The Iberia Madrid-Porto flight yesterday Thursday was not like the others. First, due to the unexpected turbulence on a route that is usually calm and second, because the frightened passengers received an even more unusual surprise: Marta Sánchez and Carlos Baute got up from their seats to sing together Hanging in your hands, a success that accompanies them since 2008 and that served for passengers and crew to forget about the gusts of wind. Marta Sánchez explains from Porto in a telephone conversation with La Vanguardia how the episode happened.
“Two of the flight attendants had recognized us and when I was coming back from the bathroom, one of them told me that it would be nice to sing something to calm and entertain people. Carlos asked me ‘Do you dare?’ And I replied that she was not even dead. I’m dying of shame.” The artist says that she was more terrified of acting improvised like that than her own turbulence. Fortunately, with Carlos Baute already reaching for the guitar, he changed his mind and the stewardess introduced them over the loudspeaker system: “There were children crying, a man holding on to the seat as if there was no tomorrow… So I told him to go ahead, let’s sing Hanging in your hands, that everyone knows her. We started off and it has gone viral not only in Spain but in part of the US, Mexico, Argentina…”
Marta Sánchez has been in music since she was a teenager. She sang and played the guitar in Sabadabadá (which she presented in Torrebruno between 1981 and 1984) and made her debut with Cristal Oskuro in 1985. Then she came Olé Olé and… The rest is well-known history. How can an artist who on Christmas Eve 1990 boarded a frigate to perform before the Spanish troops in the Persian Gulf be ashamed to sing before the troubled passage of a plane? “The context is very strange, very intimate. Getting to sing on a plane can be invasive for the passengers, who don’t expect it because it’s not normal. And you are not prepared for something like that, outside my natural habitat.
This performance clears up any doubt, if any, of the fluid relationship between Marta and Baute. At the end of 2014, the Madrid artist seemed to lash out at the Venezuelan in an interview for the Viajando con Chester program. She complained of having only received 6,000 euros for that hit and some (meager) royalties that came home from time to time. Actually, the problem was not with her colleague but with the contract she had signed. “With Carlos I don’t have any remarkable dispute; That day he caught me like this… Well, speaking of confusing contracts and I alluded to him but I shouldn’t have done it. I regret a lot about that. We have always been friends and that song has given us both a lot, we thank each other for it”.
Some Portuguese passengers and a couple of Americans, who did not know the couple, asked them upon landing where they could get the song for their playlist and were able to avoid being asked for selfies by the passengers to celebrate the moment (“because you can’t get up in flight and less with turbulence”, clarifies the singer). But what they don’t get rid of is the memes that have invaded Twitter offering the acid side of acting. “If you put a little humor in it and it’s not hurtful or offensive, it’s tolerable, of course it is. In short, in Spain we are always the same. I agree with the fact that the people who were worried at that moment were entertained and forgot that they were flying”.
