Are you dancin’?
The reality TV programme Fama attracted millions of viewers. Helen Jones went to speak to some of the stars of the show about their newfound fame. Photos: Roberto Garver
What is Fama?
Dance schools throughout Spain are packed. Everyone wants to learn to move in the latest funky style, show “energy” and look “hot”. Others are looking for the lírico vibe, while beatboys are living their finest hour in Spain as people are actually starting to understand what “break” is.
So why all the fuss about dancing? Why, suddenly, is Spain talking about every kind of dance except flamenco? It seems that it’s all down to Fama ¡A Bailar!, the reality show-cum-dance academy (and Spain’s first daily live reality show), which took over even the most discerning viewer’s lunchtimes and Sunday nights when it was broadcast on Cuatro for four months at the beginning of 2008.
The Fama phenomenon, as production company Zeppelin TV and Cuatro are calling it, isn’t finished yet, however; it’s taking over the summer too. The tour of the TV show is currently hitting towns and cities all over Spain, with a cast and crew of more 
than 100 working to create a large-scale live performance exclusively dedicated to dance. La Gira de Fama 2008 is coming to Madrid on 8 July.
During the show, 18 of the show’s contestants, including the winner and two runners-up, as well as most of the show’s instructors, will perform duets and individual and group routines based around the three styles of dance taught at the Fama academy — lyrical, street dance and funky. The two months since the end of the TV programme have therefore been a frantic combination of rehearsals and promotional work for the contestants and teachers, to make sure that the show is ready on time.
Head of the school, Lola González, who has worked in New York and London for many years, is excited about taking the work ethic of Fama to the stage. “With the tour, the public is going to be able to remember a lot of the good things from the show,” she announces proudly. “The kids and teachers are all working hard to make sure everything goes well.” And, according to series champion, Vicky Gómez, going to see the Fama show will open our eyes to another Spain, far removed from typical tablaos. “We’re going to bring something different to your way of seeing this country,” she says. “Through the tour, you’ll see the hip-hop, funky side of Spain.”
Fresh new style
So how did this all happen? How did what is, in the end, a reality TV show, manage to take off at a time when the genre is looking tired? A lot of it is to do with the fact that the Fama concept is new. While we’re currently on about the 30th edition of Operación Triunfo and Mira Quién Baila and contestants are by now Z-list celebrities, or worse, Z-list celebrities’ siblings, Fama brought contestants together to present a completely new concept to Spain: young, ambitious and, in general, trained individuals competing against each other in three types of modern dance.
Now, you would think that Spain is no stranger to dance; this is the home of flamenco, after all. But in reality, modern dance, the type of stuff that we see in US music videos, emulating the style of top US choreographers Bobby Newberry and Blake, has very little exposure here. It was Fama’s mission, then, to try and bring that type of dance to our screens.
“Fama has brought freshness to dance in Spain,” says Rafa Méndez, one of the academy’s instructors, who’s worked with groups such as Take That and Atomic Kitten. “It’s shown that dance exists and that we, as dancers, can do lots of things.”
The current boom was relatively unexpected, however, according to Rafa. While the concept had already worked in the US and some EU countries, Zeppelin struggled to sell the idea at first. Now this type of show will probably appear on other channels, which is good enough for Rafa if it means modern dance gets more airtime in Spain. 
Rafa was also part of the reason why Fama was so successful. His outspoken style (I can honestly quote him as having said, “Este show va a estar que te cagas” when the tour was launched) reminded viewers how hard the world of professional dance really is. Meanwhile, his curious use of Spanglish including the constant use of the words “hot” and “energy”, captured the international influence on the show, and his combination of sex-charged dances and boot-camp discipline allowed the mostly 20-something-year-old dancers to really channel their energy. Accompanied by Cuban ballet dancer, Marbelys Zamora and Valencian-born hip-hop teacher and musician Sergio Alcover, their strikingly different styles not only created a range of entertaining and fresh routines, but also allowed some of the contestants to try out dance styles they’d never attempted before.
The contestants
While the teachers were part of the entertainment, the 
contestants’ contribution to Fama-appeal was key. They are all from a mixture of backgrounds and circumstances, including Susana Romero — a 32-year-old mother of one who left her secure job to join Fama and lost several kilos during the series; Hugo Rosales — a cute breakdancer who dropped out of a telecommunications degree to dedicate his life to hip hop, and classically trained ballet dancer Lorena Gallego from Barcelona, who was in fact, really good at hip hop.
