Lagartija Nick are taking Omega back on the road thirty years after recording it. This time Kiki Morente, Enrique's son, takes the vocal lead. Madrid's Botánico date sold out in June; the tour continues at Córdoba's Guitar Festival on 11 July, Starlite in Marbella on 15 August and Barcelona's Palau de la Música on 30 October. They perform almost the entire album, along with songs left off the original release that were nonetheless part of the same experiment.
Omega arrived in 1996. Enrique Morente, one of flamenco's greats, joined forces with a Granada rock band to collide flamenco, Lorca, Cohen and garage rock. Distortion, cante jondo, poetry and grit, all in one place. A mad idea and a brilliant one.
The origin is in a poem. Antonio Arias, from Lagartija Nick, and his brother Jesús taught Morente “The Girl Drowned in a Well,” by Lorca, mounted on the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” Morente hooked him with an idea that was already on his mind, a tribute to his friend Cohen, and the stone was already thrown in the lake.
The recording was chaos that almost broke both parties. And with the album finished, no big company wanted it: it came out through a magazine label, El Mediterráneo, the only one that dared.
Time proved them right. Omega moved from scandal to cult album and then to landmark. Vicente Amigo, Tomatito, Cañizares and Estrella Morente all appeared on the recording. What once sounded like heresy is now studied at universities.
Kiki Morente—still a child in 1996—now sings the material, having first performed the album ten years ago at Granada's old Faculty of Medicine. The tour is part handover, part tribute: Kiki on one side, Lagartija Nick on the other, the old work searching for a new voice. Israel Galván and Antonio Rey also appear on selected dates.
What happens onstage is not a covers band tackling someone else's classic. Lagartija Nick helped dream Omega into existence, and they are the ones bringing it back to the stage—still in formidable shape, which is no small thing.