Serrat: El noi de Poble-sec

There are only a few names in Spanish music that people all over the world recognize, and Serrat is one of them. But who is he? What makes him so special that he’s become one of the country’s most recognizable cultural exports, and his career is still going strong after six decades?

Just by skimming the biography on his official website, you immediately get the sense that Serrat—born Joan Manuel Serrat i Teresa just a few years after the end of the Spanish Civil War on the street Poeta Cabanyes in Barcelona’s Poble-sec neighborhood—is a different animal than your average star.

At the top of the bio is his last name, SERRAT, in big block letters. He knows that this one word says it all. After 60 successful years on stages all over the world, he knows that he doesn’t need an introduction.

But the content of the biography is unique. It’s written in the first person and reads like a letter to a friend. It begins, “I arrived on this world without having planned to do so on the 17th of December in 1943.”

He later continues, “I started studying agriculture, I’m not really sure why.”

He’s uncommon in the sense that he mentions both his Spanish and his Catalan heritage with pride in an era when politics is polarized and divisive. and specifically credits his mother for everything she did to keep her household in working order. How many men do you know—even of much younger generations—who are self-aware and self-confident enough to publicly recognize their mother’s hours upon hours of unpaid domestic labor as a fundamentally important part of his life?

His comments about his film career paint the portrait of a man who is down-to-earth, who loves what he does but isn’t in love with the idea of his own myth. “I too, succumbed to the temptation of a celluloid career, although I admit that I put little effort into it and sincerely believe that my greatest contribution to the advancement of cinema was to abandon it.”

Serrat talks about the first tour he took with his piano player and sound engineer, Ricard Miralles. who would continue to work with him for the next 50 years. He talks about his family, about Barça games and about the joy it gave him to return to Chile and play two back-to-back stadium shows after the Pinochet dictatorship ended.

“But I always say that a show is a show, [and is equally important] in the smallest village or in New York City,” he writes.

He reminisces about friends who died, and about the time when he suddenly lost his voice onstage, but the audience sang the songs for him for the duration of the show. And about how, when he was being treated for cancer, he was convinced that he wouldn’t be fully well again until he got back onstage.

But I guess if 60 of one’s 77 years have been lived onstage and in the recording studio, it makes sense that love, death, family, friends, fans, politics, concerts, albums, business and fútbol—all the stuff that makes up a life and a successful and prolific career—are inextricably connected.

The Beginning

Serrat’s upbringing had a huge impact on his worldview, which is clearly reflected in many of his lyrics. Poble-sec was a largely working-class neighborhood, his mom was a housewife from a small town in Aragó, and his father was a Catalan anarchist affiliated with the CNT workers’ union who worked for the gas company. A number of his songs talk about Catalunya and its residents in the post-war era, usually from the perspective of people from the same social strata as his family.

Serrat started playing guitar at the age of 17, performing cover songs with a band of fellow university students. (As a young man he got his degree as an agronomist—an expert in the science and technology of soil management and crop production—but never worked in his field.) Music was just a hobby until a live performance on a radio show resulted in a contact that would shape the course of the rest of his life.

The host of the show, Salvador Escamilla, introduced him to a local record label called Edigsa. After signing on with them, Serrat released two EPs in quick succession before he ever played a live concert. His first official performance was in 1967, at El Palau de la Música.

He became known for mixing elements of Beatles-esque rock, Italian pop hits, and French chanson though the foundations of his compositions were firmly rooted in singer-songwriter sensibilities.

Fame and Politics

The following year, he was chosen to represent Spain in the Eurovision Song Contest, but as he insisted on singing in Catalan, the government replaced him with a singer willing to perform a version of the same one in Spanish. This would mark the first time Serrat ran into conflict with the authorities for his political ideals, but it wouldn’t be the last. It also catapulted him to hero status in Catalan nationalist circles.

He also joined the movement known as Els Setze Jutges (“the sixteen judges”), a collective of singer-songwriters whose mission was to normalize the use of the Catalan language in music in spite of the repression of the Franco dictatorship. He and his counterparts would become known as the pioneers of the musical style called “nova cançó,” or “new song.”

