Pau Riba’s cosmic adventure took new directions after pancreatic cancer against which he had been fighting for months to impose his plans, this Sunday, ending his heterodox life at the age of 73 in his house in Tiana, surrounded of the family.
We lose a free soul of music, countercultural troubadour to the last consequences, literal hippie, but also spirit punk, and author of some core works in a language, Catalan, which he disheveled to his liking by relating it to acid singing, electricity, and criticism of traditional morality.
This conservative imaginary with bourgeois effluvia enveloped him from his birth and marked his destiny: grandson of the poets Carles Riba and Clementina Arderiu, as well as the writer Pau Romeva (one of the founders of the Democratic Union of Catalonia), Pau Riba, who was born. Accidentally in Palma on August 7, 1948, his critical drives towards customary and well-thought-out Catalanism became songs.
Faced with the dominant French inspiration in the “new song”, the young Riba soon looked to Anglo-Saxon folk and emerging psychedelia, signing for the Concentric label (of which he was a graphic designer), where he debuted with an album of three songs (“Taxi Driver” among them). The Sixteen Judges rejected him because of the wild nature of his voice, which is why he was promoted by Concentric: “She has the voice of a watering can, but a watering can can water an entire garden.”
Psychedelic bacchanal
Hosted by the “troupe” of the Folk Group, and establishing an understanding with fellow singer Jordi Pujol, passing through the arms the traditional Catalan repertoire, exploded all his visionary talent in a work, Dioptria, conceived as a double album although it was released in two separate volumes.
In the first, released in December 1969, he wanted to be joined by the group Om (including the guitar, still electric, by Toti Soler, and the keyboards of the recently deceased Jordi Sabatés) in a psychedelic rock bacchanal with bucolic flutes and rage of rhythm ‘n’blues, carrying anti-bourgeois invectives and darts towards female figures painted as affluent and repressed, including the classic “Porcelain Girl”
The second Dioptria, recorded in 1970 after Riba’s stay in Formentera, on the beach of Migjorn, where he discovered the liberating LSD, found other accomplices to Sisa and Albert Batiste in a more folk songbook, heir to the fresh narrative of a Bob Dylan, who at the time was a high influence alongside the British psychedelic folk group Incredible String Band. Both albums precipitated a rupture of relations with Concèntric (aired in a funny exchange of letters included in the libretto) and inspired a staging that, after the veto of the Palau de la Música, ended up finding a place in the now defunct Gran Price on Floridablanca street.
Dioptria would become a cult piece, although the works that followed it are equally notable, starting with Jo, the Doña and the Toad (the musician’s favorite), with its enchanted folk, miraculously recorded outdoors, to the family placidity of his house in Formentera, which had no running water and no light. And for this reason in the electrification of Alchemical Acid Electrochemical Shock (1975) and Liquors (1977), this was recorded, in part, at the Bananamoon Observatory, by the British Daevid Allen (Soft Machine, Gong) in Deià (Mallorca).
A more showman Pau Riba, who came to connect with the spirit of the punk movement and with the emerging Barcelona underground, as reflected in his time at the Canet Rock festival, with the group Perucho’s. In the 80’s, his production became more widespread, with copies such as Transnarcís, and in the 90’s he became interested in electronics in alliance with his sons Pauet and Caïm, Pastora, in Cosmossoma.
Maturity did not detract from the artist’s acidity, which once again intrigued us with Lay Viruses (2008) and his poetic understanding with Pascal Comelade in Color Flies (2013). Not to mention the delirious mystical space plot of Nadadales (2001), an album of lost carols that would give rise to a show revisited year after year on Christmas dates. Also in this 2021, when, after letting us know the serious nature of his illness, he laughs at his death and his own shadow in a series of recitals, such as the Center Artesà Tradicionàrius, where the public she could say goodbye to him. Without losing the ability to surprise or smile.