Calamaro in Madrid, madness and genius live from the Argentine legend

Andrés Calamaro, the excessive man, dark suit and green shirt, sunglasses, comes out on stage at WiZink, which acclaims him, and he warns, icy: he doesn't like flashes, they distract him, they annoy him.

He has been warning about it on social networks for some time, and in his reflections on the concerts the behavior of the public has preference (“Complete community with a dog face, neat on stage and without flashes below. How to appreciate that. Without added lights, concentrated on listening and enjoy”, he wrote on Instagram after his

in Soria).

In 2017, during his Intimo tour, he asked —please— to respect the show with mobile phones turned off.

But the warning in Madrid falls on deaf ears and the concert starts off awkward, with Calamaro sulking and scolding whoever points the light at him.

He sings

and

, and at the end he says: “I don't feel like it”.

There is confusion among the people.

Calamaro, who has written everything, who has sung everything, who has lived everything, is capable of anything.

But the production of the live show is inexhaustible and his repertoire is impressive, so his own songs (

,

) take away their anger, they take away the public, they take away the June night in Madrid, and by the time people go into ecstasy singing “I think I'm from the fifth that saw the 78 World Cup, / I had to grow up seeing paranoia and pain around me”, WiZink has already knelt before the prodigal son of the capital;

and people, when it starts playing

(“it's late to heal”), go up into a state of madness from which they don't come down until the end.

Calamaro is at home, and his house lets him know.

Andrés Calamaro, during his concert on Tuesday at the Wizink Center, in Madrid, as part of his Load the Luck 22 tour. INMA FLORES (EL PAIS)

C. Tangana was one of the artists that Calamaro invited to the concert.

In the image, together in the song they sang. INMA FLORES (EL PAIS)

Ariel Rot, in the center with Andrés Calamaro, at another moment of the recital at the Wizink Center.

Both were part of the band Los Rodríguez. INMA FLORES (EL PAIS)

Kase O., who has just announced that from next year he will leave the stage for a while, and Andrés Calamaro also shared a few minutes on stage in Madrid.INMA FLORES (EL PAIS)

Andrés Calamaro and Ariel Rot, during the concert at the Wizink Center. INMA FLORES (EL PAIS)

Concertgoers display Maradona shirts during the concert by Calamaro, who is very fond of soccer.INMA FLORES (EL PAIS)

Calamaro points to the audience during his performance. INMA FLORES (EL PAIS)

“She said that things are going well for you / she meant that things are going badly for you”, sings the artist in

, and goes on to

before putting the first devilish firecracker into the recital:

,

and

, an involuntary trilogy of love for the best footballer of all time.

Dozens of Argentines jump out shirtless with their country's flag, an abundant group that at the end, with the pavilion empty, will continue singing

until they are evicted.

It is pure happiness

.

The public sings it alone.

And Calamaro, plugged in, is already without a chain.

It puts your body

("It doesn't matter if you don't come with me. / This trip is better to do alone. / I'm going to remember you every day / because a love like that is never forgotten").

“

is an attempt to write a popular song within a poisonous and sophisticated album like

”, she said years ago;

is always a song with a double life, a song that has been growing until it is sung by heart and danced to until the end.

And that's where the audience is, dancing, when suddenly Puchito appears on stage, C. Tangana, to sing

with new lyrics in the chorus (“I have a flower of Mary” instead of “a flower in the ass").

Tangana (dismissed with a "thank you, Antonio" by Calamaro, who perhaps believed that the Galician name Antón — his real name — was diminutive, or simply translated it) is emptied with Hong Kong, included in his album El Madrileño .

The night begins to light up with new flames.

Ariel Rot comes out and the WiZink is definitely on fire.

,

and

.

The three songs, separately, and sung together by the leaders of Los Rodríguez, are worth the price of admission.

It's a decade, the nineties, opening up.

They are compositions made in a state of grace, the same one that Calamaro perpetuated with the albums

(1997), whose theme sounds towards the end of the concert —and

at the beginning—, and

(1999), full of songs with a story behind, often tragic;

songs written from life, without artifice, without imposture.

Songs that bleed the writer and that are embedded, like a burst of bullets, in the memory of those who listen to them.

All this before immersing himself in his particular Apocalypse Now, 24 hours a day and seven days a week composing songs and consuming drugs until reaching 700 songs and choosing 103 for that wonderful mess that is

(who also sings in the

between him and the audience: “It looks like I used the spoon for something, / because I can't find soup, dessert or salad).

With Kase.O Calamaro is marked a

interspersed by

which, to no one's surprise, is fantastic;

she remains, almost, as if she was designed for that.

's hour arrives

;

half of the song is sung by people: "I want to live twice so I can forget you."

“Nobody remembers a tweet —she told

magazine years ago— , but thousands of people remember my songs.

And they fall in love with my songs, and they call Andrés or Paloma the children they fathered fornicating with my songs in the background.

You have to tell the truth to the stupid."

After

, Rot returns and sounds

, an absolute hymn and versioned to the last, before the impressive

, dedicated to “the friends who left first”.

“Many friends have gone before me, / and left me alone.

/ That's why if it's cold in winter / I also go down to hell a bit”.

And with one of those friends who left first, of the many who left this universal singer, he closed the apotheosis that the concert had become: singing

, from his friend Gustavo Cerati's Soda Stereo, who died in 2014 after a four-year coma after suffering ischemia.

Calamaro, by then, has put on his jacket again, which he took off in the middle of the noise of the concert, and throws a few cloaks between olés a few meters from Las Ventas.

When leaving, people fill the surrounding bars and continue singing songs, the ones that came out live and the ones that didn't;

there are songs for an eternity, which is what Calamaro chose to live, and there is an audience until beyond the end.

He has passed again in Madrid, where he always passes, going up the river, El Salmón.

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