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, getting into trouble. We also had our first gig with our band “Bloody Blues”.
Sabú and Xavi in 1990, 13 years old.
Rhythm'n'ModPunkBlues (1993 - 1995)
At 16, we moved in together. We had a big ass drum kit in the living room, where we rehearsed and recorded with our rhythm’n’modpunkblues band “Speed”. Hated by our police-calling neighbours and the club owner who instantly banned us from one of the two local clubs after our first show, we were loved however by English indie label Real Records, who released our demo recordings as a vinyl single. This single was played on garage/punk underground radio world wide and received great reviews, for example in the scene Bible “Maximum Rock’n’Roll”.
Our first professional photo shoot
with Speed.
From left to right: Sabú, Toni, Urs, Xavi
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 where we set up camp in a dingy basement room in Shepherd's Bush. The treasures found in London’s vintage record stores broadened our musical horizon and we soon found ourselves deeply digging into Mötley Crue, Motörhead and Alice Cooper and we soon laid Speed to rest, trading in punk rock for riff-based hard rock. Black Lürxx with its darker and heavier, more melody-based sound was born. But London in 1995 was not a good place to play hard rock... Brit pop was the flavor of the day in the trend capital…
We spent hours holed up in our basement room, composing, practising and keeping out the cold and damp with cheap drink from the corner shop (Thunderbird - don't try it!). 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. …
Emigrants
We knew absolutely fuck all about L.A. - all the information we had came from Guns’n’Roses and Mötley Crüe songs, 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 L.A. to make it, so that’s what we’re gonna do, too!”
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We sold as much of our childhood stuff as possible to raise money for a flight to Los Angeles, 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 somewhere between London and Hollywood.
Hollywood, pt.1 (1996-97)
We arrived in L.A. with one huge rucksack, $1000 in cash and our instruments. On a tourist visa, of course, which we threw away, just like we did with our return flight tickets. We initially found ourselves sleeping rough on the streets of Hollywood, unable to buy a car or rent a flat for lack of papers. Luckily, after about two weeks, we found a landlord who didn’t care about papers. Once we got our asses off the street, we started kicking the band into gear. While life was hard and a good part of our days was spend begging for food in front of shops and restaurants, we were finally fulfilled musically: We soon found a sit-in drummer, recorded our first demo, “Tunes from the Gypsy Swamp” and in early 1997 we started playing the Hollywood clubs.
Skinny street kids behind the
Whisky-A-Go-Go, 1997
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 400 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 new drummer Joe, a Liverpudlian with whom we had instantly hit it off, and we took this as an opportunity to return to Europe, since our illegal status made it impossible for us to advance our career in the US.
Ozzy
We had been adopted by a wonderful cat, Ozzy, a huge white Main Coon. You can see him and our kiddie-selves in the music video to our autobiographical punk song “Sunset Shit”. We saved his ass from the losers who neglected him and he saved our asses from immigration officials: at the airport everyone was so smitten with his fluffiness that we were waved through all checks. There was only one person who even asked to see our visas 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”.
Ozzy chilling at home, 1998.
FINLAND (1998)
Photo session in the woods, Finland 1998.
From left to right: Joe, Xavi, Sabú
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. When playing up and down the beautiful Finnish countryside, the long summer nights invited us to wander off on walks between soundcheck and gig - that didn’t go down well with the other bands, who expected us to hang out and drink backstage with them. They mistook our love for nature for the arrogance of a Hollywood band. Then 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”. Having lost the deal, our manager turned on us, refused to pay the studio time and we basically fled the country…
HAMBURG (1998-99)
We then settled in the German port city of Hamburg, intending to lick our wounds and preparing a European tour. Unfortunately, our drummer Joe added more wounds when he was beaten up on Boxing Day 1998, which 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 with the music business and bored with the “party, drugs, rock’n’roll”-attitude of many musicians, we laid the band to rest in 2000, interrupting the projects we were working on, two epic concept albums, one about ancient history and another one about a mythical land where there was no division between humans and nature
Press feature in a German newspaper, 1999.
2000 - 2020
Enjoying life together
(but it's even greater in a band!)
Between the years 2000 and 2020, we did other things and other countries: while in Germany, we went back to school, got our diploma and went on to university to study Ancient Languages and History. Unimpressed and disgusted with the elitism surrounding Latin, we started our own Latin language school and Sabú is still successfully running it now online, almost 20 years later, with Xavi helping him out.
We repeatedly rejected a well-paying career within the institution - we’ve always been much happier leading a rogue life on our own terms, money was never a driver for us.
To heal from a burn-out, Xavi retreated to Catalonia where he decided to follow his childhood dream: he went back to uni and studied Environmental Protection in Catalonia, Germany and Wales. Having ended up as a graduate on the British Isles, he found work in England, where we have lived since. Beside the Latin school, Xavi now also works as a Climate Crisis Resilience Project Manager in local communities.
2020: the Lürxx - here we go again!
At our 2022 album launch gig (the first gig in 24 years!) in Liverpool! Ooooh yesss - we are loving' it!
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. In 2018, we met our drummer Joe for the first time in 20 years, after he commented under a Black Lürxx video on YouTube. We started talking about a reunion… To mark the new start and our commitment to radical optimism, we dropped the “Black” from the band name.
While old fans instantly recognize the lürxxy sound, our new material focuses more clearly on our love for nature and the message that humans are a part of nature. In a lot of ways, we’ve picked the band up right where we had left it in the year 2000. And already back then we had talked about bringing in a flute…
In the summer of 2022 we released our second debut album, “Music for the Planet” (with our original drummer Joe) as well as the EP "Jellyfish Moon" (with our new drummer Zoe).
Having opened the floodgates of creativity, the situation quickly escalated and in the fall of 2022 we went all in with professional music again. We enrolled in various courses to learn about the modern music business – we had been a pre internet times band!! – and went back to investing a massive chunk of our time (and money!) in the Lürxx.
In the summer of 2023 we started work on our next album, "Second Chancers", co-produced and mixed by our friend James Michael of Sixx:A.M. and to be dropped in EP-sized chunks starting early 2024.