Browse by Artist: VENENO

Artist:	VENENO
Title:	Veneno
Label:	VINILISSSIMO (SPAIN)
Format:	LP
Price:	$25.00
Catalog #:	MRSSS 002LP

Vinyl-only release. Reissue of this LP from 1977, arguably the most influential album in Spanish popular music. Kiko Veneno and brothers Rafael and Raimundo Amador (aka Pata Negra) combined blues, rock and flamenco to create a piece of work that could only have happened in late 1970s Andalucía, most often voted the best Spanish pop album. Without a doubt, it's the most influential album, the one that revealed that flamenco could be used by the artists of the time to create an unprejudiced style of street rock that can be heard in current Spanish artists such as Estopa, Bebe and Los Delincuentes (who took their name from the first track of side 2 of Veneno). Now, for the first time, Veneno is released with its original cover, censored by CBS in 1977. The protagonists of Veneno, starting with producer Ricardo Pachón, didn't feel traumatized by decades of dictatorship. They wanted to create new music for the new times, and that impulse would lead, 2 years later, to La Leyenda Del Tiempo, the record by Camarón in which many of the creators of Veneno were involved. Kiko Veneno, of Catalan origin but raised in Andalucía, had been a hippie during times when that attitude meant risking going to jail. A university student, he lived in California for a while, where he, surprisingly, discovered the possibilities of flamenco. Upon his return, he got in touch with the Amador brothers, flamenco musicians who lived in Seville's gipsy ghetto, who were fascinated by Jimi Hendrix (although they couldn't afford to buy electric guitars!). The recording of Veneno in Madrid's Audiofilm Studios has become the stuff of legend: too much joking around, an excess of drugs. The record label's shock was even bigger when they saw the planned cover, which featured the band's name stamped on a brick of hashish. They made them change it, but incomprehension was the general response to the record. Despite the championing of music journalists and media such as TVE (the Spanish public TV broadcaster), the album had little commercial impact and the project disbanded, although Veneno would resuscitate further on. In later years, the record became a clandestine best-seller, shifting tens of thousands of copies of its mid-price edition. Its free and confident attitude keeps shining on Spanish pop music today. Housed in a gatefold sleeve and pressed on 180 gram vinyl in a limited edition of 1,000 copies only.

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