Tino Casal: life and death secrets of the excessive artist

Tino Casal in 1984. / LUIS DEL AMO

It was a “very high pitched” cry that Antonio Villa-Toro heard on September 22, 1991. It came from Tino Casal.

The Opel Corsa in which both were traveling and “two boys, Gonzalo and Manolo, the latter model”, had just hit a lamppost on Madrid's Castilla highway.

“I was sitting in the back and Tino was in the passenger seat.

After the crash I saw a curtain of black smoke and asked: 'Tino, how are you?'

He didn't answer, but I think he was still alive ”, remembers Villa-Toro.

The toilets arrived and called a helicopter to evacuate the singer.

He had a dire prognosis.

"He died in the sky, like a star," says Villa-Toro.

This painter linked to the Madrid movement has lent himself to talk about the details of the accident, because he is "tired of hearing lies about what happened".

“This is all part of a process.

I spent many years without being able to listen to Tino's songs.

The pain was tremendous, "says the 71-year-old from Cordoba, one more than the singer would have today.

• Tino Casal, a beacon of modern pop

The Casal universe does not stop despite the fact that the artist disappeared almost three decades ago (the 30th anniversary is next year).

The reissues of his albums, the tributes, the documentaries, the retrospective boxes, the exhibitions of his extensive wardrobe, the vindication of his avant-garde music and a figure described as "the most daring artist of Spanish pop" are recurrent.

And surprises still arise like the one that sees the light of next Friday: a mysterious album that he never spoke of, recorded in 1977 in Turin and recently found in Brazil.

Who is capable of recording an entire album (nine songs, 40 minutes) and not saying a word to their closest friends, partners and relatives?

Tino Casal, an excessive and ravishingly modern character who reigned in Spanish pop in the eighties with classics like

or

This law of silence imposed by the artist does not surprise people with whom he shared his life.

Like Javier Losaba, the musician with whom he worked the longest, a decade.

“He never spoke to me about these songs, but I don't think he was driven by an eagerness to hide it.

Tino always looked to the future.

I didn't waste a second reflecting on the past.

Maybe that's why he never mentioned this album, ”says Losada.

It is urgent to ask: where have these songs been for the last 42 years and why do they appear now?

The person responsible for this material (the album will be titled

released is Pablo Lacárcel, a 28-year-old from Madrid who has specialized in researching Spanish musical heritage and publishing it on his record company, Lemuria.

Last year he released an anthological box,

with what he believed to be everything recorded by Tino Casal (Tudela Veguín, Asturias, 1950 - Madrid, 1991).

“It was a fluke.

A few months ago I received an email from Brazil informing me that they had found some 18-centimeter tape tapes of 'that musician that interests you so much: Celestino Casal, ”Lacárcel explains.

Brazil?

Wasn't it recorded in Turin?

History deserves to be recomposed.

An Italian record company specialized in wholesale billing of cover cassettes (in Spain, the famous gas station tapes) selected several European artists to record a song that was hitting hard in Italy,

There would be reinterpretations in German, French, Portuguese, English ... Casal would be in charge of translating it into Spanish as

.

Because the?

Possibly because someone from the record company listened to a couple of singles that the singer published in 1977 with the Philips company, who was looking for a new Nino Bravo.

Also because Casal was a gifted and cheap vocalist.

"Surely Tino took advantage of the recording hours to complete the other eight songs," says the head of Lemuria.

The Italian company went bankrupt, and those responsible fled to São

Paulo harassed by debts.

After a few years operating there, Warner Brasil bought its catalog.

A few months ago and knowing that Lemuria had released

a Warner Brasil manager found the material in a warehouse and reported it to Lacárcel, who paid money for the recordings.

“The tapes were in bad, damp, moldy condition.

It has been a very meticulous handicraft work until we have managed to recover them ”, says Lacárcel.

The sound is good, and listening to it will bring a smile to the followers of Tino Casal.

