How did Raimon experience his recitals in the early eighties? What and how did you read? What were their concerns? Many of the answers can be found in Personal i transferible (Empúries), a new editorial written forty years ago, product of the diary that the singer-songwriter from Xàtiva wrote between the end of 1980 and the end of 1983. On the surface, it was a very different – ??just out of the dictatorship, there were no mobile phones and tickets cost 300 pesetas – but in many other respects nothing much has changed.
Why are you publishing this book now? In 1983 he already published Les hores guinadas, and this is the continuation of it, but it comes out forty years later.
I found it and thought it might be worth it. I hope whoever buys it likes it, but it’s very different, I was 40 years younger. If it’s useful, fine, and if not, what are we going to do about it? The plowman willingly gives it, they say. I’m excited that people will read it and like it and be interested.
And will not continue to publish the rest of the diaries?
I continued writing, but there is no continuity like in the first two, and from the nineties onwards I got tired of it because I was with other stories going up and down the world.
How did he reunite with Raimon from forty years ago?
It is a way to explain myself and to see what kind of society we lived in. Franco dies in 1975, five years pass and in 1981 there are the first elections. Those who were with Franco continued, the Francoists were still there, and it seemed to me that the foundations were being laid for a new society that would come.
We haven’t changed as much as it might seem.
In some aspects not much has changed, but modernity has also brought with it, with all the networks, an avalanche of information that is what distinguishes that era from this one.
“The technological revolution that is taking place in the world is being experienced in Xàtiva, and I imagine that many towns, in terms of unemployment and videocassettes…”, he wrote then.
Now instead of videocassettes it’s mobile phones, networks, I don’t know what… How do these revolutions come to us? We are the same, illiteracy continues even though everyone goes to school, but ignorance is becoming more and more daring.
Many entries could be written today. He writes that in Madrid before they only distinguished between Madrid and the periphery, and then between Madrid and the autonomies. Now they think Madrid is Spain…
And period! They are one of those curious things, because you are surprised how the mentality changes in some things but in the end it is the same. It’s Madrid.
He also writes that “the army is already in charge and no party represents a threat to put on the belt, that is to say, to subordinate the army”.
Like now. It went like this. The Civil Guard itself does what it does to break them, although it is not as strong as it was then.
There was hope in the triumph of the socialists, but when they came to power he was already saying that everything is whether it works or not.
There are small nuances, but during these years they do not come to undo the past.
In many respects not much has changed, but last Tuesday it was possible to start speaking in Congress in more languages ??than Spanish.
And it is very important because it attests to the real diversity, something that has not happened until now, and if people go a little further we can go to make a federal state, which is what it should be. Confederal would already be the wafer, but a federal State would have to be, and everyone would fit comfortably. It’s a wish. That maybe the socialists have been forced to? Certainly, but the temperament and the way of seeing things has changed, and there are socialists of many kinds.
In Valencia, language takes a step back.
It’s that Valencian is an absolutely different language from Catalan, and those who defend it say it in Spanish because otherwise it wouldn’t be understood, heh, heh, heh. If they put a bullfighter as Minister of Culture!
He writes that “they want to make people believe now, without scandal, that the person discriminated against in Catalonia is the individual who speaks Castilian”, and the leftists were starting to say that.
It’s very surprising, you were stunned. And now you still go to any office or many places and it has to be in Spanish. The Spanish State has been a bad copy of the French, and if they had done it right, surely we would all be speaking Spanish.
At that time, many parties called him to act on their behalf…
It was often a kind of blackmail, “if you don’t sing for us you won’t do anything!”. Well, so what are we going to do about it?
He writes how he is offered the Saint George’s Cross and rejects it.
What were we doing there, when the Generalitat was absolutely giving up on the music and the toilets? I didn’t do anything for the song. Since you couldn’t be one of them, then you were an enemy. If not, you had to be there under Pujol’s orders.
You can see in the book how he has a lot to do with people who make culture in both Catalan and Spanish, which today are often two worlds completely at a distance.
