INTERVIEW ENRQUIE IGLESIAS: Arminta Wallace, left alone in a hotel bedroom with Enrique Iglesias, meets a superstar who is 'uncommonly sane, ordinary and unpretentious'
AS ENRIQUE IGLESIAS curls his tall frame into a chair, hugging his knees to his manly chest, it strikes me that I must – at this moment – be the envy of teenage girls the world over. We’re in a bedroom at the Four Seasons Hotel in Dublin. Alone. Together. Not a hanger-on, PR person or even a snapper in sight.
I’m still savouring the delicious informality of the situation when he suddenly springs out of his seat and, with one bound, is at the other side of the room. “Do you mind,” he asks, “if I turn off the air?” His smile is cherubic, but the deed is already done. Do I detect a hint of steel beneath those velvety bedroom eyes?
Reading about him in advance of the meeting, one certainly suspects that there’s a healthy sense of humour behind the handsome celebrity shell. Iglesias is given to public musing about the size of what is referred to on the internet as his “manhood” (outlandishly small, he claims) and the state of his on-off relationship with the tennis star Anna Kournikova (“off”, he regularly tells reporters – only to clarify, as they scurry into headline cyberspace, “oops – sorry, I meant on again”).
But there's no doubt about his status as Latin pop phenomenon. His debut album sold half a million copies in its first week. He has notched up 19 Spanish-language singles on the Billboard Latin charts. And when his song Bailamos– easily the best thing about the dreadful Will Smith movie Wild West West– hit the top of the US singles charts, he sailed effortlessly into mainstream megastardom.
Which would account for the number of Ugged-up fans skulking in the hotel lobby, camera-phones at the ready, waiting for him to get back from the RDS, where he has just been rehearsing for a brief slot on the Meteor Music Awards on TV.
Obligingly, he put his arms around the girls, stood where they wanted, smiled on request. When I suggest that such celebrity shenanigans might be something of a pain in the ass, his eyes widen in horror. “No, it’s not a pain in the ass – it’s great,” he declares. “I think the day I’m gonna have to worry is the day that’s not going on. I look at it that way. I really feel like I’m in a privileged position.”
His accent is almost pure American, but when he says “position” it comes out with a soft Spanish inflection. Poss-ISS-ion.
“Yeah. There’s days, obviously, when you wake up on the wrong side of the bed and you don’t wanna see anyone and you’re in a bad mood. But then you say, ‘Well, what am I complaining about?’ I think I’m overpaid for what I do, and I think I shouldn’t be complaining.”
Should he be saying this out loud, while his record company is in the building? He laughs. “Oh, you know record companies,” he says. “I love my record company because I’ve got a lot of friends there. But at the end of the day, it’s business. If you analyse it, you’re just a piece of meat. The minute you go bad, it’s: ‘Next!’.”
For now, young Iglesias doesn’t need to worry. Universal Music is still getting a pretty fragrant return on the $48 million it reputedly shelled out to sign him, and the Latin music scene is still – unlike other areas of the recorded music business – a growing market. But the competition is tough. The Puerto Rican prince of the genre, Ricky Martin, is still living la vida loca out there somewhere, being chased by a host of glamorous wannabes: Luis Miguel, Alejandro Sanz, Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera.
The best-selling Latin pop artist of all time, meanwhile, is none other than Enrique’s dad Julio Iglesias, still making albums – and babies – in his sixties.
Enrique Iglesias, in truth, has a family history so bizarre you couldn’t make it up. Legend has it that he got started in the music business by borrowing money from his babysitter to make a demo tape, giving his name as Enrique Martinez from Guatemala. He was barely 20 then. Now that he’s a mature thirtysomething, he offers a considerably less romantic version of his own story. “I had written a song in English and I had a song in Spanish, and I demo’d them with a producer. It cost me about $4,000 at the time.
“What I did is, I gave it to my manager and I said, ‘let’s just shop it around’. We gave it to different labels. Some of them knew my name and some of them didn’t. I got rejected by a few big labels. I actually got rejected by this label – which was MCA at the time. Then I got picked up by a label called Fonovisa. A great company, and pretty big at what they did, but they weren’t – you know – a global company. They only recorded music in Spanish. But I was very happy and eager to do it.”
Had he always been a singer since he was a little kid? “No – I was more of a songwriter,” he says. “I started writing poetry, in a way. I say poetry because they were short songs – maybe a verse and a chorus. My first complete song, the one I told you about, was in English. It was probably shit,” he adds.
His timing on these one-liners is, I’ve noticed, immaculate. He pauses just long enough, then tosses in another – often self-deprecatory – observation. As a result he comes across as uncommonly sane, ordinary and unpretentious. Just a regular guy.
If it’s an act, it’s a very, very good one. “The reason why I didn’t tell my parents,” he’s elaborating now – without being asked – “is because I didn’t want to hear anything negative.
“Not that my parents were gonna react in a negative way. But you know when you want something so bad – I’m superstitious when it comes to those things. I feel like if you talk about things before they happen, they never happen. Do you know? It’s like, ‘Oh I’m gonna get this job. I know I’m gonna get this job.’ If you tell everyone, and then you don’t get it, not only do you end up looking like a fool, but you feel like you totally jinxed it. This, I wanted more than anything in my life – and I didn’t want to share it with anyone, except whoever had to know.
