RICKY DON'T LOSE THAT NUMBER
The Sunday Express Magazine
4 July 1999

A new generation of hot and totally infectious Latin music is storming the charts - and swivel-hipped Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin is leading the charge. Interview Simon Gage Photographs Paul Massey

Within three and a half minutes of the Ricky Martin crew hitting the Islington studio where we're setting up for photos, something akin to a full-scale Latin fiesta is going on.
The CD has been changed and turned way up; an impromptu salsa lesson is being given to stylists and picture editors (the wardrobe lady, Rosa, has been pulled away from her ironing to demonstrate a complicated under-over-back-under dance routine); and Jose, Ricky's right-hand man, is catwalk modelling the Gucci, Prada and Armani that's been called in for our photo-shoot. Frankly, all that's missing are cocktails, nibbles and maracas.

Jose, whose job seems to be to seduce everyone in the room when Ricky's not on hand to do it for himself, is tall, black-clad and devilishly handsome with a wicked little beard and an often unfathomable accent. He's been with Ricky for 15 years and is the only one who can tell Ricky to "get in dat chower. We late!"

The whole crew is particularly buzzy today. Not only has 27-year-old Ricky got a US number one with his rockabilly-salsa song Livin' La Vida Loca - living the crazy life - a record so infectious it should be sold with its own antibiotics, but his first album in English has also gone in at number one and has become the fastest-selling album of the year, shifting close to three-quarters of a million copies in just two days.

OK, so he was already the biggest selling male artist in the world with number ones in 40 countries, but it's nice anyway. The UK is now the only territory that stands between Ricky and total world domination. So far he's known here only for a couple of Top 10 hits, the Grammy-winning World Cup song La Copa De La Vida and Uno, Dos, Tres, Maria, Europe's summer hit of 1997, but Livin' La Vida Loca should make pretty short work of all remaining resistance.

As well as taking the American charts by storm, he's made the cover of Time, something pop stars rarely do. But then this is the year Ricky graduated from being just a Puerto Rican pop star, born and raised in San Juan, to becoming a full-scale phenomenon, the figurehead of a whole Latin explosion that the music industry reckons will be the next big thing.

Black music may have dominated the scene for the past 30 years but the smart money says that, with Hispanics about to become the biggest minority in the US, Latin is the new black.
Ricky's place at the head of this dates back to his history-making performance at the Grammy Awards in March, where he received the only standing ovation of the evening and was literally jumped on by Madonna after the show. Madonna, famous for always having her eye on the next trend, has already recorded an English/Spanish duet with Ricky and the couple have been the subject of much "have they or haven't they?" speculation ever since.

It's something that really does need to be cleared up so, I ask Ricky, have you done it with Madonna or not? He laughs at the effrontery of the question. "Even if I have done it with Madonna, I'm not going to say."
That means you have! "What are you talking about? I have not done it with Madonna, but if I had, I would not say. But if there's one thing that would make me fall in love with a woman...You have no idea how she treats her daughter. Doesn't matter where she is, at eight o'clock she has to be home because the baby's going to sleep. She can be in a meeting with the president and she'll be like, 'I have to go for my baby.' And that's something I melt for in a woman. With that, she'll have me at her feet.
When I'm dating, I always need to know that the woman is open to being a mother, because you meet some women who say, 'Who me? A mother? No, because of my figure.' And that's such a turn-off for me."

Very Latin, the whole mother thing, I tell him. He agrees. While Ricky's stated mission is to destroy stereotypes about Latin culture - by replacing them with designer clothes and double-jointed hip movements - some stereotypes are either too true, or too marketable, to be ditched.

The man himself - tall with almost cartoon good looks: the jaw, the teeth, the eyes - is ensconced in the make-up room, smoking and having his foundation sprayed on with an airbrush. Merced, the airbrush operator, says it's to get a lighter coverage, but up close the slap looks heavy enough to leave footprints in.

As soon as he gets under the lights, mind, you realise that, as usual, Ricky's got it right. The look works perfectly. Well, he has been doing this kind of thing since he was six years old. It was then that he told his father that he wanted to be a star. A couple of years - and 37 fizzy pop/toothpaste/pasta commercials - later he was telling his separated parents that from now on, if he wanted a bike, he would buy it for himself.

The same with school fees. "Every time my father wrote a cheque on my behalf," Ricky tells me later, "I was there watching, learning." It seems a shame to deprive your parents of such a basic pleasure. "It's not my problem. All I care about is being able to do it on my own," he says, "through my ups and downs."

Downs? What downs?
"My downs show up when I realise that I'm powerless over people's reactions," he says. "I'm a bit of a control freak."

It was part business and part a refusal to be told what to do that led to an estrangement between Ricky and his psychologist father Enrique.
The story goes that because his parents were separated, there was confusion about who should sign showbusiness contracts when Ricky was a child star. His exasperated father ended up giving Ricky an ultimatum. He wanted him to choose between them.

"Oh, God," says Ricky when I mention it. "Where did you read that? I don't want my father reading about that. There'll be so much trouble." He goes quiet. "I don't want to talk about it, it's something that gives me a lot of stress. It's something I have to work on. Everything's so nice now, everything's so cool, we have long conversations and everything's so beautiful, the past is the past."

