Rodrigo Y Gabriela have come a long way since their first visit to Dublin in 1999, fresh off the plane from their native Mexico City, with not a word of English between them. But what were they doing here in the first place, in this odd little island on the edge of Europe?
A Mexican pal had recommended Ireland as a relaxed first port of call in the musicians’ planned trip around Europe. Little did the pair realise, as they struggled to find rented accommodation in Dublin city centre and to master English as it is spoken in Ireland, that in coming to Dublin they’d be meeting destiny with a capital D.
With the dark-eyed good looks of their sun-kissed Indian/Spanish ancestors, Gabriela and Rodrigo were an immediately arresting sight on the streets of Dublin. But when they took out their guitars and started to busk, it became clear right away just how showstopping these Mexican musicians could be. Their unique and startling blend of Latin, jazz and rock guitar instrumentals quickly drew such vast congregations on Dublin’s Grafton Street that the normally lax-about-busking gardai were often called to the scene by complaining shop-owners. Naturally vivacious, gregarious and above all adventurous, Rodrigo and Gabriela quickly made friends in Ireland. Invitations to play at weddings and parties mushroomed, affording them just the right sort of opportunities to practise their rapidly-developing Hiberno-English (Irish accents, slang and swearing de rigeur).
With their gift of the radically new, these Latin American artistes were swiftly drawn to the heart of Dublin’s rock and roots scenes, becoming especially close to Damien Rice, a strong and supportive advocate of their unusual music.
“The weather out busking was very cold at certain stages,” recalls Gabriela – in fact, the weather is the only thing about Ireland they haven’t really taken to. “But busking was such a great way for us to evolve as artists. You really have to give it your best, to get people’s attention.”
“It’s the reason we stayed here for a whole year,” Rodrigo adds. “Our plan had been to travel in Europe, starting in Ireland – but we ended up staying much longer, before heading off to busk around other European cities.”
They returned to Ireland after their first stint on the continent, tapping back into a fan-base that was ripe for expansion.
“It was about three years ago that we started to do proper gigs in Ireland,” says Gabriela, who is a real extrovert and peppers her conversation with a string of Dublin-style expletives. “It helped that loads of people knew us from weddings – it’d be like, ‘Oh, I saw you playing at a cousin’s wedding party…’ The first time we played Whelan’s in Dublin we sold out the fucking place, because so many people had seen us play at parties! Ireland’s a small place, and there aren’t, like, loads of Mexicans playing guitar around – so word spread fast.”
Since their humble busking beginnings, Rodrigo Y Gabriela have made major strides into the big league.
“There was a big shift when we signed a record deal,” says Rodrigo. “We put out two albums, Foc and Re-Foc, and at the same time we started touring in the UK, playing at the festivals there and in Europe, all the time expanding our fan-base.”
They had some help along the way from key individuals. Other musicians, Rodrigo says, started inviting the pair on tour. “The first to help us was Damien Rice,” he explains. “He got us to support him here, and when he started playing in the UK, we supported his gigs there too. We met people like Kíla and the Buena Vista Social Club, who also invited us to support. This got us into the world music scene. It’s been a great way into the industry.”
The pair say they adore Ireland for its people and culture. The country has served as a launching pad for their career and Gabriela and Rodrigo still keep an apartment in the centre of Dublin. Recently, however, they also acquired a house on a spectacular, inspiring and tranquil Mexican beach.
One of the remarkable aspects of Rodrigo Y Gabriela’s music is its fusing of rock guitar, including heavy metal, with predominantly Latin rhythms.
On their brand new, self-titled third album (produced by the artists themselves and John Leckie of Muse, Radiohead and My Morning Jacket fame), there are covers of Metallica’s ‘Orion’ and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’. alongside nine exuberant, jazzy-Latin, fire-in-your-belly Rod Y Gab originals.
It comes as no surprise to hear that amongst their exceptionally varied live audiences, head-banging metal-heads are always out in force.
“When we were teenagers we were both in the same thrash metal band in Mexico City,” explains Rodrigo. “Then we broke away from that and started playing on our own at hotels in Mexican beach resorts, first doing covers, then composing our own stuff – but the thrash metal origins still come through.”
“It means that our music appeals to rock guitar fans, as well as world music fans,” Gabriela adds. “It’s a fucking big recipe for people who love guitar. At the festivals, rockers are our main audience. At Oxegen and Glastonbury, it’s a completely rock vibe.”
