What does anyone know about Miguel Bosé. What does anyone even less know about Luis Miguel González Bosé. What we knew (we thought we knew) of the character and even of the person is what we have been told from minute one of his birth, in Panama City, 67 years ago. An existential adventure as a child, adolescent and adult inevitably called to media depredation by birth, fame and fortune. Hence the collection of commonplaces attached like barnacles to his figure and, incidentally, to his genius.
In the end, what remains is the robot portrait outlined cliché by cliché, that of the idol of the masses, that of the sexual symbol, that of the gambler of ambiguity, that of androgynous beauty, that of divine wrath, that of the scourge of press. The one with the star entrenched in his ivory tower who has suddenly lost his temper. If he, the interested party himself, appears today willing to reset, perhaps it is time for the rest of us to also change the chip. Magazine interviewed him a few days before he was robbed at his home in Mexico.
“I needed to start a new stage, very new, after everything that has happened to me in recent years, terrible things, very dramatic and hard. I couldn’t progress, grow, with that load. It is true that, just at that moment, the time came when what in the past I considered to be kept secret, countless, private, was greatly relieved. It is a process of integration by which, suddenly, things cease to have the importance that they seemed to have. And nothing happens if you share them”, says Bosé.
At the end of 2021, he published El hijo del Capitán Trueno (Espasa), tremendous memories of childhood and youth, until his phenomenal presentation as a singer, in 1977, an entire country as a witness on television. Soon, he returned to the charge with another volume, Secret history of my best songs; “Musical autobiography”, he calls it. And, with hardly any continuity solution, he premiered the Bosé series, a fiction about his life and his miracles (originally produced for the SkyShowtime platform, it will be broadcast in the open in the fall). Then came his role as a judge on Cover Night, the talent show on La 1 in which, finally, he has been heard singing again.
The (pen) last step of this return/rescue operation will be revealed as of September 5 in Bosé reborn, the Movistar docuseries in which, now, he tells himself to an open grave. Four chapters without waste to know about Miguel Bosé, but also about Luis Miguel González Bosé.
“I said to myself: ‘Let’s go there’. I had to start this new adventure, walk, it was, call it what you want, freed from all these years, from all these memories, because I am also at peace with them. It is true that I would not have been able to let go of everything I have let go if I were not at peace, free of grudges, damage, pain, sequelae…”, explains the polyhedral artist (singer, composer, actor, theater director, presenter, writer).
“I have conceived it as a climb or puzzle to go back little by little, in a beautiful way, not contaminated or sad. I decided to release ballast and share it, and I have done it with great joy, I think it shows ”, she continues. And he ends with a nonchalant gesture: “Bah, life is like that, this wasn’t such a big deal.”
But you will understand that this sudden overexposure, especially in someone so elusive and jealous of his privacy, attracts attention, that it even sounds like an image wash.
No, no, not at all, not at all. It is simply the need to release so much load, that it takes up too much space, it has a lot of weight. If you don’t release it and thank it for everything it has given you, there is no way to keep flying, you can’t progress. And yes, I put together a plan, so that it wasn’t all messy, but rather that one piece would complement the other and understand what would come next: first meeting Bosé at a time when no one knew who he was. The son, Miguelito, Miguelón, a child, an adolescent, there was so much that was not known… And that was what marked the rest. There are the deepest roots that hold everything else together.
Do you think too much has been taken for granted with you?
If so, it’s not my problem. Surely in the minds of the Spanish there are no two identical Miguel Bosé. Everyone chooses the one they fancy, the one they like, the one they like, or the one they would like to imagine. I am who I am. What you have to understand, and I think that I have achieved that in this time, is that my life is mine, because I also have no other. And you have to live it in the way that suits you to grow, to enlighten yourself. What you can’t expect is to please everyone, first because it’s impossible, and second because it makes you tremendously unhappy. I have always lived the life that I have wanted, or as I have understood it, doing things with a reason, a benefit, to understand where I had to go. If people get disappointed, that’s their problem.
