Imagine it’s not a hotel. Imagine it’s just Rock&Roll.
To the members of a generation that is about to retire, but will never die, like old rockers that they are, the press release that the Barceló hotel group has sent us can fill us with nostalgia and the hard-fought score that our ears remember: those of David Gilmour, Jimmy Page, Jimmy Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Chuck Berry, B. B. King, Carlos Santana, Duane Allman, Peter Green, Jerry García, Ritchie Blackmore and many others, with the exception of Eddie Van Halen, who we never include in this Parnassus, no matter how much Rolling Stone magazine chose him as the eighth-best guitarist in history.
Barceló Imagine, the first musical hotel in Madrid, had to offer something more than just decoration with this oneiric brand that brings us back to the universal Lennon: You may say I’m a dreamer… Those of us who have dreamed of shaking the pick of Comfortably Numb and managed to pull the wall of the popular vesania -music gum, muzzak for fans of the Lennon post Beatle- must heat arpeggios the strings of the first guitar that enters our room thanks to the good vibrations that manages us in this hotel Raúl González, the CEO of Barceló with the name of Real Madrid player and soul of Liverpool musician. Staying here invites you to compose music. And also to play it with a silk thread.
The menu of instruments that any neighborhood cockerel can request includes a wide selection of electric and acoustic guitars with personalized spikes, silent violins, keyboards, ukuleles and — for Spanish music fans — percussion boxes and castanets. We can emulate Paco de Lucía, Triana and, why not, ‘al garrotín al garrotán’ (Smash). A call to reception is enough to organize an intimate jamming session in the room if the voice doesn’t remind us of Manuel Molina.
The Room For A Jam service will be available in each of the 156 rooms of the hotel, organized by different musical genres on each floor, according to the decorative pattern imposed by Olga López de Vera: pop, rock, disco, classical, jazz, dance, and Madrid’s movida. In addition, the hotel offers an original vinyl and record player loan service, Music Curator, designed for those who have paste in their fingers and can’t even give a D major chord. That is, a musical curatorship of mythical songs that can be listened in analogical format, for some connoisseurs of better quality than the digital one, to which they find of a metallic sonority (it will be because they do not like the heavy metal). Also, so that the music accompanies, the hotel offers underwater headphones with which through a Bluetooth connection you can continue to enjoy the music at the same time as a refreshing dip in the outdoor swimming pool.
No, Barceló Imagine is not Seaview. It is a hotel with intentions three minutes from Madrid’s Plaza de Castilla. There is no pain, you are receding / A distant ship smoke on the horizon…
Fernando Gallardo |
