ARA Baleares premieres Pere Andreo's new music video, 'Sa llampuga'

PalmWith a boat setting off in the middle of the sea while it's still dark. This is how the music video for 'Sa llampuga' begins, the third video released by musician Pere Andreo from his latest work. The space, an album released just a year ago. However, this "ode to September in the form of a music video," in the words of its director, Tarek Serraj, not only portrays the work of a couple of fishermen from Sóller, where the singer is also from, but also captures and expands the festive and popular spirit that permeates the song.

"The ray is a fighting fish," shares Pere Andreo. "It's not like the redhead, for example, which is very refined and highly regarded. But that's precisely why it interests me so much, because it's rooted in a less valued tradition. In Sóller, we have a whole series of clichés, like the oranges, the train, or the church façade, which are related to what is known today as 'that'. There's another, silent one, which isn't suitable for making keychains or icebox magnets, which is the tradition that everyone has ingrained and accepted, and which is very long-standing. This is where the idea of going to the market because it's lightning season fits in.

Thus, at one point in the music video, you can see a handful of smiling, lively young people and children dancing the boat dance in the port of Sóller to the rhythm of the song. "Now there's a young Catalan woman named Nastallat who mixes electronic music with boat dance music, and I find it very interesting," says Andreo, "because I think that's the way forward." When Tarek suggested I take people dancing, I hesitated because I didn't want to fall into folklorization, but I think it's time to normalize it, and I think it's time to normalize what Francoism promoted, and understand that popular and local tradition as something that unites us.

Bread with lightning oil and peppers

The idea of writing a song about the lightning rod, Andreo admits, had been on his mind for years, ever since he asked Gori Mayol 'Passador', a young fisherman from Sóller, to tell him everything he knew about this fish. "He told me he wouldn't tell me, that it was better if I experienced it myself, and he arranged to meet me at 4 a.m. at the port. Luckily, I'm self-employed and can manage my own schedule. I dedicated that day to it," shares the singer, who is also an architect, adding that the melody came to him. "I was coming back from a run on my motorbike," he says with a laugh, "and I saw a sculpture of a ray. I've always said I find it downright ugly, but, look, in five minutes I already had the lyrics and the melody."

The other main protagonist of the music video, besides the ray, is chef Santi Taura, who prepares a bread with ray oil and peppercorns at the end. It's as if it were an episode of the show he presents on IB3 Televisió. Cook with Santi TauraThe chef demonstrates step-by-step how to prepare it, and finally, Pere Andreo and several musicians are tasked with tasting it. "It was truly delicious, a delight," Andreo declares.

Unless something new comes up, this will be the last music video released from The space, a record that marked Pere Andreo's musical comeback after a handful of years without publishing or composing.