Fan Fervor at Bunbury Show Creates a One-of-a-Kind Event

In a dark corner of the Palace on Tuesday, a pale young Mexican man adjusted the knobs of his minidisc player, getting ready to surreptitiously record the upcoming concert by Enrique Bunbury.

“There’s hundreds of Bunbury bootlegs out there, you know,” he said when asked about the Spanish rock star. “I don’t know of any American singer who’s been bootlegged as much as Bunbury.”

Although virtually unknown in this country, Bunbury is idolized in Spain and Latin America for his rock-star mystique, smoky voice and plaintive lyrics. It was the fervor of his fans, chanting the words to every song, that helped turn Tuesday’s sold-out performance into an intense, one-of-a-kind event.

Confident in his rapport with the audience and surrounded by an excellent nine-piece band, Bunbury devoted most of the show to his latest studio album, “Pequeno Cabaret Ambulante” (Little Traveling Cabaret). Released two years ago, the album has become something of a contemporary classic in the world of Latin rock. It also signifies Bunbury’s coming of age as a singer-songwriter.

Abandoning the more obvious hard-rock tendencies of his former band, Heroes del Silencio, “Cabaret” is the rock en espanol version of a Fellini movie, complete with brassy circus grotesqueness, blood-dripping ballads of metaphysical nostalgia and nocturnal hymns that conclude with the sound of seagulls and crashing waves.

Bunbury’s fusion of disparate elements--flamenco, arena rock, Middle Eastern, ranchera , tango--sounded delightful onstage, mirroring the evolution of Latin rock from a copycat genre obsessed with U.S. and English rock aesthetics to a movement of wide sonic possibilities.