Adrián Barilari fills stadiums with Rata Blanca and sings covers of 80s hits as a soloist

They are two sides of the same coin. Or rather, with the same voice. Adriano Barilari He alternates shows in stadiums and large theaters as the singer of the supergroup White rat and the recitals he gives in smaller venues as a soloist with a repertoire of Spanish covers of hits from the ’80s.

Thus, in the month of March he will give five shows in the capital and in Greater Buenos Aires, where he will sing great hits U2, Bon Jovi, Queen, Kiss, Sting, Whitesnake, Bryan Adams, Phil Collins, Toto and Gary Moore.

It will be March 1st at the Morón Theater, the next day at the Canning Theater, March 8th at the San Isidro Cultural Center, March 9th at La Trastienda and March 10th at the Gran Pilar Theater.

Just five days later he will do one tour with Ratto Bianco to the South (Comodoro Rivadavia, Bahía Blanca, Trelew), which will continue through Tandil and Mar del Plata. In the month of April San Luis, Córdoba, Perú, Tucumán, Salta, Jujuy, Rosario and Santa Fe await you, and so on all year round.

golden songs

In 2007, Adrián Barilari surprised with a solo album entitled Golden songshis first foray into a musical journey full of memories and melodies that are part of the collective unconscious of several generations.

Several years passed and in 2022 he resumed with Golden Songs 2AND now the release of a third album is imminentof which he has already teased a single with I still have the blues by Gary Moore and will be released this week Rock’n’roll all night of Kiss.

Live as a soloist, of course, he does not disappoint Rata Blanca fans and always makes a success of the classic metal group he joined in 1989, lived his golden period – in fact – and left in 1994, but returned in 2000. Since then travels the world with guitarist Walter Giardino.

“I’m very restless,” he admits during a conference at his home in Caballito. “I take the time Rata gives me to do my own thing, which I love,” she explains.

-Never have free time or a well-deserved vacation?

-These last two months, with everything that happened after the elections and the changes, I took advantage and stayed with the family, I traveled and now I’m starting March because the possibility of doing things has opened up a bit.

-They are smaller rooms than Rata shows, obviously.

-Yes. They’re more family-friendly shows, let’s say. It’s for people who remember music from the 80s and 90s. At the time I didn’t pay much attention to solo shows because it was like a hobby, but more albums came out. golden songs and small doors open which give the possibility of doing things in the countryside.

The truth is that it makes me happy because it continually amazes me. I do the songs in Spanish, which is already a difficult thing to listen to, but it’s giving me a result that I hadn’t thought of at the time, because people sing them and enjoy it.

-Do you have any verses or choruses in English?

-Yes. I had to do it for the obvious reason that there are choruses that can’t be translated. With U2, for example, it’s not harmonically beautiful when you say “I haven’t found what I’m looking for yet.”

There are songs that can be done completely in Spanish and they come out well. There are others that cannot be translated due to a semantic problem, and others that I cannot do because I have to look for those that adapt well to the tone of my voice. Test between friends and family. If you want, stay.

-People who come to see you will definitely ask you about White Rat songs. How do you handle it?

-I can’t refuse. It happened to me with Deep Purple, if I didn’t play Smoking on the water, which probably would have happened, I wouldn’t have left happy. People always expect a chorus or a little bit of a song. And the nobility obliges.

You can’t deny your success, for example Lover woman. Generally, we do a mix at the end of the show where we mix two or three songs into one, a potpourri so people leave happy.

The first solo show

-Did you give shows as a soloist before Rata Blanca, or did it emerge after one of the separations?

-Before joining Rata in ’89 I had bands working in bars, like Días de Gloria. Once I got to Rata, I was there for about three years and then I formed Alianza with Hugo Bistolfi.

One day, while I was in Mexico in 2000, I received the proposal to record my first solo album with musicians from Nightwish Stratovarius, which was like the National team and I couldn’t miss it. At the same time he was in talks with Giardino to make Temple. So my first solo exhibition took place in 2003, in a Haedo room that was in a shopping mall.