“People say, ‘Oh, how did you keep it from your parents? I don’t believe that’. But it was pretty easy to hide it from them. My parents were divorced at the time. My mom lived in Spain. I went to live in America with my dad when I was nine years old. And my dad was travelling most of the time, so . . .” He shrugs.
It sounds like it was a lonely time in his life. To be plucked from your home at the age of nine and plonked down in Miami – which was, presumably, very different to Madrid. “Very different,” he nods emphatically. “Totally. Like . . .” He crinkles his nose and gazes at the ceiling, trying to find a comparison that will explain. “Imagine living in Dublin and going to – this might be a little extreme, but imagine going to Tokyo. A completely different lifestyle. Different weather. Different type of people – although they speak Spanish, but you gotta understand, it’s like the difference between Irish people and Irish-Americans. It’s more of a Latin-American influence there than Spanish.”
So he had to create a whole new life for himself? Another emphatic nod. “Totally. Start over. It was hard. It was difficult to leave my mom behind. That was the most difficult thing.” How did he cope? “I think that’s where music comes in. I was always a loner, and I liked being a loner. I wasn’t a good student. I wasn’t a horrible student, either, but I was definitely not good. I always just passed by pure luck. But I realised that I could sit down and write songs, and I could do it for hours, and I loved it. And I think psychologically it helped me a lot. You know from 13, I would say, to 17 is a tough time for kids. It’s where you make a lot of decisions which are gonna define who you are and what you become.”
Especially for teenage boys who, famously, don’t talk about their problems. But if you’re getting it down on paper in the form of a verse and a chorus . . . ? “Exactly. I’ve always said that for me, it was like going to a psychologist. Till today. It’s definitely therapy.”
Aha. So he haswritten messages into his song lyrics, then? "Oh, a lot of times I have, yeah. Sometimes I write songs which don't make it on to albums – songs about relationships, whether it's with my parents, with a friend, with anything I've been feeling."
Aha again. I whip out the lyrics to his song Quizás, which people say is about his relationship with his father. Is it? "I guess so. At the time when I wrote it. I hated saying that it was about my father, but it's kind of stupid for me to deny it. That's a song I wrote a long time ago. I don't like that song any more. That much. I don't like that album that much. You grow out of things. Some songs, for me, would stand the test of time much better than others. And that one – for me, I think it's forgettable."
It does suggest, though, that he and his father are both very similar and very different. He nods. “I’ve learned a lot from him. A lot. I respect him and I admire him. But at the same time, I feel like maybe he hasn’t enjoyed his life as much as he could have – or his career as much as he could have. That’s me, saying that from the outside. But I could be wrong. I could be totally wrong.”
Curious, that he would describe himself as “an outsider” in his father’s life. How does he get on with his young half-brothers? Does he see much of them? “Not really. I haven’t seen them that much, no. I barely ever see my father. It’s strange. It’s hard to explain, and it’s difficult to understand for lots of people – unless they feel like I do, and have been in the same position that I’m in. I really get along with him, and I truly respect him more than anything in this world. But there came a point in time when we just separated, in a way. We don’t really see each other that much. I don’t know what type of relationship you have with your parents . . .”
Before I can stop myself I’m talking about my daughter, who lives in Sydney, and how it’s not so bad – though it is, really – because we talk on Skype every week. Iglesias chuckles fondly. “I’ve never talked to my dad on Skype. I can’t even imagine my dad on Skype. I cannot. But how many times do you see her physically?” Not often, I hedge. “But when was the last time?” he persists. Two years ago. “Well, mine has been way longer than that,” he says softly. “So don’t feel bad.”
Maybe they should try the old Skype trick, I venture, but he’s shaking his head. “For me technology is becoming . . . it’s almost like an invasion of privacy. I feel like every time you open up your laptop now you have that camera, and people know where you’re at. It’s already too much with Blackberries. You go in the street and you see cameras. Don’t you hate it sometimes when people . . . I mean, I don’t mind when people come up and are up-front about asking for a picture. But when they hide it – man. You’ll be eating and they’ll be hiding their cell phone under the table and taking a picture. That really gets to me sometimes. I don’t know why. It’s the whole being-sneaky-about-it thing.”
Does he know how many songs he has written? He blows air. “Phew. I don’t know. A lot.” But does that – and all the awards, the sales, the big bucks – make it easier to write another one, or does it just put more pressure on him? “No. You learn. But I think your question is also, ‘Do you lose enthusiasm – do you lose that hunger? Right? I haven’t lost that and the reason is because I still feel that I can make better songs. I’m still in search of that – that – I guess you could call it the great song. The one where you say ‘OK this is the one where it just can’t get any better’. Maybe I’ll reach that. Maybe I’ll never reach that. I don’t know. But that’s what keeps on pushing me.”
We’ve been talking for more than half an hour – our allotted timespan – and nobody has come to check us out. I’ve been told to ask about Anna, I say. Iglesias raises his eyebrows and waits. Well then. Is he still – you know. Are they. . .?
“Yeah,” he says. “I was. But I’ll be able to give you a straight answer when I come back home to Miami.” Pause. It must be my turn to look horrified, because he throws back his head and laughs. “No! I’m kidding. I am. I am. I am.”
Well, I’m glad we got that one cleared up. He uncoils himself, springs out of the chair and offers a hand. “Cool,” he says. He certainly is.
Enrique Iglesias plays the Odyssey in Belfast on May 11th and the O2 on May 12th, with special guest Alesha Dixon