Ricardo Lezón (Zaragoza, 53 years old) worked in a gas station, sold houses, served drinks, gave tennis lessons, set up a bar and a country house. He did almost anything to make a living. He didn’t live from music, but he lived thanks to it. 21 years ago he founded a group in Getxo (Bizkaia) with some friends, McEnroe. A band that doesn’t fill football stadiums, but whose supporters share a loyal devotion. Lezón’s lyrics achieve something extremely difficult: creating your own, recognizable universe after the first verse. Love, heartbreak, pain, melancholy, joy and sadness flow through the songs, on six albums with McEnroe and another four with other projects, which seem like sung verses. This excites and tears. After three books of poems and stories, he has now published Slow and Wild, an autobiography that explains with brutal honesty how he lived for more than two decades in a musical group as unlikely as his.
Q What is McEnroe?
R. It’s like a house, the happiness that the four members of the group met and are still together 20 years later. It’s like this hamlet that stays standing, although no one knows why. And it’s better not to ask about it, otherwise it will fall apart.
Q He has spent half his life writing lyrics and music and writing poetry. But he says he is neither a musician nor a writer.
R. I never studied music. I picked up a guitar and started making songs. And that’s what I continue to do: songs. I have also written and published poetry. And now this book. That’s all.
Q He says that he never liked the world as it is, that he never felt comfortable in it, and that in order to survive he built a smaller world. Are these your songs?
R. When you create a small world, you confuse it with the real one. You surround yourself with the things you like and tell them how you would like them. You imagine it and stick with it. And when someone comes and tells you that they identify with what you have written, it is as if they are telling you that they have entered your world.
Q Fear appears in the book as something that runs through her entire life. He speaks openly about therapies and anxiolytics. What did it mean?
R. There are two very different parts. What I experienced until they told me I was afraid is what you live alone and without understanding. I imagine the worst. Feel very different and distant from everything around you and limit yourself greatly. I deprived myself of many things that I should have experienced more naturally. And then there’s another part: When you’ve already been told that you’re afraid. Then you miss half of it.
Q How old was he?
R. I think 17. I was lucky enough to talk to my father, who was a doctor and psychiatrist. First he asked me to write my life on a piece of paper, and the next day he had me read it out loud. From then on I started therapy and already knew what I had. Fear often overwhelmed me, it took over much of my life, but less and less. And over time I saw it coming. When you fight something specific, everything changes.
Q That’s why it’s important to talk about it openly, right?
R. I think almost everyone comes by there. And of course it’s important to talk about it. I told everyone. I’ve done some pretty strong therapy with people who were much worse off than me, and they helped me sort everything out and lose my fear of telling.
Q To what extent has it shaped your life and your relationship with music?
R. It is something that is always there, like a shadow. And you know that somehow it will always be there. Listening to music helped me a lot. It was a place where I felt better, where everything calmed down a little. It had healing power. Then I started playing with friends. He played the bass, very badly. Then I started making songs and felt kind of calm. I found a way to express things I wouldn’t have been able to say otherwise.
Q He says in the book that he was always afraid to reveal his fears. However, she gets completely naked in the book.
R. There is something that has always surprised me about myself. I’m very scared, but when certain really important moments come, I calm down. For example, when I go on stage, everything disappears. And the same thing happened when I wrote the book.
Q He also talks about the contradiction between the many fears he has had throughout his life and, at the same time, the difficulty of not following his impulses.
R. It has always been like this. Fear can seriously weaken your self-confidence. But there is always a part where you subconsciously continue to trust your impulses. The title of the book derives a little from this theme, namely trusting the wildest part of us, our instincts. There are many things we cannot control, but there is always a part that you can choose. And you have to use it to find out what you like and what you want.
Q Many fans find McEnroe’s music and lyrics an antidote to their own fears. Ángeles González Sinde says that your music served as a refuge for him as he grieved the death of his brother. That your songs were the medicine I needed in that moment.
R. Maybe because composing and listening to songs was also therapy for me. When my friends went out partying, I often went to the beach to walk and listen to music. I felt accompanied, even if I didn’t understand the text in English. If we have managed to keep company and offer a certain comfort with our songs, for me there is no greater success.
