Joan Manuel Serrat: "I would give Sabina the Nobel Peace Prize, I know he would like it"

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Joan Manuel Serrat is Catalan and Spanish, but he is also Argentine.

Very Argentine.

It is becoming very clear these days in Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Rosario, with each farewell concert turned into

, a meeting of generations in which children and grandchildren take their parents and grandparents by the hand so they can say goodbye, in person, the man who sang his youthful dreams like no other.

"I have come to say goodbye to a city, a country and some people who

, so many complicities," says Serrat at one of the concerts at the Movistar Arena, the most massive and modern closed stage in the capital. Argentina.

Serrat sings, but sometimes he can't, because the declarations of love that come to him from different corners of the stands are to move anyone.

Also him.

"I'm going to do an experiment; pick a song," he says when he pulls himself together and is able to take control of the night before an audience he met in 1969, 53 years ago.

It was another Argentina, it was another Spain, it was another world.

Serrat was 25 years old and did not imagine that in 2022 he would be starring in a farewell tour,

, which in these weeks

.

"He always seemed to me a person of integrity. He represents a lot of my youth," Margarita, an 81-year-old from Buenos Aires, explained to EL MUNDO to whom no one would calculate that age.

"Serrat knows where his roots are, but he

, he enjoys our public, although he is a universal artist.

is universal," he adds, referring to the closing theme that made many of the 15,000 sing and tear up. Spectators gathered at the stadium in the Villa Crespo neighborhood.

Joan Manuel Serrat, in one of his Buenos Aires concerts.

The final concert in Argentina of the tour will be today in Buenos Aires.

It will be the seventh in his adopted country, on the way to the

final farewell on December 23 at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona.

Only Mexico equals Argentina in the number of Serrat presentations in Latin America.

Who would you give a Nobel Prize to?

"Is it the barbecue, is it soccer?" a journalist asked him at a press conference (his only contact with the media) in Buenos Aires earlier this month.

Serrat responded quickly and sharply: "That's rhetorical. My relationship with Argentina goes much further."

At that meeting, Serrat asked for the Nobel Peace Prize for three artist friends: "Would I like to win that award? No, but I would give it to three artists. Chico (Buarque), because I find it moving. Silvio (Rodríguez) for the intelligence of his songs and

."

At that press conference, and also during his performances, Serrat played with the fact of his withdrawal from the stage.

A yes, but no.

What would that consist of then?

In continuing to write and release records.

"I'm going to retire from the stage, but I'm going to keep writing and living life."

And if he leaves the stage, it's for a reason: Sabina, one of his candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Buenos Aires, he recalled when, during a recital in Madrid, Sabina fell, returned to the stage in a wheelchair, and the concert was cancelled.

"That day that Sabina had the misfortune to fall off the stage and suffered a serious accident, that day began a whole need to

. Due to Joaquín's accident, the tour had to be suspended and right after that the terrible pandemic that locked us in our homes, changed our lives, forced us to a different social functioning, everything changed".

"The theaters, places of performance and work were closed to us and I was obviously out of daily life with the trade. We could not rehearse or play. All this was causing

. A year and a half! There I saw that

considerably, so I told myself that it was a good moment to decide on a future that was not yet foreseen".

What is Serrat looking for with this tour?

"

, with music, with people and with everything that has happened to me. I would not be in a position to restart something with such short time frames. A tour of these characteristics, through so many places, countries, being coherent, going from one place to another... We have been able to get here very satisfactorily. I started in New York and ended the tour in Barcelona. If one wanted to do it like that, they would not leave voluntarily".

"I am not counting the shows I did and the ones I have left to do. It is an absolutely defensive attitude.

Therefore, I carry each one of the concerts as if it were the only one that exists".

montonero serrat

The Argentine media devoted ample space to the farewell tour, and took the opportunity to delve into the beginnings of the Argentine idyll of the

.

Víctor Pintos, an

specialist , did it with details about the steps taken at the end of the 60s by the Catalan to gain that trust in a country 10,000 kilometers away from his city.

"He did everything that someone who wants to feel at home and at the same time win the hearts of the public with the best weapons should do: he went to soccer and horses, he

he got to know the good restaurants in Buenos Aires, and he made great friends. He was handsome and cultured, as well as friendly and successful. He had them all. And ideologically speaking, he seemed well placed, almost in the place where the boy who had come to be was expected to be. face Generalísimo Franco in the mid-60s in the notorious case of the Eurovision Song Contest, where he had insisted on

, something that the Spanish dictator logically did not sponsor".

Pintos also recalls the emergence of Serrat from 1983, with the return of democracy to Argentina at the hands of Raúl Alfonsín, his successful artistic alliance with the Uruguayan poet

, as well as the success of his performances with Joaquín Sabina.

montonero serrat

The journalist also dives into a little-known side of Serrat's history,

, the left-wing guerrilla that resorted to violence in the 1970s with bombs, kidnappings, and murders.

"The skinny long-haired man was very successful in the massive carnival

where he was hired at the time,

and also in all the incursions he made through the interior of the country, and he also got into difficult issues of reality, Argentina because people allowed him to and, it is fair to admit, he had earned his place by force of respect and passion".

"That's how he came to write

, the theme that would be, for reasons never entirely explained, the most secret of his enormous work. 'With those hands of loving you so much, he painted on the walls Fight and return, staining with hope and of songs, the sidewalks of that 69', he began by saying. Then he continued

. '

Who dedicated the song to him or who he was talking about is a secret that Serrat kept for years and years, decisively, under lock and key."

According to Pintos, Serrat himself slipped in the 1990s that the song "talked about Alicia, an almost anonymous friend he had met in his early days in Buenos Aires, a time when a good part of the Argentine youth dreamed of

and devotedly followed what Perón was saying from his exile in Puerta de Hierro in Madrid".

That young woman was "finally assassinated by the parapolice forces of Triple A, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, which had been designed and directed by José López Rega, an exponent of the far-right of the Peronist movement and Perón's minister at the time of his last government."

"Serrat never officially recorded

and even refused to authorize its inclusion in a documentary from the mid-90s."

Far away from those stories, at the end of the Argentine spring November what prevails is emotion, mixed with

between the Argentine public and the

.

Goodbye arrives, and the best thing Serrat can do is sing.

And joke.

"Let's say goodbye with joy, but I make it clear that this is not going to be my last concert. But

".

Laughter fills the stadium, and then Serrat makes a theatrical pause and leaves his last sentence, a statement that most of his dedicated fans in their 60s, 70s and 80s could happily sign on a Buenos Aires night.

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