However, the young singer later received backlash from the other side of the fence when he released an album based on the poems of Antonio Machado. The success of the all-Spanish-language recordings exponentially expanded his audience and resulted in extensive tours of Spain and Latin America but angered some members of his die-hard Catalan base. His star continued to rise, and he continued to make both fans and enemies on both sides of the political aisle for refusing to bow to political pressure or conform to anyone else’s ideas of what he should be or do.

In 1974, Serrat had to flee from Spain to Mexico after clashes with Franco’s government over their policy on capital punishment, but the upside of his sudden geographical proximity to the United States was the opportunity to perform in the US for the first time. In Mexico his friends were other exiles and creative progressives and his home base for his extensive touring during that period was a motorhome he called La Gordita (the fat lady).

Serrat was able to return to Spain after Franco’s death, even though there was still a warrant out for his arrest.

Leaving His Mark

After his first official release in 1967, Serrat released a full-length studio album nearly every year for the next twenty years, and one every two or three years for the twenty after that.

Many of his compositions are influenced by poets, including Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda and Mario Bendetti, and just as other wordsmiths have influenced him, countless lyricists from the following generations have cited him as a reference. Fito Páez, Victor Heredia, Javier Ruibal, Silvio Rodríguez, Alejandro Sanz and numerous others. The dozens of homages by the new generation of Catalan singer-songwriters as well as their counterparts in countries around the world are clear evidence of the depth and breadth of his cultural and musical impact.

Serrat has been recognized by various awards, including honorary doctorates from universities all over the globe, a Latin Grammy and medals of honor from both the Spanish and Catalan governments for his contributions to both cultures. His music has been equally important in countries not his own, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, who admire him for standing up to authority, for his romanticism and for his championing of the working class.

The passing of time hasn’t made Serrat lose any of his fire or his sense of humor. One of his albums in collaboration with his friend Sabina is The Orchestra of the Titanic and shows them laughing and tipping their bowler hats with the doomed ship in the background.

Serrat Today: Still Pushing the Envelope

Even after such a long career, Serrat doesn’t rest on his laurels—he continues to put out new music. In 2006 he released his first album entirely in Catalan in 17 years called Mô, inspired by the city of Mahón, where he spends a lot of time. In 2018 he also revived his seminal 1971 album Mediterráneo with brand-new orchestra arrangements.

Serrat continues to tour the world and still regularly performs his best-known song, “Mediterráneo,” from his 1971 album of the same name—which he says he wrote in a room at the Hotel Batlle in Calella de Palafrugell nearly 50 years ago—sometimes solo, sometimes with a band, sometimes with an entire orchestra.

He consistently gets involved in cultural and social activist movements, such as the highly-publicized call for an “ateneu de la cançó,” or a center of study and investigation of singer-songwriter music in Barcelona.

Serrat was a vocal supporter of the importance of the development of a coronavirus vaccine, as well as amnesty for rapper Pablo Hasél, who is the latest in a series of artists, journalists and influencers to be convicted under Spain’s gag law.

He is a consistent proponent of freedom of artistic expression and has been known to say that he “sings best in whatever language that’s prohibited,” in reference to his defense of the Catalan language under Franco and his equally strong defense of his albums in Spanish.

In spite of being a revered hero and a native son of Catalunya—one of his affectionate nicknames is el noi de Poble-sec, or “the boy from Poble-sec”—he has received backlash and even calls for boycotts against him by Catalan hardliners for his criticism of the Catalan Independence movement.

But after all these years, the experienced songwriter and showman isn’t about to be intimidated by anyone—even pausing a performance to clap back at a fan who gave him a hard time for singing in Spanish during a concert.

Serrat is 77 years old as of the writing of this article, and in his own words, has no plans to stop doing what he’s always done: make music and follow his own path. His official, first-person biography finishes like this: “I have yet to discover a better way to spend my life than touring and singing for the people. So, to the extent that my health and the audience allow it, and thanks to my wife, who has been generous enough to do the heavy lifting when it comes to the house, the children and the dogs with her husband on tour, I’m still at it.”

He still lives in Barcelona.