexican Stand Off

Welcome to Rodrigo y Gabriela: The Road Warriors, a sonic remake of Perdita Durango by way of Lorca – with acoustics turned up to 11. A few short months ago Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero – thrash-loving Mexico City ex-pat buskers who fetched up in Dublin some years ago and used the city as a base from which to enact the most unlikely kind of world domination – released Live In Japan, the culmination of years of planes, trains, automobiles, luggage carousels, hotel check-ins, sound checks and live shows.

It was a record distinguished by spellbinding acts of digital virtuosity and metallic hoodoo guru moves channeled through the ancient medium of Mexican flamenco dream-weavery, with a side order of polyrhymic hand-drum fills, thrill, frills and bellyaches enacted on hollow-bodied acoustics, plus a dash of Django jangle, duende and gypsy jazz. The kind of record that could only been made by virtuosos who’d sweated long hours over their craft.
When we catch up with Rodrigo on a Saturday morning in late November, the man has become so road-hardened he’s taken to spending his shore leave in a succession of hotels in Nonces, France.
“The thing is,” he says, “we’ve tried to tour with the same people since everything started, we know each other, we’ve created a way to tour with people that became pretty much our friends, so we don’t hire a different tour manager for every tour. I mean, some guys have changed, our sound engineer was a great Irish guy but he just decided he needed a break…”
They burned him out, in other words.
“Yeah, he had some issues. He was amazing and we love him, but he was very tired and under pressure, but he has his own priorities and we have ours. There’s never been any fights, we keep very close to the crew and we need help to do a lot of personal stuff when we’re on tour. If you have some business back at home, you cannot live with everything at the same time, y’know? My brother came in to help us as well, three years ago, and is pretty much part of the organisation nowadays. So it’s a good bunch of people that have the same goal. The idea is just to share it with everyone, and if everyone is happy, that’s the point.”
There’s long been a correlation between heavy rock and classical music, but Rodrigo y Gabriela must be about the only duo whose records get stocked in the world music sections, yet they attract a metal mob to their concerts. As Rodrigo points out, this is not as anomalous as it appears, given that the pair first played together in a Mexican thrash outfit called Tierra Acida.
“Obviously our metal influence is pretty much alive,” he says. “Y’know, our fuckin’ view of the life we live, the metalheads really relate a lot with that kind of mentality, and a lot of my friends come from that background. Although you cannot hear it, probably you can see it, that attitude.”
Consequently, it’s the approbation of metal musicians that matters most to Rodrigo.
“Metallica of course,” he says, when asked to name names. “And Alex Skolnick, the guitar player from Testament, he was my hero when I was a kid, he wrote me and we met later and now we are very good friends. I’ve met a lot of musicians that I met and respected, but on a personal level Metallica and Alex were special, because I played music pretty much because of them.”
While we’re talking metal, any Spinal Tap moments over the last 12 months?
“Yeah, a lot, so many I don’t even remember!”
Has a crowd ever gotten out of control at one of their shows?
“Absolutely. I remember a few times, back in the day when we were touring small places in England, I mean, some crowds were wild. One time in Newcastle they were fuckin’ crazy – in a good way – but we probably didn’t expect or want them to get as crazy, ’cos we were in a different mood that night and wanted to have a more relaxed gig, and suddenly fuckin’ people just went mad.”
Rodrigo believes that the biggest challenge for any touring musician is to maintain concentration night after night.
“It is quite draining, and sometimes if you don’t focus or concentrate enough it can be quite boring as well,” he admits. “That’s actually the tricky part: if you start to feel bored about it you have to come up with more creative ways to make the whole thing worth it for you and the people who are paying to see you.”
How does he keep from going on autopilot? Sit on a nail?
“(Laughs) That’s a difficult one. You know probably from interviewing artists who tour more than we do, some people like it because they get so used to all the fuckin’ addictions you get with this lifestyle. But I think in my past life I did all the drugs and things, so that doesn’t really hit me this time round. I have to get addicted to other things.”
What’s the single most indispensible item necessary for survival on the road?
“The iPod is a very good fuckin’ invention, you know what I’m saying? Something that I probably won’t let go for a good while is a travel guitar. We just signed a deal with Yamaha and they’ve been building some beautiful guitars for us, but they customised two travel guitars. They’re spectacular man, they’re so good, so silent, you can play on planes, everywhere, you put your headphones on and you have reverb and you can play along with the iPod if you want to.”
Rodrigo y Gabriela’s most extraordinary quality is the telepathic manner in which they weave serpentine guitar lines. Rodrigo reckons a deep psychological and emotional connection is crucial to their musical dynamic.
“I think the years we’ve been playing together make that chemistry that we have,” he says. “That’s actually a problem when we sit down with some (other) musicians. It’s difficult to play because we feel disconnected. We are so used to playing together and when we jam with other musicians we expect them to do what we normally expect from each other.”
It sounds akin to the secret language twins devise in the womb.
“That’s right. It’s probably something weird like that.”
Is it scary to have his identity as a musician umbilically joined to another human being?
“No, it’s not scary because we like to be together, and we decided for this to happen, it’s something we feel comfortable with. The day we stop feeling that we would probably finish. We know what we don’t like from each other as well. I think that’s the secret of a lot of big bands – they learn how to put up with each other. But at this time in our lives we don’t really fight at all about decisions we take for the band, or even about writing. We know what we have to do and we know what we like.”
So at what point in his life did he realise he possessed such a potent musical gift?
“I don’t think that I have a gift at all, I think it was years of work. In that case, everyone has it. The muse is not gonna come out of nowhere. It’s not gonna come to a lazy bastard. I don’t consider that you’re born with special… I mean some people are, but I’m not that kind of person. Maybe Bach was, I think he was born with something different. But I think just playing and the necessity of surviving in Irish lands for a few years, the busking times, that actually pushed us to play and compose and write what we do now. It was totally an accident pushed by a necessity, and we just hung to it and tried to make the best out of it and try to enjoy it while it lasts. And hopefully it lasts a long time and we can keep our career going as long as we want, but you never know. Maybe in two years we’ll get interested in something totally different.”

Live In Japan is out now on Rubyworks