A collective, down-to-earth attitude about them all made the show even more appealing, and their surprise at the amount of press that turned up to the tour’s launch is just one reflection of this.
Sonia Navarro, a former gymnast, was one of the most impressed of the bunch. “I’m really excited, our first press conference, it’s great,” she said. Sonia, originally from Barcelona, came rushing back to Spain from Italy, where she’d lived for the past seven years, when she heard about Fama. “I’d wanted to come back to Spain, and when I saw this opportunity, I decided to take advantage.”
She now plans to carry on with her training, something that most of the contestants intend to do as they still feel that their skills need more work. In other words, Fama is not the be all and end all of their careers.
Not even Vicky thinks her career is made after winning the show. “Fama was a way of opening doors, rather than a search for fame,” she admits, with a typical level-headedness. In other words, she’s in it for the long haul. “Through this we can create a new circle in Spain,” she says, referring to the current hip-hop scene in particular, which still only has a relatively small following in Spain. “And maybe after the tour we can work together on other projects. Who knows?”
Originally from Salamanca, Vicky became the individual winner of the series when she was voted the viewers’ favourite during the 29 April gala show, which registered a peak audience of 10.5 million viewers, a figure usually reserved in Spain for football. She was one of the contest’s most discreet figures who tended to communicate almost exclusively through dance, and her character served her well, as she found no enemies inside the Fama house. “I was always natural. I behaved like me in the house,” she assures me. “I concentrated on my work. I was there to dance, so I danced.”
And there were no unpleasant scenes waiting for her when she got out of the house after four months inside. “The programme showed respect for our privacy,” she says gratefully. “The image that was portrayed was of our effort, the work we did, and the public has gotten to know what a dancer’s job really is all about.”
Her own work ethic served her well, as did her natural talent, which was evident from the very first shows. While other contestants struggled with some new styles, Vicky and her dancing partner Quique just kept drumming out their high-standard pieces, which made them both pretty good candidates for the top spot from early on.
Another dancer who had a bit more trouble during his Fama trajectory was Kiko Jiménez, a long-term resident in London who came back to Spain to try his luck in the dance world. With partner Tatiana Morcillo he got to the semi-final of the programme and while he probably had the best body of the gang, thanks to his work as a professional go-go, teachers constantly laid into him about his facial expressions. However, rumours of a smile crept onto his face as he considered the future as a professional dancer: “This life is really hard, it’s hard to make a living in this world,” he admits, but he’s positive. “Through this programme I think people have got to know me better so hopefully it should open some doors.”
Whether those doors will open to his ambition of dancing for Justin Timberlake is another question, but Kiko is heading for LA after the end of the tour.
Vicky is also looking abroad. In fact, most of the contestants plan to take their training overseas, reflecting their openness to outside influences, which is constantly illustrated in their dancing.
Vicky has already travelled to the US and UK thanks to her passion for dance, and she admits that these trips changed her expectations of the future. “Once you know how people dance there, how amazing they all are, you think to yourself, ‘That’s what I want’,” she says, with a wistful look in her eyes as she remembers her trips abroad. She talked all the time about Los Angeles during the show, and it’s likely that her prize for winning Fama — a grant to study in a dance school of her choice — will take her back to the US.
First of all, however, Vicky’s got a bit more dancing to do on the Fama tour. “It’s a great show, 18 dancers, all together, and totally different to watching it on TV.” Sonia agrees: “In a live show you’re going to feel the energy a thousand times more than on TV.”
Enough energy, perhaps, to make even you think about shaking your thing in a dance school near you very soon. La Gira de Fama 2008, Palacio de Deportes, Avenida Felipe II, tel: 91 258 60 16 (Metro: Goya). 8 July, 9.30pm. Tickets: El Corte Inglés, www.elcorteingles.es, tel: 902 40 02 22.
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The Rumble Strips
They’ve been friends since they were knee-high to a grasshopper and they’ve got a peculiar name, but they make fabulously innovative music. Jack McKay catches up with The Rumble Strips after a gig at Madrid’s Moby Dick club
There’s something quite wholesome about The Rumble Strips. The five-piece group have been friends since school and despite now living in London, their endearing west country accents show no sign of being twisted into default “mockney”, an inflection favoured by those too posh, too articulate or too regional to fit in to the capital’s scene. But then fitting in was never part of the plan. The Rumble Strips never intended to be a typical guitar/bass/drum kind of a band and since their inception have incorporated a brass section, a move more usually adopted by colliery bands and the Salvation Army.