Do they deliberately play up their rock influences at festivals?
“Oh yeah,” asserts Rodrigo. “It’s the attitude. You feel more free to move because of that special energy. If you play an [all-seated] Olympia show, people are more reserved. But when you play to a standing audience at a festival, having the roots that we have from the thrash metal, it’s not something that’s difficult to get back into your blood.”
Do they miss the electric rush of playing in a thrash metal band?
“I don’t miss it,” says Gabriela. “I really respect that music, but since I was very young I love all music. So for me, playing acoustic guitar or trying to play a classical piece is as enjoyable as playing a Metallica cover. And I don’t miss the band, because I feel more complete and in control of the sound we do, not relying on the drums or the bass, because we are just two. I think, as two, it’s different from a band. It works out musically better than any band I’ve played in.”
I ask Rodrigo if he feels the same way.
“Well, I wouldn’t change what I do now, because of the uniqueness of it,” he says. “But I would like in my spare time – if I ever get any! – to have a thrash metal band with friends, just for the laugh.”
Rodrigo and Gabriela explain that their particular blend of guitar styles is as unusual in Mexico as it is on this side of the world. Without a doubt, this unique mix has been a major factor in their rapid rise to success.
“Yes, definitely,” says Rodrigo, “and that’s the thing I like the most about what we do. When we play at festivals or wherever, we have no reason to compare ourselves to other bands, or to feel the need to compete in any way. When we were in the thrash metal band and playing at festivals, always we’d feel competition, because there were a lot of people doing the same thing. Nowadays we feel complete freedom from all of that.”
Their incomparable sound is also a major reason for their popularity as a support band for big acts, who often prefer not to risk being upstaged by bands that play music from a similar genre. Over the last few months, Rodrigo Y Gabriela have been getting massive exposure to a different audience, playing to arena-size crowds in the UK and Europe as support to David Gray. The thing is that they’re on a roll, constantly converting people anew to the Rodrigo and Gabriela cause. You get the feeling that if it continues in this vein, there’s a couple of superstars in the making sitting here – albeit, as it turns out, a pair of very unconventional superstars.
Gabriela and Rodrigo’s lives have been deeply intertwined for many years. They live, compose, play music and travel together constantly. Latin music traditionally expresses the passions and storms of intimate relationships (“You should hear the lyrics!” Gabriela laughs. “It’s like, ‘You fucking bastard, you’ll never set foot in this house again!’ and ‘I wouldn’t want to anyway, you stupid cow!’").
“So how do you guys,” I ask, “manage the tempests in your own relationship?”
Rodrigo and Gabriela glance at each other briefly. Then they shrug and explain how experience has shown that because I’m a female journalist, there’s no point in bullshitting me that they’re just friends or cousins or brother and sister – which is what they often say when asked...
“Hmmm…” begins Gabriela, with a look on her face that says this is gonna be a long story. “It’s like sometimes we are boyfriend and girlfriend, and sometimes we’re not…”
“It depends on the weather,” adds a cheeky Rodrigo.
“But my reading is that you’re a couple,” I say, looking from one to the other, momentarily confused. And then it dawns on me that these two people, who are obviously soul-mates, have one of those elusive ‘open relationships’! I’m all ears.
Rather than being coy about it, Gabriela and Rodrigo seem to trust me enough to give me an insight into how it works – and what the relationship means to them.
“It’s very difficult to find people who understand the kind of relationship we have, and normally we don’t like to say anything about it,” Rodrigo confesses. “And sometimes people try to make out that open relationships are only about sex. Certainly that’s part of it, but it’s not everything.
“My closest friends know how we are,” he continues, “and they agree with half of it – that I can be with other women! – but they don’t agree that the other part of the couple should have the same freedom. They’re happy to be free to be with other girls, but they don’t understand how I could give my partner that kind of freedom. Which is stupid, because then there is no real freedom.
“So they take their freedom without telling the woman, and the relationship is shit because of that. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re together, we’ve got married and got kids and everything, but I shagged somebody else last night and the other one doesn’t know about it’. People seem to want to put chains around each other, and a lot pretend they’re happy in a monogamous relationship, when really they’re not.”
“Which is terrible,” says Gabriela. “For me, this life was the ultimate dream I always had – playing music and travelling. And for Rodrigo it was the same. So for us, to sacrifice all that for some fucking relationship which is shit – we’d have no time for that at all. There’s no time for being upset or demanding with each other.”
