There are plenty of rock bands with stories about bad apartments, questionable decisions, record deals that went sideways, and years spent trying to become famous. There are considerably fewer whose stories include leaving school, moving to London as teenagers, sleeping rough in Hollywood, playing the Sunset Strip, walking away from music, going back to school to study Ancient Languages and History, opening a Latin language school, and then deciding about twenty years later that maybe it was time to get the band back together.

That was the part of the Lürxx story that caught me. When I talked with Xavi, Sabú and Joe, I expected most of our conversation to stay somewhere around rock music, Hollywood and their return with Music for the Planet. Instead, I found myself talking with three people whose story had somehow wandered from a basement in London to the clubs of Los Angeles, through Finland and Germany, into Latin classrooms and ancient history, and eventually right back to the music they had left behind.

From a London Basement to Hollywood

By 1995, Xavi and Sabú had left school and headed for London, where they moved into a basement room in Shepherd's Bush and began building the harder sound that eventually became Black Lürxx. The timing was not particularly helpful. Britain was in the middle of Britpop while they were listening to bands such as Mötley Crüe, Motörhead and Alice Cooper, but being badly timed has apparently never been much of a deterrent for these two.

When London failed to cooperate with the plan, they decided to move to Los Angeles. According to their history, they sold what they could, bought plane tickets, and arrived in California in March 1996 with their instruments, one large rucksack, about a thousand dollars, and an understanding of Los Angeles largely assembled from music, interviews and rock biographies.

They initially slept rough in Hollywood before eventually finding somewhere to live, recording music and working their way into the club scene. By 1997, Black Lürxx was playing places including the Roxy, the Troubadour and the Coconut Teaszer. According to the band's history, they were also nominated for Best Hollywood Band in the 1997 Rock City News Awards.

For two young musicians who had recently been living in a basement in London, things were moving.

They were also about to get considerably more complicated.

When the Rock-and-Roll Dream Goes Sideways

Drummer Joe joined the band in 1998, and Black Lürxx eventually headed back to Europe after attracting management interest in Finland. Their account of that period includes performances, television and radio appearances, another recording of their debut album and interest from Sony Records.

According to the band, Sony offered them a deal, but the proposed agreement came with conditions they were unwilling to accept, including changes to their songwriting and drummer. They turned it down.

That is one of those decisions that probably becomes easier to analyze twenty-five years later than it was while standing in the middle of it. People like to imagine that being offered a record deal is the finish line, but contracts have a nasty habit of including things beyond the words "Congratulations, you're famous now."

After Finland came Hamburg, followed by the kind of combination of events that can finish a band whether anyone has actually decided to quit. According to the band's account, Joe was seriously injured in an attack, Xavi later lost his voice because of medical problems, a planned tour was cancelled, and by 2000 Black Lürxx was essentially put aside.

A lot of band stories would end there. A few recordings survive, everybody gets older, and eventually someone uploads a grainy old performance to YouTube while people argue in the comments about what might have happened if the right record executive had shown up.

That is not what happened here.

Rock Musicians Who Teach Latin

After the band stopped, Xavi and Sabú went back to school, earned their diplomas and studied Ancient Languages and History at university. They eventually established a Latin language school and began teaching, with Sabú continuing to work with Latin and Roman history.

This was the part of our conversation I found wonderfully strange.

There is absolutely no reason someone who played rock clubs on the Sunset Strip cannot also become fascinated with Latin grammar and Roman history, but we have a habit of putting people into little boxes anyway. Rock musician goes in this box. Latin teacher goes in that one. Historian goes somewhere else. Then somebody comes along and screws up the filing system.

What interested me was that they did not seem to view these things as separate versions of themselves. History, language, music and eventually environmental interests became parts of the same larger curiosity about the world, and the years away from the band were not simply empty space between two attempts at making music.

They became part of what happened next.

Twenty Years Later, the Band Was Still There

The music never completely disappeared. Xavi and Sabú began writing together again in 2017, and in 2018 they reconnected with Joe after he commented on an old Black Lürxx video online.

There is something appropriately modern about a band separated for nearly two decades being resurrected because somebody found an old video on the internet.

By 2020, the project was moving again. Black Lürxx became the Lürxx, with the band explaining that dropping the word "Black" reflected a change toward music and a worldview they considered less dark and more optimistic. Their newer material also began drawing more heavily from nature, environmental concerns and the idea that human beings are part of the natural world rather than standing somewhere outside of it.

Then, in 2022, the Lürxx released Music for the Planet, an album they have jokingly described as their "second debut album," along with the Jellyfish Moon release. That year they also returned to the stage in Liverpool for what the band describes as its first live performance in twenty-four years.

Think about that for a minute.

Most people abandon something for twenty-four years and it becomes a story about who they used to be.

The Lürxx picked theirs back up.

Maybe the Detour Was the Story

What stayed with me after talking with Xavi, Sabú and Joe was not simply that they returned to music. Comeback stories are everywhere, and they usually get packaged into some tidy narrative about perseverance and overcoming adversity because apparently we have decided every interesting life has to look like somebody climbing Mount Everest.

Their story is better than that because it is messier.

They tried one life, watched parts of it collapse, built another one, became students and teachers, developed entirely different interests, and eventually discovered that returning to music did not require pretending those years in between had never happened. Those years became part of the music.

The musicians who once headed for Hollywood chasing a version of rock-and-roll success eventually came back with Latin, ancient history, environmental education and a couple of decades of life mixed into what they were writing. The destination might have looked familiar, but the people arriving there were not the same ones who had left London with their instruments all those years earlier.

We are usually told to pick a direction, build a career, establish an identity and stay on course. The Lürxx did almost none of that. Their route went from school to music, London to Hollywood, Hollywood to Finland, Finland to Germany, rock music to Latin, ancient history to environmental education, and eventually right back to guitars.

It makes absolutely no sense if you are trying to draw it as a straight line.

Apparently, nobody told them it had to be one.