Nomadic musician with a cartful of heart
He's quite an enigma Nilda Fernandez. A male singer with a woman's name and a feminine singing style. A pop star who's sold more than 500,000 albums, but prefers to tour in a horse-drawn caravan. A successful 20-year career has been disturbed only by a nomadic tendency to uproot himself from his French homeland to live in countries thousands of kilometres away.
Later this month, Fernandez will be in Hong Kong for the first time to debut a new song and play three free gigs here, and in Macau as the headline act for shows marking the end of the Year of France in China. He'll sing in French and Spanish.
Fernandez, 47, was born Daniel Fernandez in Barcelona. When he was a boy, he and his family moved to Lyon in the south of France. From an early age, Fernandez sang, took piano lessons and taught himself flamenco guitar.
When his first album received a less-than-enthusiastic response, Daniel changed his name to Nilda (drawn from the letters of his first name) - and his career took off, after the release of Madrid Madrid in 1987.
'It's the schizophrenic in me,' Fernandez says from his home in Provence, south of France. 'It offers two perspectives. It's as if Daniel writes the songs and Nilda sings them. It creates an interesting ambiguity.'
Known for its feminine pitch, some have questioned whether Fernandez's voice has the ring of an acquired delivery. 'No, it's my natural voice,' he says. 'I didn't work on it, I didn't change it. It is what it is.'
With eight albums under his belt, he's worked with the likes of Sting, Jane Birkin and Grammy award-winning pianist Michel Camillo. All the more strange then, that when he embarked on a tour of France in the late 1990s, he dispensed with charter flights and luxury coaches and opted for two horse-drawn caravans.
'To do 30kms took us about seven hours. A car would have done it in about half an hour,' he says of the 1,000km French tour. 'The horses were the primary concern. At each stop, it was important to find a place where we could feed them and they could sleep.'
The Romany route appealed to Fernandez, who wanted to exchange the custom-made tour bus for a down-to-earth experience. The only concession was that the equipment and roadies went ahead by van so that when the musicians reached their destination, the gig was set up and ready to go.
'When we arrived at the theatre [in Paris], we put the horses outside, the caravan on the pavement and threw hay all over the entrance to the theatre,' he says. 'We put all the things we'd collected on our journey - pumpkins, direction signs, bottles of wine we'd been given along the way - around the theatre and it was the most beautiful set decoration of my career.'
Clearly, the experience didn't put him off. In September, he leaves Paris for Beijing, travelling through Moscow and Siberia. To his regret it will be by train, rather than caravan, with 30 musicians in tow.
'I've spent my artistic life in places where I shouldn't be,' he says, recalling a four-year stint in Russia during which he performed across the country before returning home last October.
During an extended stay in Cuba, Fernandez formed a friendship with pianist Aldo Lopez-Gavilan Junco, and the 25-year-old will be performing with him during his Hong Kong gigs.
Nilda Fernandez, June 17, 10pm, Fringe Club, 2 Lower Albert Rd, Central; June 18, 7.30pm, Macau Tower, Macau; June 19, 3.30pm, Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Salisbury Rd, Tsim Sha Tsui, free. Inquiries: 2811 4900