Then it wasn’t like that, they were Catalan people who wrote in Spanish because it was the language they had used. Now there is indeed a separation. If you haven’t mastered the Catalan language, it’s more difficult to get there, especially since Spanish is so close, and even for market reasons. You know that in Catalan you will sell two and in Spanish, if it works, there will be twenty. Now you still read a little more in Catalan, but if I had written instead of singing, I would have met a quarter of the people, because they didn’t read in Catalan, only those about onions and some about garlic.
Every five or ten pages he curses himself for making very messy reads. But lots of reading!
When I picked up a book I liked I wanted to go further, but then I started reading something else, with a feeling of disorder that I wish I didn’t have but I still have.
A voracious and multilingual reader.
From the first moment I have always had a lot of curiosity and a lot of love for languages. French, English, Spanish, Catalan and Italian are my linguistic field, but not beyond that. I read in the languages ??I can because I also want to keep them alive, at least as a reader. Because they open up a range that you didn’t have and with books that I wouldn’t have read here until twenty years later. In fact, I started writing in Catalan because I didn’t know it and I thought that the only way to know was to start writing, because all my education has been in Spanish and French, and with English I I spluttered on my own.
In the book we find an intimate Raimon who is not known.
I don’t know what idea they have of me, I have encountered many surprises from very different people who have different ideas. People who know me a little know that I am a sensible and hard-working person, but people who don’t know me get an idea that you want to know where it comes from.
Perhaps it is surprising to read that then, between the ages of 41 and 43, he saw that in a few years, between five and ten, he would stop singing…
That was the idea, and I’ve actually done little else. And since I folded, in 2017, I did some things, but now I’m in my 80s, which is something I don’t advise anyone to do.
We see a Raimon with an accomplished career, but he was really very young.
It’s just that at 40 years old he had already done a lot. I was lucky enough to be able to sing in Paris, at the Olympia, called by Bruno Coquatrix. I had gone there first to sing for the Republicans, and at the Mutualité, and then people saw me because I appeared on French television and that gave me a name in Paris and also here.
In this diary he writes a lot about how he tries to be perceived beyond the protest song.
They wanted to put the label on me, and I can now sing Ausiàs Marc that there are people for whom I have only been a singer against the dictatorship and that’s it, but fortunately outsiders have seen it in a different way. Here at first they only saw me like this, although if you look at the songs there are many nuances. I didn’t just make an anti-Franco song, because sometimes there is this or that or pure lyrics… But everyone takes what they want.
The diary also shows how he thinks about publishing the previous one, the writer’s concerns, and he even imagines giving up music and writing books.
It’s just that I was told that many times, and I did something, but it’s a different kind of dedication, singing up and down also involves a different way of doing things and I didn’t think much of it. I did what I thought I had to do, despite what I was told. Because the first thing they do to me is to offer me to sing in another language. First in Spanish, but also in French. And then Harold Leventhal, who was Pete Seeger’s manager, told me: “You come to the United States for two years and I’ll make you a celebrity!”. And I said no, that “I will be a celebrity in Barcelona”. But there were no records in Catalan, and the first record made with Catalan songs that had nothing to do with modern Spanish song is the 45 revolucións that includes Al vent, Som, La pedra and A cops.
They did everything with a clog and an espadrille, as they say.
Luckily Annalisa got into it, because she has a clearer head than I do. There was no material, no people dedicated to it, everything was new. People sang in the party halls and here in Barcelona they all sang in Spanish. There was no one who sang in Catalan.
I guess he doesn’t regret leaving it, now.
Finire in bellezza, as the Italians say. I had seen things I didn’t like, from artists who couldn’t even get on stage. Things should not be prolonged if you are not in a good condition, because later the voice shakes, people make mistakes, they don’t remember the lyrics. I have seen cases like this, and I “rather die than lose my life”, as Cantinflas said. Life lived that will not return.
And haven’t you missed the stages?
I’ve always liked the contact with the public, but once the decision has been made I no longer miss it. I could have continued to sing, but I decided to stop while it was still good. I thought I had already done what I had to do, and since I tend to agree with myself, which doesn’t happen often, I did.
Doesn’t he play the guitar either?
At first a little, but lately I don’t get into it at all. If anything, I’ll put on a record by someone who does it better.
