GERMANY: US-LATINO ROCK BAND TITO AND TARANTULA PLAY KAISERLAUTERN AS PART OF THEIR EORUPEAN TOUR TO PROMOTE THEIR LATEST ALBUM 'ANDALUCIA'

Record ID: 392971

  • Title: GERMANY: US-LATINO ROCK BAND TITO AND TARANTULA PLAY KAISERLAUTERN AS PART OF THEIR EORUPEAN TOUR TO PROMOTE THEIR LATEST ALBUM 'ANDALUCIA'
  • Date: 9th August 2002
  • Summary: SV/CU/SCU: SOUNDBITE (ENGLISH) TITO LARRIVA (THE BAND'S LEADER) IS SAYING "They were looking for an actor, the German company, and they wanted Tom Waits and they flew to LA to meet with him, but he didn't want to do it I guess, I can't remember or he wasn't available, so then someone recommended me and they met with me and I auditioned and I got the part. And we had the band too, so it all kind of came together. It was fun, I loved working with her (German actress Hannelore Elsner), she was a great lady, a really fine actress, I like her." (3 SHOTS)
  • Embargoed: 24th August 2002 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: KAISERSLAUTERN, GERMANY
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA3IFPGMRKRA9XRHFAR861DDYRE
  • Story Text: Whilst Tito And Tarantula are best remembered as the murderous Mexican band in Quentin Tarantino's bloody vampire film 'From Dusk Till dawn', the four-man US rock group is best loved for its powerful Latino based rock albums and its great live shows, especially in Germany, the band's second home. The group have just released their latest album 'Andalucia' and have once again hit the road for an extensive tour of Europe.
    Reuters recently caught up with them to discuss life in Germany, the new album, working with Enrique Iglesias and 'that' scene with Salma Hayek! Tito and Tarantula make music their own way. Their distinctive brand of Latino rock owes its origins to their charismatic lead singer Tito Larriva, who is not only the band's front man, but has also spent the last twenty years scoring and playing in some of the most notable 'alternative' movies to come out of Hollywood. He began his career scoring and appearing in the 1984 cult film 'Repo Man' and since then he has worked with directors such Wim Wenders and his two co conspirators on many projects, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Indeed it was the bands appearance in the cult Rodriguez/Tarantino film 'From Dusk Till Dawn' that helped establish Tito and Tarantula as a cult alternative band, especially in Germany, where the group has forged a second base outside of LA. Indeed, Tito has even starred in some German films, most notably 'Der Schrei Des Schmetterlings' (The cry of the Butterflies), opposite leading German actress Hannelore Elsner, for which he received an award from the German TV association.
    "They were looking for an actor, the German company, and they wanted Tom Waits and they flew to LA to meet with him, but he didn't want to do it I guess, I can't remember or he wasn't available, so then someone recommended me and they met with me and I auditioned and I got the part. And we had the band too, so it all kind of came together. It was fun, I loved working with her (German actress Hannelore Elsner), she was a great lady, a really fine actress, I like her."
    The band have just released their fourth studio album entitled 'Andalucia' and have been busy preparing some of the tracks for the upcoming sequel to Desperado starring Antonio Banderas and Enrique Iglesias. Iglesias plays a gunfighter who cannot fight without singing and in the film he sings the track 'La Flor de Mal' from the album as Tito explains.
    "So Enrique (Iglesias) is singing this song in the film, we'll do the soundtrack version. On the demo that we did for him to sing to, he lip synchs to my voice, but in the film he is actually going to sing it, they are going to record it soon.
    So there will be two versions of it."
    Whilst the band do make music that is particularly film friendly, they are conscious of the fact they have a broad base of fans who value them as a group and have never seen their films, therefore, they worked hard to keep their material fresh and build on the success of the previous three albums as Peter Atanasoff explains.
    "Yeah, we kind of approached this new record differently, it is simpler, it is rawer, it is more direct, the songs are shorter and we spent about a month writing them before we went to Spain (to record) and even when we went to Spain, they weren't even completed yet. When we were there, there was a whole other process that took place there, but basically they are just a lot rawer and to the point and simpler and Tito comes from a punk rock background, so does Io (the bass player) actually so there was a big influence with that in the songs, in the way we played them."
    That said, the group are conscious that a lot of fans remember them as the band from 'From Dusk Till Dawn' the Rodriguez/Tarantino film that had them playing music as actress Salma Hayek dances provocatively with a snake, before attacking the Tarantino character. The bands involvement in the project came from a chance encounter on the set of the first Desperado film, as Tito explains.
    "As we were working on the mix of 'Desperado' on the film set, we were in the mixing whatever you call it. Robert always has guitars lying around and I picked one up one afternoon and I was playing this song (After Dark) and he asked me what is that and I said it is a song about a vampire and he said that is weird, we are working on this movie, me and Quentin (Tarantino) about vampires. So he videotaped it, played it for Quentin and they made this whole scene in the bar with Salma (Hayek) and the snake. They had the scene already, but it was with a juke box, they played a record."
    The band is currently touring in Germany before beginning a tour of Russia at the beginning of September.
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