There is a clear influence of disco music in pieces like

(the Bee Gees released that same 1977

other songs like

enter the field of melodic ballasts (Nino Bravo, Camilo Sesto) and disco rumba lashes emerge. type Las Grecas in

.

There is an abuse of falsetto and high-pitched vocal exhibitionisms.

He is a musician in the process of searching for his style.

Casal had already started a career in the sixties with Los Zafiros Negros, then with Archdukes, but it was not until 1981 (with

that he began a brilliant ascent.

He released five albums, all number one in sales in Spain, except for the last,

(1989), which remained in position three.

Obsessed with the avant-garde ("Musically he loved Peter Gabriel, Thomas Dolby or David Bowie," says Losada), he could make a sophisticated piece and at the same time have the irony of dedicating a song to his penis,

Another conjecture to understand Casal's silence from his seventies album is how little he liked to listen to himself.

Villa-Toro speaks: “We came to my house after having been partying all night and we began to paint.

I sometimes played his records.

And he would tell me: 'Take it off, take that off'.

He was too restless.

What was recorded was past ”.

Villa-Toro affirms that in the last months of his life the singer thought more about painting than about music.

“I would go to bed and he would spend the night painting.

He was very talented.

I put it on a par with Pollock or Kandinsky.

I have about 50 of his canvases that I will one day exhibit ”, he says.

The painter wants to clarify some episodes: “I have heard many people say that they were in that car on the day of the accident.

Looks like it was a bus.

There were only four of us and we were not drunk, as said.

We were having dinner at a restaurant and four of us drank a bottle of wine.

Then we went to Stella [a trendy nightclub in Madrid in the eighties] for a while.

One of the guys who came with us told us that he knew a recording studio in Pozuelo that was very good.

I had keys because it belonged to a friend.

Tino had to produce the album of a singer from a group that wanted to go solo, I think it was from Semen Up [the singer was Alberto Comesaña].

We went to Tino's house to get a set of microphones and we went to the studio, which was in Pozuelo.

It was a rainy day, with mud.

The car slid and we collided.

It would be 6.30.

I remember that a photo of a syringe came out and some media put it to the test to affirm that we were drugged.

By God, it was from the toilets: they had to inject me with painkillers.

It blew everything away. "

The only victim was Casal.

Villa-Toro fractured his clavicle and two ribs.

A tragic episode was still missing from that story.

“The two people who accompanied us were not great friends of ours.

When we went out at night, young boys beat us, ”he says.

One of them, Manolo, a model, committed suicide four months later.

"I later saw Gonzalo, the one who was driving, presenting a television program, although I don't remember his last name," says the painter, who adds: "They called us La Santísima Trinidad.

Tino, Fabio McNamara and I were always together.

But that day, I don't really know why, Fabio wasn't coming ”.

Rumors about his three-year absence

Another of the chapters that people close to Casal want to deny are the machinations about what caused his withdrawal for almost three years, from 1985 to 1987. According to these, the singer suffered a sprain in a concert at the Pachá nightclub in Valencia.

The doctors recommended rest.

He rebelled and continued the tour, self-medicating with cortisone.

The abuse of this medication produced a necrosis, which led to bone decalcification of the head of the femur and this caused a serious infection.

He was in the hospital for several months.

It was 1985, the AIDS years.

The rumors soared… “All that annoys me a lot.

We were not saints and we tried many things, but Tino was a very sober person.

In life I saw him drunk.

He knew how to retire on time, ”says Losada.

The appearance of these hidden recordings for 42 years opens another focus of speculation in the artist's life.

Surely the only person who knows the whole truth about these songs is Pepa Ojanguren, who was his partner for more than a decade (they broke up in 1987).

Ojanguren, a relevant theater and opera costume designer to whom a large part of the transgressive image of the musician is attributed, was with Casal in those seventies.

She was required for documentaries, shows and reports, but she never wanted to speak after the musician's disappearance.

And now it is impossible: he died at the age of 69 last August victim of cancer.