“For whatever the reason, do you know what I’m saying?” adds Rodrigo. “Whether we are a couple or not, we respect each other as people. And whatever she wants to do, or whoever she wants to go with, it’s her business, and the same goes for me.”
I’m quite amazed at how cool these guys are on the question of what most people would think of – prejudicially, I guess – as infidelity. They’re both very sexy, very sexual people – warm and funny and full of joie de vivre, with attractive, vital minds which seem to love learning. Apart from that, they’re young, extremely talented, and spend a lot of time on the beach or being adored by fans. Jaysus! They must both have sexual offers all over the place!
Stumblingly, I ask: “Did you have to struggle through a lot of emotional pain to get to the place where you can be calm about the openness?”
“Of course,” says Gabriela and she smiles that playful smile. “We started off going out together as a typical couple in the rock band when we were about 19. But we were never, like, clingy with each other. It was more like, ‘Look, don’t even touch me when we’re out’!”
“We had the openness vibe – but didn’t really know how to deal with it,” recalls Rodrigo, who is naturally more serious and reserved. “We felt under pressure to be like a normal couple.”
One of the pressures derives from the reality that there are very few if any positive role models for the kind of relationship that Gabriela and Rodrigo now enjoy: there's nowhere people can look and say ‘Well, that’s how it’s done successfully’. Aside from that, there’s a lot of facile condemnation of ‘open relationships’, with many people believing that it’s simply impossible for them to work. But why not? While an open relationships certainly wouldn’t work for every couple, it could well prove be a path to far greater happiness for many. That Rodrigo and Gabriela share such clear and similar life-visions seems to be a big reason for their success in this adventure.
“For me, the most important thing is the music and to play,” says Gabriela. “And Rodrigo is the same, so that makes things flow more easily. Because if I had another idea, if I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do this for a hobby, but I’d really like to be a mother’ – well, then we’d have a big problem! Or if it was the other way around, with Rodrigo wanting me to settle down…”
In effect, they have decided to stay together to celebrate what they have in common – and part of the deal is not to mind the other stuff.
“Exactly,” says Gabriela, “because it’s when you learn how not to mind the other stuff that you actually progress within yourself.”
“Yes, as an individual,” adds Rodrigo. “A lot of people lie to themselves about all this. The only thing they do, in my mind, is to repress themselves, or fall into cheating each other eventually – and it’s so stupid because that’s the least of the problems that we can have as a person.”
“In the music business,” observes Gabriela, “you’re being forced to look at all this, because we have a style of life where we meet loads of people. When we started to play on the beach in Mexico, every night we met different people from all over the world, and it was like ‘ooooh look over there’, and ‘ooooh what about there’…”
Gabriela laughs in her characteristically wild way. “So we started to do whatever we wanted to do,” she says – and the way she says it, it seems like the best idea in the world!
“We were together as a normal couple for about six years,” says Rodrigo. “Then there was a period of transformation, of pain, of trying to understand whether what we were starting to do was right – but coming to Europe was great, because we were away from our families, so we had to deal with this shit on our own. And at the same we had to be really reliant on each other, because our livelihoods depended on playing together on the street, and in the middle of that we were trying to deal with the relationship situation, where we wanted to be free to do whatever we wanted.”
“It’s amazing that you could stay trusting each other through that transformation period,” I say.
“Well, it was very, very painful,” admits Gabriela.
For how long?
They both laugh grimly, and just say it wasn’t quick.
“So how did you learn not to feel really jealous and hurt if one of you went off with someone else?” I ask. For most people, it’d be the 60,000 dollar question.
“But jealousy and hurt is a good thing to feel,” says Gabriela, who then explains how these emotions – which bring a person’s self-esteem or lack of it into sharp relief – have the potential to become gateways to greater self-love.
“When you start feeling jealous and hurt,” she explains, “that’s exactly where you say, okay, this is something I don’t fucking want to feel over this person. I can’t really feel jealous, because I can’t really feel less than anyone in this world. It goes that way, especially if you’re female, because often the weakest point for a girl or a woman is to feel less – or sometimes to feel more – than anybody. So that pain offers the opportunity to redress the balance. You can train yourself – your whole body and system – to change that ‘lesser-than’ trip. And then you’re able to face anything with anybody, and maintain your own integrity.”
Rodrigo takes up the tale.
