With his “ph” added when he signed for the Philips record company, Raphael, Andalusian medalist, is the great Spanish musical legend, with 60 years in his pocket and millions of fans of all ages and throughout the planet. Indispensable, in La 2, dedicates its delivery tomorrow, Sunday, to this front-line figure who is part of the sentimental memory and who continues to be quite present, as he has expressed in Movistar + to Emilio Aragon in his BSO program. This Must-Have has a surprising name: From Russia With Love.
In the 1960s, when Francoism seemed to loosen its hand, Rafael Martos began his artistic career after making himself known at the Benidorm Festival and while the Cold War widened the gap between the two superpowers. And in 1970, thanks to the screening of the film Say What They Say in theaters in the USSR, almost 40 million people discovered the captivating Raphael and his songs.That success in the cinema of a film of the most ultramontane dictatorship in Western Europe still causes some surprise.
But it is true, as this La 2 documentary shows, that Raphael became a consecrated and admired value in the USSR, breaking borders when the iron curtain was inaccessible.The success of the singer led to the point that the learning of Spanish in Soviet schools and universities increased by 60%.
The social phenomenon around his personal bearing was of such magnitude that, unlike what happened with other Western musicians such as the British Beatles or the Rolling Stones, who were fighting for world number one and yet were censored, Raphael reached the Red Square.From Russia with love is the chronicle of the relationship between Raphael and his millions of fans in an extremely convulsive context. This documentary is the work of Xavier Baig, Jordi Rovira and Oscar Moreno, through the production company REC produccions, together with RTVE and Universal Music Spain.
This Essentials opened the door to the creation of a biographical series on Raphael that Movistar + announced in May. Said semblance will be shot in Linares, Malaga, Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico, Miami and Los Angeles.
It will thus be an extension of this open premiere tomorrow, Sunday, after having been on demand on Movistar. From Russia with love reaches our days with the testimony of fans, who speak of the duplication of vinyl singles through x-rays.
In 1980 Raphael received a Uranium Disc for having sold more than 50 million copies in the USSR, to which are added those pirate copies of precariousness. Only figures like Michael Jackson, AC/DC, Queen had that notoriety in sales.