With that image of self-sufficiency, a bit arrogant, that you project, are you capable of asking for help?
It doesn’t cost me anything to ask for help, but nothing. When I am lost or the criterion escapes me, I have my references and I use them. It is very necessary to know how far you can solve certain things by yourself and from when you need support, words, other people’s experiences.
Have you ever been to therapy? I’m not asking just because mental health is a recurring topic in the celebrity conversation today…
(She laughs as soon as she begins to ask him the question.) I’ve attended therapy in the past, of course. He helped me at the time to solve certain issues. Once you have understood what is happening and are given the tools to face it, or face it, and solve it, everything is easier.
In the documentary he alludes several times to his ability to survive, a defense mechanism that he has kept activated since he was a child. But when you spend so much time surviving, do you forget to live?
Survival is not defense. It is a way of imposing yourself to be you, with perseverance, determined to be what you are going to be. But you live and survive, yes. You face that complicated part with which you have to fight in a different way and it is what gives you the strength you need to solve what resists. But there is the profession, the friends, the family, that is not abandoned. I have not done it.
In that program on our television that celebrities have to go to pay the toll when they are promoting, Bosé repeated what his parents deserved each other. That it was a matter of karma that they met to “fuck” each other. The audience burst out laughing, forgetting that the one who really got screwed was the son. This is what happens, probably, when the scope of your parents is as magnificent as that of Luis Miguel Dominguín and Lucía Bosé, personalities of larger-than-life dimensions, as the Anglo-Saxons say.
After writing The Son of Captain Thunder and from what emerges from the docuseries, the chapter with his father seems finally closed, healed. But what about his mother’s?
It is also closed because he left. Speculating what he could have done, say, is wasted time. Would I have liked more of my father? Of course. I really miss him. She had a man-to-man friendship with him that was very goliardic, full of humor, tenderness, and complicity. If I had a thousand questions left to ask him, I don’t know either, I don’t remember. With my mother the relationship was creative, intellectual, talking about theosophy, apart from everyday life. It was home, kitchen, grandchildren. But she left suddenly, like that [she snaps her fingers], at a time that was also very complicated and ugly with what was happening in society, very different from my father’s. You never want to lose your parents, and as you grow you understand them, especially when you become one. But yesterday is already gone, period. Think about tomorrow.
Unleashed force of nature, much more even than the bullfighter, Lucía Bosé died at the age of 89 in March 2020, one of the first victims of covid-19 in our country. Her son was then in Mexico (where he moved in 2018 with her children, after spending three years on the east coast of Panama, at a particularly troubled economic and emotionally delicate moment).
“Not even my sisters [Lucía Bosé and Paola Dominguín] could be with her because the health protocols prohibited it,” she concedes, before adding without hiding her anger: “The damn protocols.” The journalist has been warned that entering the rag of the interviewee’s anti-vaccine position is off-limits. Nor would it have occurred to him, because he also knows that it would be a waste of time.
He assures that he has forgiven and that much has been forgiven. What have you had to forgive yourself and why?
Wow, lots of things. And you better learn it, dear. Forgiveness can be hard sometimes, but you end up giving up. Actually, it’s the least expensive, like giving away sighs, but asking for forgiveness is the key. If you don’t know how to forgive yourself, there’s no use asking for forgiveness and forgiving. In my books you see that there is no rancor: I have forgiven myself, I forgave myself, and that is why I was able to forgive everything that had happened to me and apologize to the people I had hurt. And it worked. You are the one who does the most damage to yourself, not so much to people from outside, family, friends, profession. We have the bloody habit of blaming the world, but what happens to us is what we allow.
Is the family model you have chosen a consequence of what you lived at home?
In part, absolutely yes. No matter how much the parents say “We are going to protect them at all costs”, in the end the hosts are always taken by the children. I wanted mine to have my two last names, they are my biological children and no one is going to take them away from me. It was a very sought-after, thoughtful, very worked-out paternity. And the moment was precise and exact.
