Ricky Martin was the biggest name in Latin music, selling 70 million albums. But he didn't enjoy the fame. Now, after discovering himself, he has also discovered an edgier sound, he tells Brian Boyd
He may be a hot Latin superstar, a man with spray-on leather trousers and a come-hither look in his eye, but today Ricky Martin has crime on his mind. For the past few years he has been quietly working to stop the trafficking of children, particularly after natural disasters. "Unfortunately, after the Asian tsunami we saw how the child-traffickers simply went on with their crimes. These crazy animals capitalise on the situation and kidnap unaccounted-for children and force them into prostitution and pornography. It's an industry that generates billions of dollars a year for them. You wonder about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. All the studies suggest that child-trafficking goes on everywhere. People don't like to think that it happens in their own country, but it does. Simply because of the success of my music, I have had the opportunity to go to the UN and talk about this. I perfectly understand that without what has happened in my career nobody would listen to me."
Martin's work with child-protection agencies, which has resulted in both his appointment as a Unicef goodwill ambassador and the creation of his own charitable foundation, began shortly after a breakdown of sorts during a tour of Australia five years ago. He had sold 70 million albums, become a massive crossover success, worked with Madonna, bumped hips with Kylie Minogue and, one week, been number one in 40 countries at the same time. "Was it a breakdown? I don't know," he says. "All I know is that I was on stage in front of 25,000 people and I wasn't enjoying it. I felt disgusted with myself. I felt disoriented. My entire career I had lived for the applause of the audience, and suddenly I was feeling angry and just having no sense of gratitude. Something was wrong. We were supposed to be going on to South America, but I cancelled everything. I was told how much it would cost me to cancel the tour, how much it would damage my career, how I was on a crest of a wave and shouldn't stop, because people would forget about me."
Martin had seen it all before, though. Born Enrique José Martín Morales in Puerto Rico, on Christmas Eve 1971, he was first a child model, then a member of perhaps the first boy band, a Latin group called Menudo. To this day he can't quite explain how famous they were. "I was only 12 when I joined Menudo," he says. "We were massive. Forget about private jets; we're talking private 737s. Forget about hotel suites; we're talking the whole floor of the hotel - just for me. We used to play to audiences of up to 200,000 people. It was bizarre."
Menudo had a revolving-door policy: once members turned 17 they were replaced by younger singers. When Martin's turn came he left for New York. Having become used to a life of managers, bodyguards and hangers-on, he arrived in the city, perhaps unsurprisingly, with only a microwave and a pillow. He got a job in a daytime soap, sang in the Broadway production of Les Misérables, then recorded two albums in Spanish that made him the figurehead of the Latin-music explosion. When he started singing in English the millions of sales became multimillions. His first English-language album, Ricky Martin, sold 16 million copies, and its single Livin' la Vida Loca set up home in charts around the world. Five years ago he and his music were everywhere, but at 28, after a 16-year career, he moved back to Puerto Rico.
"I shaved my hair off and decided to try some self-discovery. I know it sounds like a cliche, but that's what happened," he says. "I feared if I carried on doing what I was doing, then everything I had accomplished would be ruined. I suppose I needed to decompress, which wasn't easy. I was like a fish jumping out of the tank for the first while. But then I got more comfortable in my own skin. Then I just put on my backpack and started travelling."
While he was travelling in India, Martin started living what you might call la vida yoga. "I started practising yoga with a guru in Calcutta. It was liberating; I felt so free," he says. "For many years I had walked through life in automatic gear, because it was all work, work, work. But in India I spent a lot of time with this guru and learned a lot. It was also in India that I saw all the orphanages and first learned about child-trafficking. I began helping out in the orphanage, and that led to my involvement in raising awareness about the extent of child-trafficking. I also travelled to Nepal and then on to Egypt, and over time I began hearing these different musical sounds in each of the countries. This was music that was being created by people just on the street, and I was so attracted to these ethnic sounds that it reawakened something in me. When I got back home I went into the studio and started writing music, drawing on all that had inspired me on my travels."
He had never been known for his songwriting ability. "At first I was really scared of doing the songs myself. I tried to run away from it, but then the melodies showed up and then the harmonies. Automatically, I started to see myself on stage again. I actually wanted to go back." Because he was straying away from his trademark Latin sound on his new album, Life, he spent a lot of time testing his new songs in cities around the world. "I just brought them into clubs, asked the DJs to play them and then got some feedback from them. They told me to keep my sound but be influenced by what's going on and take it to the next level. The great thing is that because I spent about three years working on it, I could travel back to places like Egypt and come back with these really cool instruments, which gives the album a real global sound. The other thing that really influenced me was this huge growth in Latin hip hop, in which the old barriers of English music and Spanish music are coming down. I was listening to a lot of really cool Cuban bands as well as to acts like Outkast."
Martin is aware that Life, which is a good deal edgier than his previous work, is not the type of album expected of the Livin' la Vida Loca man. "It is a risk. It is daring to go places in music I have never gone before. I wanted to start from zero, as if it were the first album that I was recording, so I could present a new sound," he says. "The more different the cultures I experienced on my travels, the more I realised the connections. On each of the new songs I try and describe, through lyrics or music, stories that represent not only my personal experiences but also scenarios that I have witnessed. So it all began with India and yoga, then took in the Middle East, and back then for some Latino hip hop. You could say this album has been around a bit."
Life, by Ricky Martin, is on Columbia Records