BIOGRAPHY
In the beginning... (1990 - 1992)
We met at school when we were 12 years old. We quickly became best friends and started writing music together at 13. Almost instantly, we realized that there would not be another person either one of us would want to spend his time with - once you find your soulmate, that’s it. So we’ve been together since we’re thirteen, too. First love kinda thing, very romantic and all that jazz. There was really never another option!
We spent a very unhappy youth in a small town which suffocated us. At 15, we were the teenagers from hell, drinking, taking drugs, raising hell, getting into trouble. We also had our first gig with our band “Bloody Blues”.
Bloody Blues -1992, even though it looks like it's the late 1960s!
Rhythm'n'ModPunkBlues (1993 - 1995)
Our first professional photo shoot with Speed.
From left to right: Sabú, Toni, Urs, Xavi
At 16, we moved in together. We had a big ass drum kit in the living room, where we rehearsed with our rhythm’n’modpunkblues band “Speed” (police-calling neighbours included!). This was our first ‘serious’ band in that we played a club gig at one of the two local clubs where we promptly got banned from ever playing again and in that we recorded our first demo and subsequently released a single on the English indie label Real Records. This single was received very positively in the garage/punk scene, getting great reviews, for example in the scene Bible “Maximum Rock’n’Roll”, and receiving a bunch of airplay on underground radio. This ‘success’ inspired us to set our sights on moving to London - it had always been clear to us that we would flee our small town as soon as we turned 18 and London seemed like a logical choice.
LONDON (1995)
In front of our bedsit in Shepherd's Bush.
Xavi has already turned into Izzy Stradlin while Sabú
still preserves the Punk-look.
As soon as we turned 18 we dropped out of school and left for London. We had a bunch of money which our parents had saved for us for “our education” but which we now, at 18, just claimed for our move, as well as some savings from forgoing school lunches for years and from working odd jobs ever since we were 14. So we put all we had into our move to London and found a dingy basement room in Shepherd's Bush where we set up camp. London in 1995 was not a good place to play hard rock... Brit pop was the flavour of the day and all the trendy Londoners weren't interested in a bunch of guys who were just starting to go crazy about Guns'n'Roses, Metallica and Mötley Crüe...
This damp room in the Bush was the birthplace of Black Lürxx. We spent hours holed up there, composing, practicing and keeping out the cold and damp with cheap drink from the corner shop (Thunderbird - don't try it!). Out of these hours and out of the ashes of Speed emerged the darker and heavier, more melody-based sound of Black Lürxx. The song RIP, soon to be featured on our demo "Tunes from the Gypsy Swamp" was written here.
With London being too trendy to play metal, the logical thing to do was move out west... not to Cornwall, but to L.A. …
We knew absolutely fuck all about LA - all the information we had came from Guns’n’Roses and Mötley Crüe biographies and interviews. We didn’t even know if there still was a music scene in Hollywood. We were just operating under the premise of “our heroes moved out to LA to make it, so that’s what we’re gonna do, too!”
The Black Room (1996)
We left Shepherds Bush, returned to the shithole we had come from and spent a miserable February of 1996 illegally living in an unheated rehearsal room (“The Black Room”) while selling as much of our childhood stuff as possible to raise enough money for a flight to Los Angeles.
Originally, we had planned in at least a couple of months for this phase. But then there was a special offer on flights and we borrowed some money from a rich friend and got our tickets to L.A.
And in March 1996, we left. On the way to the airport (driven by a tearful mom) we listened to Mötley Crüe’s “Danger”, mentally preparing for the adventure that lay before us.
Sabú & Xavi during the "Black Room" time.
