carmen press clippings

Trust Tony Visconti, Britain's best electric producer, to align himself with the most interesting acts. Bowie's best efforts have been with Visconti's help and Marc Bolan's phenomenal British success on record must in the end be traced to Visconti's visceral production.

Visconti's latest find could potentially be his most exciting. Carmen are a five piece band who play a peculiar blend of high energy, non-rifled rock fused with rhythms, percussions and vocalizing whose origins lie in Castilian and Flamenco folk music. Visconti's super production creates an almost surreal super-clarity of sound so that the highs of acoustic guitar, voice, and percussion rush out from the speakers to give the music a textural, physical presence.

The end result is a spine-chilling exercise in new musical wonders. The intenseness of the music is partly due to the tightly-packed nature of each song's arrangement. Co-founders of the group David Allen (guitars and vocals) and sister Angela Allen (synthesizer and vocals) collaborate on most of the songs with Roberto Amaral (vocals, percussion), a refugee from Jose Greco's dance troupe. And anyone who has seen Carmen on the Bowie TV special this spring will know that Angela and Roberto also interweave some excellent Flamenco dancing within the context of the songs.

One would think this an almost impossible sound to record well but Visconti has magically used the footwork to create novel percussion effects throughout the album, especially in the staggeringly high energy opener, "Bulerias". David Allen sings "Give a woman a gypsy lover and I'll promise she want no other." Or: "En the pueblo de Granada / They get down..." How would you help but love lyrics like that? They're so sensationally bizarre!

"Stepping Stone" is also brilliant in displaying the surreal imagery of its lyrics: "As I run to the river's edge / snakes of copper swim the tide / soon they'll slither by my side." In fact, the the outstanding thing about Carmen's music is that they always seem to be saying something of interest. Whether it's a plea for help from a half-drowned sailor ("Sailor Song"), a lament for the ending of a proud family line ("Lonely House") or the depiction of a legend ("Tales of Spain"), the music knows what to say and how to convey content in the most direct, precise way.

Whether you like them or not, for they are sure to stir up controversy and polarity, Carmen is an important group to listen to and support. In this the greyest of all times for rock music, Carmen is cloth-of-gold. Eric van Lustbader

Modern rock'n'roll music has always been more or less of a patchwork quilt. That's to say that many different kinds of music have fused with rock's big beat.

The Beatles found a wealth of music in India, for instance. They introduced us to raga-rock. Many young English bands, most notably the rolling Stones, discovered old blues records by black American musicians. Bands like The Grateful Dead and singers like Linda Ronstadt have gone to Nashville and brought back country-rock. Even British madrigals have been plugged in by Steeleye Span to create a new kind of folk-rock to go along with the American breed pioneered by Bob Dylan and the Byrds.

As strange as it now may seem, we're going to have to get ready for flamenco rock!

That's right. One of the hottest new bands in Europe, and one whose American following is increasing daily, is Carmen. They're one of the most original looking and sounding groups to come along, mixing Spanish music and dancing, classical music, and heavy metal rock'n'roll.

You may have already seen Carmen if you were one of the lucky people to catch David Bowie's MIDNIGHT SPECIAL television show on NBC. Their performance on that program so excited record executives in the U.S: that it started a fierce bidding war for the rights to Carmen's first album. FANDANGOS IN SPACE. ABC-Dunhill finally released the record, and FM rock stations all over the country are playing it.

Carmen was formed around an attractive brother and sister team, Angela and David Allen, children of a Mexican flamenco dancer and guitar player. Their parents lived a gypsy style life, traveling from America to Europe, living for a time in caves outside of Granada, Spain. Back in America, David and Angela's parents opened a flamenco club in Los Angeles.

David and Angela were part of the act until their early teens, but David realized at a young age that he could use his training to ultimately get into his own thing. He and his sister formed a rock'n'roll band, but they tried to do it straight first, without using any of their inherited flamenco techniques.

They sounded just like any other small-time L.A. rock group until David figured out just how to incorporate flamenco and rock into one dynamic package. And it wasn't easy; it took a couple of years before things started to tell. Now, as David put it recently, "It's been a long haul, but we've done it!"

Part of the reason Carmen has come together so successfully is the third major member of the group, a young Spaniard named Roberto Amaral, a former lead dancer in the Jose Greco troupe.

"We were able to build a band around the three of us", says David, "but during the first year we were together, I think we had 10 other members."

Even after all the rest of the band's line-up was set, there was no recognition in their home town of L.A., much less the rest of the U.S. So, like quite a few bands before them, Carmen went to Europe, where the market for new concepts and ideas seems to be wider. It was here, after a few months of recording and performing, that the band met David Bowie and he invited them to appear on his TV show.

Between Angela's extraordinary beauty and hypnotic dance skill (she dresses in traditional flamenco costume in performance), and David Allen's fine voice, Carmen is putting across impressive music with dramatic flair - no gimmicks allowed.

(more great clippings to come)