‘I’m happiest in the studio, naked and drinking mezcal’: is Buika the most liberated performer on Earth?
She is the ‘singer from everywhere’ who belts out numbers ‘with her heart ripped out’. As the flamenco fusion phenomenon blazes into Britain, she reveals all about her new superpowers – and the exoplanet she hid on during Covid
Etan Smallan
Tuesday 12 March 2024
Buika has forgotten about our interview. The Spanish singer-songwriter was in her studio, preoccupied. “Completely stoned with my music,” she says, once her manager has given her a prod and she connects with me via video call from the Dominican Republic. “I’m so sorry.”
What is she working on? “Well, actually, it’s very complicated,” she says, as a ceiling fan whirs over head. “During the pandemic, it was too much for me. I was secluded and I was afraid of everything. So my solution was to escape – oh, you’re going to think I’m crazy. OK, my solution was to escape to an exoplanet.” She is now recording 13- to 15-minute tracks of thoughts and music inspired by her imaginary planet.
Buika has been compared to Amy Winehouse, Billie Holiday and Édith Piaf. She has collaborated with everyone from Santana and Seal to Pat Metheny and Anoushka Shankar. She is also a judge on Amazon Prime’s singing talent show Operación Triunfo, which airs in 33 Latin American countries. A conversation with the 51-year-old is not unlike an interstellar experience: she is unrestrained and transcendental, as happy talking about her love life as her records. And every candid comment is punctuated with an explosion of laughter – a throaty roar from the soul. Yet the basics can be hard to pin down.
Does she, I ask, still live in Miami? “I’ve got a secret for you, my brother,” she says. “If you spread your love, you have a home everywhere in the world!” What I can establish is that she is in Punta Cana between stops on a world tour that will shortly reach London, a city that evokes memories of “a lot of cold and a lot of love”.
At the end of every tour Buika used to ink her skin, but there isn’t much space left. Instead, she says: “I tattoo on my heart and in my mind.” On one arm, she says she has two butterflies “because my flight is like the butterfly’s. I fly in all directions to be straight.”
She is no easier to pin down when it comes to genre. The self-taught “singer from everywhere” (New York Times) who only knows how to perform “with her heart ripped apart” (Pedro Almodóvar) has flitted between flamenco, Spanish copla, jazz, pop, rumba, R&B and soul since her debut solo album in 2005. But she hates “psychoanalysing myself. I’m not going to do that. I’m a free spirit and I’m a free note. Let yourself be! That’s why I feel I fit in to every music from the world. No matter if it’s from Russia, from England, from America, from Africa, I think that my voice is going to sound good.”
Buika is currently in her happy place, if you remove the intrusion of this journalist from the equation. The singer, who regards herself an introvert, is never more content than when sitting alone in her studio, naked, smoking and drinking mezcal. “I got to be honest, yes, I do sir. Every time I can.” She tells me she has never voted because she wants “to agree with everybody. I don’t really understand about right or left or red or blue. If a politician finds the time to talk about love and donkeys, I like them.”
Her longtime producer, Javier Limón, has described her, somewhat contradictorily, as “an extraterrestrial” and “the most liberated woman on earth”. Buika says: “I dream I am. I discovered my superpowers when I turned 50. They give me big and tremendous feelings of freedom.” What was she frightened of before? “Oof, everything. Because that’s how they taught us: that we have to be scared of not having money, scared of not being in love.”
Touring is a family affair. Buika’s production manager is her 24-year-old son, Joel, while her musical director is the boyfriend she recently re-connected with in Spain after first meeting when he was 16. “He used to come for the weekends to see our band playing and I used to see a little boy. He used to ask for orange juice and milk in a blues club. But after 20 years, I found him again in the street and I was like, ‘Hmm, hmm, you look good. How old are you now?’ And he was like, ‘Old enough to make you happy.’ He just shot my heart.” She adds: “My man is, like, 10 years younger than me. Because at my age, options are not better!”
Buika grew up in Palma de Mallorca, in the only black family for miles around, inhaling flamenco, Gypsy and African folk songs like air. Her father was a pro-democracy politician in exile from Equatorial Guinea, who walked out when she was nine. The teenage Buika, she says, was “a wild animal. Oh my God! I used to go on stage barefoot – well, same as I do now – with chewing gum in my mouth, with no bra. I was the enfant terrible,” she says, guffawing. “I used to invent a lot of stories because I didn’t want to face pain. But the first time in my life I heard applause from the audience, they saved me. They gave me the possibility of being someone. I owe them everything.”
As the queen of flamenco fusion, Buika has a Latin Grammy to her name, plus two US Grammy nominations, as well as two books of poetry and a role as a wedding singer in Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In. She says she often channels her “naughty” hard-drinking, chain-smoking grandmother, with whom she shared a first name, Concha, although she has always gone by her surname professionally.
Did Concha sing too? “Yeah! All my family do. Because we are from a little tribe called the Bubis. And it’s not the same as in Europe where you write down your story: tribes in Africa, they sing it.”
It is all some distance from Las Vegas, where she started out as a “hungry” Tina Turner impersonator with a two-year-old child, before finding her own uniquely raw and raspy voice. I ask how she would react if she discovered a Buika impersonator in a casino today. She lets out that gravelly howl. “I think that she would go crazy,” she says. “It’s not easy to be me!” She pauses and shoots me a gap-toothed grin. “But it’s fun.”
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