Hollywood, pt.1 (1996-97)
Skinny street kids behind the Whisky-A-Go-Go, 1997
We arrived in LA with one huge rucksack, $1000 in cash and our instruments. On a tourist visa, of course, which we disposed of quickly, just like we did of our return flight tickets. We initially found ourselves on the streets, unable to buy a car or rent a flat for lack of papers. Luckily, after about two weeks on the streets of Hollywood, we found a landlord who was corrupt enough not to ask for papers and who came around once a month to collect the rent in cash. Once we got our asses off the street, we started kicking the band into gear. We pretty soon found a sit-in drummer, recorded our first demo, “Tunes from the Gypsy Swamp” in the fall of 1996 and started playing the Hollywood clubs soon after.
Hollywood, pt. 2 (1997-98)
Playing at the Coconut Teaszer, 1997.
We latched onto the remnants of the Sunset Strip glam rock scene where we were welcomed with open arms. All through 1997 we played the Strip and were fortunate enough to play such landmark clubs as the Coconut Teaszer, the Roxy and the Troubadour.
We were nominated “Best Hollywood Band” in the Rock City News Awards 1997 and we built up an international fan club, the Lürxx Gang, which had over 500 members all over the world.
In the spring of 1997 we recorded and self-released our debut album “Give it to the Sea” which was well received among the international underground rock community.
In 1998 we attracted interest from management in Finland. We had just fired our sit-in drummer and found our forever drummer Joe, a Liverpudlian who had found himself in LA without his band and with whom we had instantly hit it off, and we took this as an opportunity to return to Europe.
Ozzy
We had been adopted by a wonderful cat, Ozzy, a huge white Main Coon. We saved his ass from the losers who neglected him and he saved our ass from immigration officials: at the airport everyone was so smitten with the fluffy cat that we were waved through all checks. In the end, the only person who asked to see our visas was an airline employee, not even a US American, and when we gave her some spiel about how we hadn’t known you were supposed to keep ‘em, she just said “oh, I’ll just give you a replacement, what a lovely cat” and that was that.
Ozzy chilling at home, 1998.
FINLAND (1998)
We spent the next months falling out with management in Finland. We did manage to play a bunch of kick ass shows, shoot a music video, be featured on TV, radio and in glossy magazines and even re-record our debut album. But when we turned down a deal with Sony Records because they wanted us to change our songwriting, kick out our drummer (“too old”) and sell us as a commercial “pretty boy band” our manager turned on us, refused to pay the studio time and we basically fled the country…
Photo session in the woods, Finland 1998.
From left to right: Joe, Xavi, Sabú
HAMBURG (1998-99)
We then settled in the German port city of Hamburg, licking our wounds and preparing a European tour. Unfortunately, our drummer Joe was badly beaten on Boxing Day 1998. This led to him having to have steel plates in his face for a while and being unable to play the drums.
A little later Xavi completely lost his voice due to medical reasons and we had to cancel the tour.
Disenchanted and frankly a little bored with the rock world, we laid the band to rest in 1999…
Press feature in a German newspaper, 1999.
2000 - 2020
Between the year 2000 and 2020, we did other things: we went back to school, got our diploma and went on to university to study Classics. Unimpressed and disgusted with the elitism surrounding Latin, we formed our own Latin language school while still at uni and Sabú is still successfully running it now, almost 20 years later.
We repeatedly rejected a well-paying career within the institution - we’ve always been much happier leading a rogue life, money was never a driver for us.
Xavi later went on to follow a childhood dream and studied Environmental Sciences. Beside the Latin school he now also works as a Sustainability Consultant.
Enjoying life together (but it's even greater in a band!)
2020: the Lürxx - here we go again!
Eventually, though, art pushed its way back in. You can do without it for a while, but as an artist, you just gotta do art…
We started writing music again in 2017, taking it slowly at first. In 2018 we met Joe again for the first time in 20 years, after he commented under a Black Lürxx video on YouTube. We started talking about a reunion…
And in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, we did it! We went back into the studio to start work on our second debut album, “Music for the Planet”. Here we go again…
At our 2022 album launch gig (the first gig in 24 years!) in Liverpool! Ooooh yesss - we are loving' it!