Diego and Tadeo González Bosé are around 12 years old. About to arrive from school, the camera eludes them in the documentary, but his father shows no qualms about talking about them and the radical twist in the script that they have meant in his life, so much so that he left everything to be by his side while grow up. That was, surely, the great reinvention of Miguel Bosé who, for that matter, has always been an expert in the art of renaissance, he, who his first record company wanted to turn into a successor to Julio Iglesias when his destiny was that of a David Bowie, at least.
With some twenty albums in which he has played all styles, including electronics, and more than 30 million records shipped around the world (and in almost all languages), let’s see what kind of artist comes next, now that the professional waters return to their course.
“Get in line, because everyone wants to know. And I have no idea, ”she replies. “I’m doing things, a duet with Rauw Alejandro, hilarious, who is a jitazo [If you stick, watch out for that reggaeton Bosé], and with Mónica Naranjo, who sang here in the auditorium. It’s all very different. When it curdles, I’m sure I won’t even be able to explain it to you. You will have to listen to it and see how and where she touches you.
Does it bother you that people are more interested in knowing how much coke you’ve taken than your musical achievements or your work as an activist?
You do things because you believe in them and you feel related, and you think you can contribute something. That it later has more or less repercussion is no longer in my hands.
Right now, celebrities are almost required to position themselves socially and ideologically, because of the fact that with great power comes great responsibility, which they used to say to the superhero. It is surprising that, with his long history of commitment to causes such as the fight against HIV, indigenous peoples or the pollution of the oceans, no one holds him accountable.
Rights are not duties. We can ignore things and shut up. The media look for headlines and want you to decide, even if you don’t have affinity with the cause they want you to express yourself about. I have struggled to achieve the preservation of half a million nautical miles, from America to Asia, that is beastly. That people haven’t found out, I don’t care. There we are, preserving marine life even today [referring to Oceana, the NGO with which he collaborates]. Let it not be known that my Paz sin Fronteras foundation managed to get the United Nations, after a tremendous diplomatic and political corridor fight – I am talking about 15 years – to recognize peace as a universal human right, because it was not, it gives me the same. There is. The question is not to be axiomatic with what is said, but your judgment has to be supported with a vital attitude, otherwise you lose credibility.
Knowing firsthand the consequences of fame, why did you choose the path that leads to celebrity, being able to be an oceanographer or an anonymous marine biologist, as you dreamed of as a child? And don’t tell me it’s the genes.
It is that they are, I carry it inside! [Laughs] It’s the life I chose. Because? I don’t know, no one knows why one follows a path. Although I couldn’t be anything else, it wasn’t what I had to do. It has to do with public work, on the one hand, and with personal growth based on what you have left pending, on the other. It is karma, that spiritual, internal development that makes us load ourselves with experiences to polish ourselves and be able to move on to other stages, not physical, but in other dimensions. Those are my beliefs.
At least five minutes ago the 30 digital audience granted for the interview passed. Too bad for what remains unanswered, for resolving the countless paradoxes that the Bosé enigma raises (a geologist who would unravel substrate by substrate what time has deposited in it is what would be needed). Why the only moment in the docuseries in which he breaks down and starts crying is when he addresses his arrival in Mexico, his sentimental relationship on the verge of falling into the void.
Why is he not heard at any time talking about his bisexuality (declaring it openly, with what that would mean for many young people, and not so much). How does someone who was a paradigm of beauty cope with aging (deconstruction of masculinity? He was already at it more than four decades ago). Why he considers the former family residence of Somosaguas “a farce” (he demolished the chalet in 2011 and rebuilt it from scratch). How is it possible that the conscientious artist who once proclaimed “I want a world in which HIV has been defeated” now says that vaccines are poison. Last question:
Right at the beginning of ‘Bosé reborn’ he reveals that he would have loved to work in the fields, be a farmer. What has he sown and what has he reaped to date?
Oh my gosh! Apart from planting orchards through a tube, I have planted friendships, projects, good deeds, children, a career in which I have given a lot and have also received a lot in return from people. I have already had several great harvests. And they will return, of course they will return. in that I am.