The photo-shoot is over in record time. Ricky steps under the lights and - click, click, click - starts jumping around and freezing in poses, like a game of musical statues. Head back, grinning, spinning, all very dazzling and spontaneous-looking but totally, masterfully controlled. Rather like his career.

Half an hour later a cortege of black Mercedes is winding its way through some of the seedier parts of north London on its way to the Top of the Pops studio, stopping only so Ricky can nip into Burger King for fries. Britain is currently the only place in the world where he can do this without an armed police escort. When he visits his native Puerto Rico, or anywhere in Latin America for that matter, he has to move around by helicopter. For everyone's safety.

As the Ricky Martin mobile party hits the dour corridors of the BBC, Ricky and I get a quiet moment together on a settee. He's got his arm along the back of the sofa, and his lucky fine-knit jumper, the one he wore to the Grammys, rides up - as it's been custom designed to do - over his tanned, slightly furry, little tummy. We talk about the madness of his life - "Yeah. I'm living la vida loca" - and he starts in with a patter as fluid as one of his dance routines: "It's all about emotions and you can't fake it."

Ricky is an expert at tailoring his soundbites to suit his audience. At Lake Como, Italy, last month, journalists from all over the world were flown in for a lavish concert/party/press conference combo at a cost of many millions of pounds - Ricky apparently challenged his record company to make it happen big time, and they're certainly putting their money where his mouth is. There, Ricky fielded globally stupid questions such as "What's your second favourite city in China?" and "Tell your Malaysian fans about spirituality" with a seamless stream of words. Apart from being a way of handling journalists who don't speak much English, it's a distancing technique. And he can reel it off till the cows come home, have dinner, get changed and go out again.

It's a trick he learned during his time on America's most-watched soap General Hospital and while he was in the Broadway run of Les Miserables. And from being in Menudo, Latino America's highly successful and totally manufactured boy band, which recruits new members at the age of 12, works them like mules and then unceremoniously dumps them when they reach their sell-by date at 17. Ricky, who joined the group in 1984 and left it in 1989 when he moved to New York, is supposed to have earned his first million with the band. But it's not so much what he earned as what he learned.

Don't give me that, I say when he starts on his "emotions" nonsense. Of course you can fake it. You're an actor, this is a job. He's not sure how to take this. Later, he admits that in interviews he sometimes just "runs the tape" and if he's interrupted, he goes back to the beginning. "It's like, if you're repetitive, I'm going to be more repetitive than you."

Does he like all this attention?
"Yeah," he says, the accent part-American, part-Spanish. "Who doesn't love the attention? Who doesn't love to walk into a place and have everyone look."

So, is this whole thing about needing to be loved by as many people as possible?
"If I was a lawyer, I'd still want to be loved," he says, "so what if you just see music as a good way to express yourself?" But you could have done that in small clubs in Puerto Rico. "But that's the mediocre way." So you need global recognition? He grins. "There you go."

You've been spending too much time with Madonna, I tell him. "No, not really. We do have things in common but at the same time she has things that I don't go for. And vice versa."

So, if you're not dating Madonna, who are you dating? I ask. Is it still Rebecca de Alba, the glamorous television presenter currently working in Spain?
"We just broke up," he says, not seeming that upset about it. "I met her when I was 18 years old and we were together for a while then broke up, then we were together again, then we broke up, then we were together again, then we broke up. I'm not blaming my career, I'm just saying, if it's my time to be alone, it's time for me to be alone."

And the rumours that you're gay? "What are you going to do? I don't have a problem with homosexuality. I'm gay-friendly - I'm not gay."

There are obviously privacy issues to consider, too. As Ricky says, "I sell records, I sell concert tickets but I don't sell the key to my room. I have to think of the other person, and that person's family: it's all 'Yeah, that's the mother of the girl Ricky was naked in the boat with'."

You were naked in a boat with a girl?
"There were no pictures," he says, laughing. Still, one thing Ricky's going to have to learn about if he adds the UK to his list of conquests is the behaviour of some of the famously salacious British tabloids. If there are "Nude Ricky with Boat Girl" shots, you can be sure they'll turn up here first. I wonder if there is anything in his life that Ricky dreads becoming public.

"Yes, there is something," he says, rather recklessly. I wait. "Oh, I'm not a criminal or anything like that. It's not like I've raped someone, but they're not happy with what I've done." He doesn't say who "they" are or what he's done. "But you know what I'm saying? When I'm in love, I yell it out loud, I tell everyone, 'This is my girlfriend'."

After the interview, we go down to watch Ricky perform Livin' La Vida Loca on Top of the Pops. The minute he gets on to the podium it starts. The hips move like he doesn't know what they'll do next. But of course he does know. Like the early Madonna, whose crazy dancing distracted us from a calculating ambition, Ricky knows exactly what he is doing.

He grins and pouts and bumps and grinds and the studio audience, which admittedly always goes mad, goes mad, hardly realising that wherever they go on their summer holidays this year, they are going to be hearing this song. And Ricky's hip thing - like the Lambada and the Macarena before it - will be imitated from Butlin's to Bali, until kiddies sick up their Tizer and oldsters throw their backs out.

So, do you want to be the male Madonna I ask Ricky, before he makes his way to the private Lear jet waiting to whisk him back to his Miami home.

He thinks about this one for a moment. "I want to be Ricky Martin." It's just what Madonna would have said in his place.