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‘I’m happiest in the studio, naked and drinking mezcal’: is Buika the most liberated performer on Earth?

She is the ‘singer from everywhere’ who belts out numbers ‘with her heart ripped out’. As the flamenco fusion phenomenon blazes into Britain, she reveals all about her new superpowers – and the exoplanet she hid on during Covid

The self-taught “singer from everywhere” (New York Times) who only knows how to perform “with her heart ripped apart” (Pedro Almodóvar) has flitted between flamenco, Spanish copla, jazz, pop, rumba, R&B and soul since her debut solo album in 2005. Buika grew up in Palma de Mallorca, in the only black family for miles around, inhaling flamenco, Gypsy and African folk songs like air. It is all some distance from Las Vegas, where she started out as a “hungry” Tina Turner impersonator with a two-year-old child, before finding her own uniquely raw and raspy voice.

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