b. Enrique Miguel Iglesias Preysler, 8 May 1975, Madrid, Spain. The son of global superstar Julio Iglesias, Enrique recorded his self-titled debut album of Latin-influenced pop in 1995. The album’s release saw him catapulted to superstar status in the Spanish-speaking music world. Assured of media exposure of similar intensity to the elder Iglesias, certain sections of the media also implied a rivalry between father and progeny - his parents having divorced when Enrique was seven. Certainly Enrique’s statement to Spain’s top-selling daily newspaper, El Pais, ‘When I have children, I’ll leave work to one side for a while - something my father never did’, helped to fuel the conjecture. Although his love songs and ballads, such as ‘Experiencia Religiosa’ and ‘No Llores Por Mi’, placed him in the same stylistic area as his father, Enrique claims to have been influenced as much by rock acts such as Journey, Foreigner and Roxy Music, having spent much of his youth growing up in Miami, Florida.
The singer’s follow-up collection, Vivir, won a Grammy Award, and by 1997 the two albums were credited with global sales in excess of eight million. By that time he had also achieved a sequence of seven chart-topping singles on Billboard’s Latin Top 50 chart. Iglesias was even more successful in 1999, the commercial breakthrough year for Latin music, with ‘Bailamos’ topping the Billboard Hot 100 in September and breaking into the UK Top 5. ‘Be With You’ also topped the US singles chart the following June.
Iglesias enjoyed further success with his Interscope Records debut Escape and the singles ‘Escape’, ‘Don’t Turn Off The Lights’ and ‘Hero’. The latter provided Iglesias with a UK chart-topper in January 2002. The Spanish language follow-up Quizás was also a major hit and generated three further Latin chart-topping singles, making Iglesias the most successful number one artist in the history of the Billboard Latin chart. The English language 7 (2003) was a surprisingly unsuccessful release, with the album’s move into a more rock-orientated direction alienating the artist’s core fanbase. During the same year Iglesias made his movie debut in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon A Time In Mexico.
In the ensuing four-year gap between albums Iglesias made infrequent concert and festival appearances. He also wrote material for the Hollies, Melanie C. and Andrea Bocelli, and appeared in the CBS television series Two And A Half Men. Insomniac, released in summer 2007, was premiered by the hit single ‘Do You Know? (The Ping Pong Song)’.
