The Tony Manero Foundation says its last goodbye to the dance floor

More than a quarter of a century since its birth, the Tony Manero Foundation offers its last concert as a band tonight at the Apolo (9:00 p.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
27 October 2022 Thursday 21:52
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The Tony Manero Foundation says its last goodbye to the dance floor

More than a quarter of a century since its birth, the Tony Manero Foundation offers its last concert as a band tonight at the Apolo (9:00 p.m.), thus ending its farewell tour The Last Dance, which began last August

With this curtain drop, not only does a reference of disco and funk music at a local and Spanish level leave the musical universe -recordings and live shows-, but also an example of aesthetic and collective coherence.

In fact, the announcement of the dissolution was made public in September 2020, five months after having released their latest work, Adult Disco, but the band had already made the decision before recording it. The desire to say goodbye properly, however, had to be delayed for months due to the restrictions caused by covid.

Today's concert will start promptly at nine o'clock at night and will be an intense session without interruption for two hours where his juicy repertoire will be covered: from United soul, through Can't nobody love me like you do, the generational Supersexy girl or the most recent Femme fatale.

Eight albums and hundreds of concerts mark an artistic career marked by that desire to transmit optimism, freshness and the desire to shake the skeleton that has remained intact until the last breath.

As a result of the hectic and creative cultural Barcelona of the late nineties, the large combo with names like Miguelito Superstar, Lalo López, Paquito Sex Machine or Delicious Smith gave shape to what became an unusual and comforting crossroads of culture and hedonism in these latitudes .

The guitarist and composer Lalo López, one of the alma mater from its beginnings and the indefatigable driving force of the formation until today, believes that "this is a brutal life experience; we have grown as people, as workers, within a group and also emotionally. , and it has been more than half of ours, and for that reason it can only be defined as pure life. And it is also family, which means that there are ties and bonds that will exist forever".

The guitarist and composer Lalo López, one of the alma mater from its beginnings and the indefatigable driving force of the formation until today, believes that "this is a brutal life experience; we have grown as people, as workers, within a group and also emotionally. , and it has been more than half of ours, and for that reason it can only be defined as pure life. And it is also family, which means that there are ties and bonds that will exist forever".

López, with an intense musical career at the head of several projects, explains what many of his wide legion of unconditional fans wonder, that is, the reasons for the definitive goodbye of the iconic band.

"We have finished because in the end because the life of a band like that of a couple is based on commitment and on overcoming the progressive growth crises that arise. We have been overcoming several of them throughout these years, the crisis of leaving the mainstream to go to independence, of going from a large audience to a small one, of working with budgets to having to invest ourselves... and all these crises we have overcome as a group until a point has come that for pure growth, pure wear and tear, there are people who say that their life at the moment is no longer the stage, and when that concern arises in certain members of the band, we propose: either we replace those who want to leave and we generate a Frankenstein of the Tony Manero Foundation that extends all this life, or we are consistent and end up being what we have been, that is, six founding members and then four people who have joined in. And we decided to end like this, dignifying what our trajectory has been and ending what we have been". In fact, for a few years the band has been made up of nine musicians because one of them was not replaced at the time.

Finally, the legacy, the greatest cultural contribution of the combo "I think it has been to dignify disco music in this country at the time, and to be one more part of this country's musical history from a genre that had been mistreated and reviled, and that we contributed to its being back on the scene. And from then on, our immediate influence on later generations of musicians has been that many of them have grown up watching us. Many young people from here, from Catalonia and the surrounding area have formed funk bands from us and not from Chic for example. And that has served so that later they investigated and ended up loving African-American music".