JOSEP SULLER

Josep Suller was born in Tarragona (Spain) on the 19th June 1971.

He started playing the guitar at the age of 16 and formed his first rock band "Lord Byron" at the age of 18, which later became the band "Lausengiers". He played with Lausengiers for several years receiving great reviews from the local mass media. With Lausengiers, he won the competition "EXIT" in the year 1993, appearing on TV (Canal 33). In 1997 Lausengiers split up. In 1998 Josep joined his current band "Chicanos" with whom he recorded a CD and several demo tapes. He has played hundreds of concerts all around Spain.

Thanks to Chicanos' first CD, Josep got a contract to endorse the famous brand of guitar amplification CRATE. He has performed several clinics as a Crate endorser and he even played with Marty Friedman in a clinic in Salou (Tarragona) in the year 2000. At the age of 23 he got a degree in English philology and started working as an English, computer science and music teacher at Sant Gregori school in Barcelona. He spent 6 years in Barcelona and decided to expand his musical knowledge in the "Taller de Musics de Barcelona", where he studied jazz, harmony, composition, improvisation and other subjects for more than 3 years.

In the year 2000 Jose was the stage guitarist for singer Mikel Herzog (one of the most famous pop singers in Spain).

In 2001 he recorded an instrumental demo cd which was selected by the famous web "Guitar Nine Records" as one of the best instrumental demos of the month (August-September 2002) One of the songs of this instrumental cd: "When you lose a friend" was named song of the month by the magazine "Guitarra Total" - the Spanish edition of Total Guitar - in December of 2000.

Josep has been working as an English teacher at the EOI Tarragona (Oficial Language School) since 2004, where he is also the ICT coordinator. He has published several articles and has done some teacher training courses on the use of ICT for ELT. He has also produced online ELT materials for EOI students

For more information about his musical career, visit his website: http://www.telefonica.net/web2/josesuller/

BARBARA LATHAM

Barbara Latham was born in Liverpool (England) on 16th August, 1957.

She started singing in the bath at an early age and first sang in public in the toilets at her school, for the benefit of her classmates, in the late 60s and early 70s.

Near the end of the punk era, she began singing with a New Wave/Punk band called The Ozones. She and her fellow “musicians” were regularly spat at on stage in many venues, including the legendary Eric’s club in the same street as the Cavern, where that lesser known group, The Beatles, began their career. Unfortunately no photos remain of this phase of Barbara’s career, as everybody was too busy spitting.

At the beginning of the 80s, Barbara studied for (and was surprised to actually succeed in obtaining) a Diploma in Music at Liverpool’s Greenbank School of Performing Arts. Her first instrument was voice, and she greatly amused her fellow students by choosing piano as her second instrument. She never fully mastered the art of playing this instrument.

After receiving her diploma, so great was her astonishment that she didn’t sing again in public for many years, returning to the stage in the late 80s, before the Tarragonese public, to a clamour of indifference, with The Jazz Trio, featuring Tarragonese saxophone player, Xavi Pie. When The Jazz Trio decided to dispense with her services, she rather desperately began singing songs she didn’t really like, in hotels in Salou, with keyboard player and entrepreneur, Jordi Esmel.

Later, she and a group of friends began singing Irish folk songs with a group of friends in Kennedy’s Irish bar, in Tarragona.

For the last few years, Barbara has dedicated her considerable artistic talents to belly dancing and salsa, but has become a recluse as far as singing in public is concerned.

Barbara has been working as an English teacher at the EOI Tarragona since 1990, where she often tries to make her students listen to her singing, under pretext of exploiting a song for grammar and vocabulary purposes.