-In that period there was also the new boom of Rata Blanca, with “Great Songs”.

-Yes. I was in the middle of recording as a soloist, but the debacle in the country hit me in 2001. Everything went helicopter and my album stopped. I thought it would be an unfinished dream, but producer Marcelo Cabuli went ahead and relaunched the project, although obviously it took more time.

Was called Barrels and it was an iconic album that people still remember with great fondness because it’s a great album and it was my start.

-Now resume your solo career when there are gaps in Rata’s activity.

-Yes. I already know the Rata Blanca calendar in advance because it is planned in advance. And I have a very skilled manager to go out and do things with my band, which has been together for over six years. We added backing vocals and now we are seven musicians.

-Are most of the songs from the 80s?

-Not all, but most do. There are artists from the 90s or 2000s that I really like, like Robin Williams and Bruno Mars

-Is there nothing of what you sang as a child or of your favorite bands?

-When I was very young, one of the first singers I heard was Tom Jones, and I cried when I saw him live about six years ago.

The three bands that made an impact on me were the Beatles, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd, but I don’t do any of them live. There are songs that don’t suit me. Then came Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.

-80s themes are better known.

-Of course, this always influences. I go more to what’s effective or what song is popular. During the pandemic, they asked me from Australia to do a song by John Farham, You are the voice, and I did it. I thought people wouldn’t remember, but we did it live, it’s amazing what happens, because they sing the chorus.

News on Rata Blanca

“With Rata we have already recorded and there are three songs finished and mixed, which are the ones we played at Luna Park”, says Barilari. He doesn’t know if they will be released as singles, as an EP or just when the full album is available.

“The formats are strange,” he says, “and I get very angry because you spend months in the studio to record a complete album and then the songs come out little by little, because it’s convenient for the current business. In my case, a song is already released last month.” passed, now the Kiss one will come out and it will be one a month, I imagine, and they will extend it until the end of the year.”

-How do you see Rat’s career in perspective?

-A band that wants to be big and compete in the world has to go through many stages. It’s not blowing and producing bottles. At the beginning everything is rosy, but if you want to grow in this field from Argentina to the world you have to paddle dulce de leche, a lot! You have to have a very firm belief in what you want to do and where you want to take it. And this is purely and exclusively a product of Walter, who was the one who initiated this idea and supported it.

In the first period there was a lot of visibility in programs like Tinelli’s and the band grew indefinitely. In my case it was too much for such a short time and I couldn’t emotionally sustain that speed. I had to go down, look ahead, think about the future, mix and give again. That’s why I took that time.

-Would you have liked it not to be such a rapid boom, but a little slower?

-That period from ’90 to ’93 was really meteoric. We competed with Soda Stereo and we were metal, which had no reach unless you had a crossover like Lover woman. Once they kicked us out of the Tinelli because we did a live performance of Callejero, which lasted about 12 minutes, but we wanted to show what we did. We come from a post-military period, there was a lot of rebellion and we wanted to go out and say what we felt. We could have been censored or ignored.

Tango and trap

-At some point you flirted with recording tangos, right?

-Tango was for me the essence of who I am. Even though I had the voice, tango gave me expression. I understood that in tango you have to know how to say the words to touch people’s hearts. You can have a very beautiful voice, but if you don’t touch people’s hearts, you don’t say anything. This is what I learned.

I flirt with tango because I bring it from my family: my uncle was a bandoneonist. During the pandemic I did a streaming singing tangos and it’s going around there. Maybe time will lead me to do something more concrete. They offered me to do tango shows, but I don’t have time. Afterwards you never know.

-What do you think about the urban music boom?

-I’m not against it. Music must be listened to. If there is something that still doesn’t discriminate it’s music, but we do. Maybe I don’t like everything, but I like things like Wos or Trueno, which are more rock oriented. Welcome to the artist who is paving the way and who has a career ahead of him.