Double ration by Fernando Alfaro in Cartagena: book and concertIT
Fernando Alfaro It has been going on for a long time now, since it started in the late eighties with Surfin’ Bugs –Chucho would later arrive and, later, a career under his own name–, feeding the Iberian collective imagination with extreme songs, like uncalculated doses of emotion, excitement, calm or storm. For a long time now, the man from Albacete has been functioning as an autonomous cell with solo concert tours, acoustic guitar on his shoulder and – in Alfaro’s own words – playing his “usual bastard hits, with dark folk, strange blues, tacky pop and punk rock in primitive acoustic. Well, today he arrives in Cartagena in this way.
Specifically, this uncontrollable element will land tonight – from 9:30 p.m. – on the stage of Mister Witt Cafe, from where he will offer an ‘unplugged’ concert and in which he will be the only protagonist. Well, him and his songs. It is, therefore, a golden opportunity to know in first person the skeleton of all those songs – from Surfin’ Bichos, Chucho and Fernando Alfaro –, to enjoy them as they were conceived and composed, with the voice in close-up and a scratchy or caressing guitar suggesting the melody.
This concert is also part of the tour to present his first book, Turbid World, recently published by Contra publishing house. It is a novel starring the characters of all his songs, which are also included in the book. Thus, the concert is articulated on the backbone of this book, in a kind of agitated and disturbing plot line. However, Alfaro will take advantage of the visit to the port city to also present this work in a somewhat more canonical way. Thus, a couple of hours and a half before the gig – that is, at 7:00 p.m. – the man from La Mancha will be in the bookstore The Magic Mountain to chat with the writer Juan de Dios García and the readers who come to the event.