Q The songs speak of despair, but also of hope. How electricity can suddenly appear in the darkest hour.
R. Even when you’re at your most fucked up, there are always little glimmers that you need to recognize. Often it is very difficult and you have to help, but that is also a great thing that someone wants to accompany you. In the end, this shine becomes greater and you feel new ones, and you no longer waste energy on things that are of no use.
Ricardo Lezón with his daughter Jimena on December 18, 2022 in the La Riviera hall (Madrid).
Q Her songs are almost always about love: the love that begins, the duration and the end.
R. Now I like to talk more about affections in general. In the last album it was important to me to touch on love for parents and self-love because I had over-idealized romantic love. And there is a very bad part to that. Idealization is the shortest route to disappointment. Maybe it was because of what I had experienced in my house. My parents divorced and had a difficult, very turbulent relationship. Given this, I decided that I would make love something very important. And maybe I overdid it.
Q In what sense?
R. I placed it in a very high place. It shouldn’t be there. The first time I was with someone, it was for love and I wanted it to be a powerful story. That’s how I lived it. But you don’t control fate. And when they stop loving you, you often stop loving yourself too. Heartbreak exposes many of our own weaknesses. When someone loves you and tells you they like the way you are, it makes you feel really good, but it covers up holes that will resurface later.
Q There is a song, La Palma, in which he makes us listen to a kiss and everything that moves inside us.
R. It’s one of those songs that doesn’t need much explanation because it’s something that’s happened to all of us. On the street of La Palma or elsewhere. Those late nights when suddenly with a kiss everything makes sense. When life is messed up for the better.
Q The book also addresses how extreme sensitivity can lead to very dark places.
R. Sometimes sensitivity overcomes you, similar to fear. In Intimacy, author Hanif Kureishi talks about something that interests me a lot: the importance of the right distance in relationships with people. If you are too far away, they leave. But if you get too close, you’ll crush them. It’s the same with sensitivity: you have to find exactly the point that helps you to be happy without overwhelming yourself.
Q He went to a town in Soria with 15 inhabitants “to spend the winter away from the world and its depressing noise.” He set up a country hotel and stayed there for two years. What did he learn?
R. All. I lived in Marbella. He was coming out of a romantic breakup. I didn’t see myself in this city. And one day when I was looking at Idealista, I saw that site and left. It was instinct again. There I found myself again, I forgave myself and I started to like myself again.
Rehearsal of the McEnroe group in Villarcayo (Burgos) on February 24th. Gloria Cavia
Q Does the fear you talk about so much have something to do with the fact that you remain, in a way, on the margins of the music industry? At one point in the book he says that he separated him from the world and locked him in his own world.
R. I wasn’t on the fringes of music. I went door to door to record companies. But when I started with Jaime McEnroe, we were already 33 years old, I was a father and we were moving on with our lives. Music was a privilege, something we had to care about, something special. When Subterfuge signed us, it was a complete success for us. Or the day we played on Radio 3. Everything that happened to us was incredible, and that’s how I experienced it.
Q Would you have wanted to live from music alone?
R. Is that a success? I don’t know it. Not necessarily. I always thought that there was a leap that I didn’t want to take. What is the difference between filling the Vesta space or the Wizink space? The money? Because success is something you can’t touch and that’s different for every person. By no means do I mean that those who make a living from music are sold out. There are wonderful groups, much better than us, who fill huge halls, like The National, and do what they want. But we’re here and it’s okay. And things continue to happen to us. I never imagined we would be playing at Botanical Nights and that happened this summer.
Q How do you heal this beauty that is so present in your songs?
R. Silently. The concept of beauty is complicated. Each of us has our own. For me it is closely linked to purity and goodness. Kindness impresses me and inspires me very much. People who don’t use love as barter, who simply give.
Q There is also something beautiful about sadness, he says in one of his songs.
R. I can’t write because I’m sad. I have to do it for joy or for peace. But I often think of bad moments that I experienced and that followed other good moments. After going through all of this, I’m able to write certain songs. Sadness contains this shine.
All the culture that goes with it awaits you here.
Subscribe to
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
GET IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_