The hushed warnings were that Enrique Iglesias was ultra-sensitive about a few things, and his relationship with his infamous father, Julio, heads the list. But Iglesias - the crooner's younger son from his first marriage - seemed more than happy to talk about how great his father is during our half-hour ride from the hotel to the Taipei studio where he was to announce a duet with Valen Hsu Ru-wen.
'A lot of people think I had a very screwed up childhood,' offers Iglesias, who was in Taipei to promote his debut English album, Enrique. 'But it was very normal. My father's been a great dad and my family's done a good job of bringing us up. I was, kind of, an independent kid and my parents weren't there a lot but I always felt that, if I needed him, he would always be there. It's not like he had disappeared; I always knew where he was.' Iglesias, 24, is now a heart-throb in his own right with a career that would make any father proud. His three Spanish-language albums sold almost 14 million copies worldwide and new record label Interscope reportedly paid US$40 million (HK$312 million) for rights to launch the singer into the international English-language market. (His elder brother, Julio Jnr, released his debut English-language album last year.) At 21, the younger Iglesias won his first Grammy for best Latin pop - beating none other than Dad. Despite is youth and boyish tendency for distraction, Iglesias has made all the right decisions and he credits the success this has brought to his unorthodox childhood. 'I think you absorb a lot of things unconsciously, just by being around and watching a lot. When you're a kid and you watch the people around your father, you know who are the ones who are really true to him and love him; the ones who would really work for him. As a child you can see that very clearly, because if they really love the father, they also love the kids,' he says.
'The number one lesson you learn in this business is that you have to surround yourself with good people. It's crucial. This is where I feel different from the rest [in the business], because I grew up in it,' he says. 'People ask me if I think it was a handicap. I think you should take the positive view. You learn so much from it. I'm talking about the essential things: the support you need and the people you surround yourself with. That's where I'll always be ahead of the pack. They'll learn after a few years in the business what [I] already knew as a kid.' One of the first things that Iglesias did when he decided to strike out on his own as a singer was to hire his father's former manager, Fernan Martinez.
It was so important to him to make his own success that he told Martinez to flog his demos as the work of a Central American hopeful named Enrique Martinez. But once Mexican label Fonovisa signed him on, Iglesias reverted to his real name. He was only 18 and left home for Canada with only the clothes on his back to record his album. Three albums - Enrique Iglesias, Vivir and Cosas del Amor - followed . . . and the rest, as they say, is Latino history.
Iglesias, who lives in Miami, got his first mainstream Billboard No 1 with his first project in gringoland music, the Latin-pop track Bailamos from Will Smith's 1999 summer flick flop, Wild Wild West.
It came in the wake of the gyrating, hysteria-inducing Grammy performance of Ricky Martin. Although Iglesias had been selling millions of records and won a Grammy long before Martin re-invented himself, it is the Puerto Rican hearth-throb who has been largely credited with heading the Latin invasion.
Iglesias isn't bothered. 'If anything, it helps me. People say, 'but it's the Grammys and everything', but everything that everyone is saying about the Latin explosion, I have done it all. Only I did it in Spanish,' he says. 'I'm the top-selling Latin artist. I've sold six million with one album and a total of 13 million for three Spanish albums. That's a lot of albums for Spanish, no? 'We each have our own time and we each have our moment. The more [of us] there are, the better.' The two Latino heart-throbs now making a bid for the English-language market are from very different schools of music: Martin has made upbeat Latin-tinged shake-your-bon-bon numbers his trademark; Iglesias is better known for smouldering ballads.