Once upon a time there was a girl named Paula Ribó (Barcelona, 1990) who for years dubbed the child character Caillou. She was so creative that when she left her nun college, she decided to get involved in theater pieces as a playwright and an actress. At the age of 30, Ribó became a mother, she became Rigoberta Bandini, a alter ego musical under which he would compose the song In Spain we call it loneliness [En España lo llamamos soledad], one of the hymns of confinement. And suddenly, completely unexpectedly, he rose to fame. Creator of the funniest live shows that are made in the country, now Bandini is launching a new song, entitled Julio Iglesias and in one of his stanzas he speaks directly to Ribó: “Girl who left, take care of this woman who has not yet forgotten you.”
Question. Why Julio Iglesias?
Answer. Because he is no longer just a person, but a whole universe and a way of life, which can generate a lot of rejection because he was a man who, like many of his time, lived with women in a very patriarchal way, but managed to create a style unique with his music and his way of singing. In some way, it is very liberating to play at being Julio Iglesias, to seize those values that have always been considered masculine.
P. And if you reached the level of success of Iglesias, would you lead the same lifestyle?
R. I would not want 12,000 men at my disposal. I think promiscuity is highly overrated.
P. How is that?
R. Some time ago I wrote a little book in which I wrote a phrase that I think sums up this very well: “You have confused happiness with euphoria.” For years I have confused her, I think we of my generation have confused her a lot.
P. He speaks in his lyrics of his father’s Ducados and the Seat Córdoba of his childhood. Do you think Millennials are too nostalgic?
R. I am very nostalgic since I was 10 years old. I romanticize everything. Very much. The Julio Iglesias thing is a clear example.
P. One of his greatest hits is titled Too many drugs [Demasiadas drogas]. How would you define your generation’s relationship with drugs?
R. It is very normalized, which I do not find entirely harmful. The dangerous thing is the trivialization, because in the end they are toxic, but I find the whole ritual by which some friends decide one day to enter another state: hugging, loving each other and saying incredible things to each other. I am not apologizing for drugs, but they have given us very nice things and whoever says no, they have not tried the good ones.
P. His last song talks about a lost lover. Do you have a hard time recovering from breakups?
R. It depends a lot on each break. Throughout my life I have been different people. When I have had some very strong experience, it has happened to me like my son now, that sometimes I look at him and I already cry because I imagine when he is 18 years old and he tells me that he is leaving home … And he is still 16 months old! It’s not just that I’m homesick. It is that I anticipate nostalgia!
P. In the lyrics of this same song he says: “He wanted to be an athlete and he cut off his tits.” What does that mean?
R. When I was still playing with dolls I started to get lewd looks because my body had developed so early. I hated my breasts for a long time. At the age of 20 I went through an operating room to reduce its size. I have never wanted to be an athlete [risas] But now that I see it in perspective, it seems very strong to me that the pressure that women receive on our bodies leads us to make decisions like this. Right now I would not have surgery.
P. What happened that her parents took her at the age of six to a dubbing studio?
R. My sister and I were in a choir at school and the music teacher, who composed, told us that she needed children for announcements. My sister started to make a character of [la serie infantil] The backyard band And I was going to see her every fucking day. I was fascinated by that world. So I insisted that I wanted to do it too, because I had no shame and it was awful and they caught me to be Caillou.
P. And your parents weren’t worried about you doing that? At the end of the day, it is to start working very young.
R. It was that for me it was an extracurricular activity that motivated me so much that it almost made me study more and finish my homework earlier to dedicate myself to it. And then, for many years in which I have done theater, a very precarious activity, that money is what has allowed me to take risks in artistic projects.
P. You made an adaptation of Shakespeare in which you turned Richard III into a 27-year-old woman …
R. That was during an art residency in New York. It interested me a lot because Shakespeare’s villains, villains in general, get the public to empathize with the worst in human beings. There is a Richard III in all of us. There is also a Juliet. We have to accept those parts and stop dividing ourselves into good and bad.
P. Do you think we live in a time when artists are required to position themselves as black or white?
R. I believe that a person can act bad in context and not necessarily be evil. You don’t have to be benevolent towards people who generate hate speech or who screw up loudly, but I find public lynching a very medieval thing. I understand that there are people who think that it is a very effective way to neutralize things that you do not like, but in the end the only thing you generate is fear that they will put you on the guillotine in the town square.
R. And have you ever felt that fear since it’s in the public eye?
R. There is always fear because the more the project grows, the more loudspeaker I have. It would hurt me to hurt some sensitivity, especially if it is without wanting to, because if it is wanting, well, look, this is my opinion, that’s it. But fortunately I have not seen myself anywhere scrub…
P. But did I dream of it or did I see it on C. Tangana’s boat?
R. Ahhh [risas] No, no, I was on a yacht with him too, but the week before the scandal. We did not know each other and we met at the airport because we were going to the same festival and we spent some very cool days in Mallorca.
P. Do you consider yourself ambitious?
R. Yes Yes. I am ambitious. What happens is that I come from having planted many other seeds that have not worked so much so with the success of now it is not that I am freaking out a lot. I’m enjoying it from a pretty healthy place. If it grows faster, I still get a heart attack. It would give me a lot of trouble not being able to have a normal life, to become David Bisbal. Not being able to go down the street is a price that I don’t know if I want to pay. So I like music, but the first thing I like is life.
P. You seem very sure of yourself. Where does it come from?
R. I would say love. I do not know. My parents have given me a lot of love since I was very little and they have made me believe that everything I did was the host. They have supported me a lot in all my steps. And then I started doing things very young. Also, if you create something from your honesty you become much more immune to criticism because it is your fucking honesty, that is, there is nothing else. It is your truth.
P. She jokes a lot about being “a posh from Teresianas” and dresses up with her school uniform at concerts. How was your relationship with the nuns?
R. I have one of lime and one of sand. On the one hand, it was getting out of there and starting to create things and realizing that I felt a very strong repression there. But on the other hand, although I am not excessively Catholic, because for me God is precisely freedom and expression, I know that my connection with the spiritual comes from there. There are people who ask me if I am from Opus and I understand that they think it because sometimes I hear myself and say my goodness, but that experience has left me inside like a lit candle. I could also attribute it to my grandmother, who is a person who has just passed away, but who always transmitted to me that of looking at the sky and understanding the immensity. On the other hand, my parents have always been very creative. My mother always said that she wanted to be a backup singer for Julio Iglesias.
#Rigoberta #Bandini #Promiscuity #overrated