Unsurprisingly, the group have been compared to Dexy’s Midnight Runners and other similarly horny groups. Thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly for a band from Tavistock in Devon, you won’t catch The Rumbles jumping over hay bales in dungarees (although the saxophone and trumpet do seem to lend themselves more to a drunken country barn-stomp than a performance in a sports stadium). As with most bands that have only recently broken into the limelight, The Rumble Strips are replete with self-effacement and affable charm. Coming off the stage at the Moby Dick club after the sound-check, faces flushed and t-shirts heavy with sweat, they look slightly the worse for wear following a show at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound the day before, yet happy enough to be here. There’s already a group of girls camped outside despite there being more than an hour before the doors open; a musical barometer, if one were ever needed, that the outlook is good.
The band — who take their name from the little bumpy lining at the side of the motorway that warns drivers they are too close to the edge — were originally approached by Transgressive Records, who produced their first seven inch “Motorcycle” back in 2005. They then moved to Island Records before releasing Girls and Weather in September 2007. More recently the band’s single “Girls and Boys in Love” was used as the official song for the Simon Pegg film Run Fat Boy, Run, which was directed by David Schwimmer.
Diminutive front-man Charlie Waller is, naturally, the mouthpiece for the band and although his youthful appearance is accentuated by an overuse of “like” and “kinda” in every sentence, he is no newcomer to the music circuit. For a short time Waller was a member of both Vincent Vincent and the Villains as well as the Rumble Strips, but was forced to make a choice between the two when his moonlighting began to take its toll. It would seem that childhood friendships won out in the end (there’s that wholesomeness again) and soon the two bands will meet at this summer’s Benicassim Festival. Stood beside, and towering over Waller now is lanky bassist Sam Mansbridge. With his hair flopping into his eyes, the grinning Mansbridge provides the perfect foil to Waller’s earnestness. In conversation the two work off each other like a couple of, well, like a couple of childhood friends. The other members of the band, drummer Matthew Wheeler, keyboards and trumpet player Henry Clark and saxophonist Tom Gorbutt seem to have slipped away leaving Waller and Mansbridge to do the talking.
Tonight’s performance in Moby Dick’s is a few months overdue, as The Rumble Strips were scheduled to play Madrid in March. The morning of the flight, however, Waller realised he didn’t have his passport. Cue cancelled shows, an apology posted on their website and a long wait for a new one to be issued. “I didn’t even know where I thought it might be,” Waller admits. “I think everyone was a bit pissed off, but we just went to the pub didn’t we? We had quite a nice day. Actually it still hasn’t turned up. It’s a mystery,” he says. “Or it’s just a joke?” muses Mansbridge, “One big practical joke”. “Yeah, I’ve always had it,” deadpans Waller.
With regards to the brass section, was there ever any stigma attached to bringing out a trumpet? “Well, not a stigma but it was kind of strange; because we were doing the regular indie circuit round London. People were interested, like the whole ‘What’s that you got there?’” says Waller. “But it was more mainstream compared to how it had been about six months earlier,” adds Mansbridge.
“Yeah, when we first started it was me, Tom, a saxophone player and this other guy. I played like a drum on this old guitar that I covered with cardboard and Tom played clarinet and this guy played really gay keyboards. And it was terrible. I think we did one gig and we had quite a good reaction and then we did another gig after that and it was terrible,” recalls Waller.
The current line up have been together for around four years, but this experimental approach is still visible in their live shows where they will casually swap instruments or introduce new ones. Tonight in front of a heaving and jittery crowd The Rumble Strips blast out their trademark indie-ska assault. A cover of Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys are Back in Town” works particularly well with the sax and trumpet combo turning the lead riff into something altogether more joyous. And the old favourite “Motorcycle” elicits screams of delight. Waller’s wailing voice is faultless, his mouth open like a landed trout gasping for breath while Mansbridge abandons his bass to beat a snare drum as though driving the nails into Satan’s coffin. That The Rumble Strips can put on a show is not open to question; what remains to be seen, however, is whether they have the goods to produce another album of such soulful and upbeat originality.
The Rumble Strips will be playing at Benicàssim Festival on 18 July. See www.therumblestrips.com for more nformation about the band.
