The night Rosalía sang cante alante at Tablao de Carmen

Rosalía’s LUX tour wraps in Miami this September, after 57 shows across seventeen countries in Europe, North and South America. It is the third time she has toured the world at this scale: the first was with El Mal Querer, the second with Motomami.

Ten years before that, she sang for twenty minutes at a flamenco tablao inside a mock Andalusian village in Barcelona, to a room of thirty-five paying customers. The man who would produce El Mal Querer was in the audience.

How it started: a Raval bar called La Rouge

The story begins in one of the many bars in Barcelona where you can hear live flamenco up close — specifically at La Rouge, on a corner of the Raval, which still programmes flamenco today. A very young Rosalía went there to sing. So did Augustin de Beaucé.

He remembers a near-empty room, and four girls in it already, as he puts it, hopelessly in love with the singer. Augustin — at the time manager to the dancer El Yiyo — liked the way she sang. But the certainty that he was watching someone who would go on to do something enormous arrived when he spoke to her afterwards.

“What struck me was her presence, and how extraordinarily likeable she was. You saw a very sure person, with an immense vision — the kind you believe,” he says. “It was completely clear to me that she was going to be a star.”

Mimo Agüero, director of Tablao de Carmen, had the same reaction. Rosalía had come to her attention through a festival leaflet — the image caught her eye, and so did the line printed beside it: the contemporary voice of old flamenco. So when Augustin suggested going to hear her at the Paraninfo of the University of Barcelona, she went.

Rosalía sang La hija de Juan Simón and other popular flamenco coplas she would later put on her first album, Los Ángeles. “I want this at the tablao,” Mimo thought. It is worth crediting the ability to recognise an unusual talent at a moment when not everyone saw it — and when some were actively dismissive.

“Mimo, a tope”: dinner at La Fonda

Not long after, following a visit to Tablao Cordobés, the three of them had dinner at the restaurant La Fonda. Augustin remembers collecting Rosalía from City Hall that day, where she had sung for Ada Colau, then mayor of Barcelona. He told her the mayor had not stopped crying. Rosalía didn’t understand why.

“She was very humble, very guileless — you could see she felt she didn’t deserve it.”

It was at that dinner that Mimo asked Rosalía to sing at Tablao de Carmen. “She was lovely, open and focused,” she remembers today. “She didn’t drink, just herbal tea. She was driven — a person with a goal. You could see the concentration in her eyes, total focus; when she talked about the gig she was already working out how to do it. It amused me that she answered everything with ‘Mimo, a tope’. And I kept thinking: she has to come before she gets famous.”

For Rosalía it may have been one of the first ambitions she ticked off. Certainly her parents saw it that way. They told Mimo and Augustin that as a teenager, when she started studying flamenco singing, she used to ask them to take her to Tablao de Carmen. “That place up on the hill,” as her mother Pilar called it.

She asked because Chiqui de la Línea — her singing teacher for many years — kept telling her to go to the tablao at Poble Espanyol and listen to Juaneke, then the lead singer of the company. What she could not have imagined is that years later Juaneke himself would recognise her singing, and tell Augustin: “Listen, I’ll tell you something. Everybody criticises this girl, but that one really can sing.”

14 May 2016: twenty minutes of cante alante

The date was 14 May 2016. The second half of the second show that night was given over to her, accompanied by the guitarist Alfredo Lagos. Thirty-five tickets sold at fifteen euros, plus guests, plus the tablao’s regular audience.

She sang cante alante — flamenco singing as the lead, rather than as accompaniment to a dancer. Deep, classical repertoire: cantiñas, milonga and bulerías, among other palos she already commanded. Around twenty minutes.

“It was one of those moments where a silence falls and you can’t hear a fly,” Mimo remembers. As Augustin attests, it was one of the last times she could be seen like this — in a room that size, at that distance.

Someone else came to that gig out of curiosity: El Guincho, the producer who would later approach her about working together. El Mal Querer came out of that meeting.

A month later she released Antes de morirme with C. Tangana, which put her in front of a much wider audience. In February 2017 came her first album, Los Ángeles. She brought a copy to the tablao as a gift and came to say goodbye before moving to Madrid. When Mimo invited her to the tablao’s thirtieth anniversary party in November 2018, she couldn’t make it: she was going to the Latin Grammys. El Mal Querer was nominated. The rest is Spanish music history.

From flamenco to Berghain: what Barcelona gave her

Mimo and Augustin were both sure she would matter. Neither predicted the turns she would take.

Augustin remembers how El Mal Querer landed in the flamenco world. It raised objections about what counts as orthodox. But one prominent specialist critic conceded to him: “Rosalía makes us a lot of money. She is internationalising flamenco.” He sees the same thing in his own French family, who discovered her music and then asked him: do you know who Camarón is? I love him.

Mimo didn’t see it coming either. “I thought she’d stay in flamenco. I never imagined a Berghain,” she says. She was among the few invited to the LUX listening party at the MNAC, Catalonia’s national art museum. “It was extraordinary. She has such good taste.”

However far she has travelled, everything she lived in that mixed, layered Barcelona shaped an artist with no borders and no mould. The journalist Maricel Chavarría gathers that whole cocktail in her book Rosalía. Por ahí por Barcelona, taking the title from a line in her song Reliquia. The book tells this story. El Periódico de Catalunya devotes a few lines to the tablao as one of the significant places in her early years, and the French paper Les Jours puts us on the map of the Barcelona where Rosalía learned the nerve she sings about.

We are proud to have given her that space, and to have heard one of those voices up close on our boards. In Mimo’s words: “We’re very lucky Rosalía exists. She’s a plus for the planet.”