“Many people have the idea of having that kind of open lifestyle,” he says, “but when you agree to do it as a couple, at the beginning you’re dying to do it but you don’t. It’s very important that somebody takes that first step and is very actively doing it. And then suddenly the other comes around, and then there is a kind of a trading, and probably normally one is going to be more active than the other one, and this one is going to learn about one side of it, and this one is going to learn the other part of the whole situation. You know what I’m saying?”
I do. Rodrigo and Gabriela are making a very good fist of explaining something that is obviously deeply subtle and sensitive, in a language they couldn’t even speak seven years ago. i'm impressed.
“So while one of you is learning that they’re not a bad person to want to be with other people, the other, through being confronted by the insecure part of themselves, is being forced to learn how to love themselves more?”
“Yes,” he says, “and the second part is the more difficult.”
“But it’s also the best part,” adds Gabriela. “The other one isn’t a problem. You have to face guilt and that kind of shit, but that’s easier, because going off with someone you think is gorgeous isn’t exactly a fucking struggle!” Both she and Rodrigo roar laughing. “It’s not like, ‘Oh man, this is so fucking tough’! It’s when you’re on the other end that you learn more, definitely, You have to really learn to respect yourself, your integrity, and don’t blame the other. Then you make a step forward towards yourself, which produces a better quality of life for you, and gives you more freedom, psychologically. And it’s very hard then for things to hurt you as badly as before.”
Rodrigo introduces another dimension. “Even as a couple, as well, it helps you to develop a relationship that can be really fun, so it’s not just you and your own goals. As a couple you can share the same sense of freedom and openness, or whatever you want to call it.”
“So has being open brought you more together as a couple?” I ask, and they both agree that it has.
“You don’t have a reason to leave!” says Gabriela. “You don’t say, ‘Look, this is over, I can’t take it any more’ – because there’s nothing to take! But what I think is very important, if you want to go with somebody else, you need to ask whether it’s because you really want to share time with this person, or because you’re so insecure that you need new people to tell you how great you are all the time. If you’re looking for what people call an ‘open’ relationship, it basically means for me that you are very secure in who you are. This allows you to have no problems if your partner does whatever they want, or if you do whatever you want. But if you want to have an open relationship because you think you’re going to find rock ‘n’ roll, well, that’s not going to happen.”
“I think you have to be very conscious of what you’re up to, really, and why are you doing it,” adds Rodrigo. “If it’s literally just for superficial reasons, be conscious of it, or if you’re doing it to get the reassurance, be conscious of it, and then if you know how to deal with that shit, it can be very exciting for your partner to share it. It’s really difficult and if at some stage if you can talk to each other about what you need or do, then you’ve reached another level. Sometimes you don’t want to know what the other one’s up to, and sometimes you do.”
I make the observation that they seem to really enjoy discussing what is a special personal and spiritual journey with one another. Is this kind of dialogue an important part of their relationship?
Rodrigo and Gabriela agree vigorously. “We have loads of identification and friendship,” says Gabriela. “I think we met in a past life or something, because there’s such a great connection, but we definitely need to respect that we are individuals. We don’t want all this bullshit of me and you together always, no. But ironically, we are still together!”
“And we have been for 15 years, though our relationship has passed through different phases,” adds Rodrigo.
Were you ever afraid that it was breaking apart forever?
“Oh yeah,” says Rodrigo. “That’s natural, that’s the painful part. But when you get to a certain level of being open or whatever, then suddenly you find you go through phases where you don’t really need it that much any more, you know what I’m saying? The main thing is we want to respect each other’s space, whether we are with others or not. We want to grow as individuals – we know we share lots of stuff together anyway. So we’re learning to be on our own and to enjoy being on our own, not just with other people.”
“Once you learn how to treat yourself well, you improve your relationships with everyone,” says Gabriela. “That’s the thing for me. The journey to self-love, but not in an egotistical, selfish way. If you have a bad self-image, then it’s going to be very difficult to relate to anybody, because all your perception is going to follow into that, and then you take everything personally. Once you really work out that way for yourself, then you’re able to improve everything in your life, and you’ll be able to manage many, many things, and be able to understand other people’s views.
“But I think that’s another day’s work – we’ll have to make a workshop, a love workshop.”
She laughs her big, raucous, wonderful laugh again and Rodrigo joins in.
“Yes, that’s it. A love workshop with Rodrigo Y Gabriela!”