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Castejón (Cuenca), 1945. He has sold more than 30 million records and never stopped looking like a normal gentleman ... but he is not. On Monday 20th he receives the Honor award in the first edition of the Odeón awards, called to be the Goya of music.

When you give these prizes to a whole career, do you get nostalgic or think you are being invited to retire? I appreciate them, they are a recognition of a job of many years. I love prizes but, and it's going to seem silly, it makes me very tense to have to show my face when picking them up. All my life singing on stage and public speaking is what makes me most nervous in the world. He recently announced that the current one would be his last tour. You have to leave it when you are great to be able to do other things. I feel fully, the voice is very good and I really want to continue writing songs and books. Simply, there are many things that I want to do and I'm starting to miss time, because I'm going to be 75 years old. So it was a good time to escape from those tours that never end and get very tired: you go to America and never come back ... That is a bit big for me and I want a quieter life. There are forty-something years of music and solitude in hotels. In fact, I did not leave it before because in recent years either my wife accompanied me or did not go. Actually, my vocation was never the stage. They almost had to push me to sing ... Did you ever be tempted by the lifestyle of a music star? No never. Perhaps I have never led that life because I have never felt a star. I am not the typical singer who likes parties and glamor. I write songs like the one that goes to the office, only that my office is my studio or my sculpture workshop. But it is a normal worker's life. You won't feel a star, but the numbers don't cheat. He has sold more than 30 million records, he runs out of tickets wherever he touches ... Star is. That is the end result of my whole story and, yes, it could be interpreted as a star race, but I don't feel that way. I think it is a compensation for hard and absolutely vocational work that I have done for a long time. But up there. The rest of the superficialities of the stars have never interested me. That disinterest in fame has made him underestimated when placing him among the great singer-songwriters? I feel well treated. I have never sought that recognition, but it is true that because of my work, my career, my sold records and all these things that have happened to me, which are many more than I could have dreamed of, I understand that they put me in the big bag . And I appreciate it. When you are placed between the great pride and a bit of artist's vanity, that you always have something. What do you presume? You're welcome, but I think that everything that has happened to me is the fair reward to many years of making songs by Success for me and others. It has not been a job, it has been a real pleasure, but I have dedicated all my strength. And that resisted the call. He was an electrician and draftsman until he surrendered to the vocation. I was not going to be a singer. I studied for an industrial master of electricity at the Universidad Laboral, but I had no vocation as an electrician. What happens is that it was that or to go home to be a bricklayer like my father. So I stayed, although I began to compose and forget about mathematics. It was very difficult for me to pass, but when I left class I always had a new song. I liked the challenge of writing a song, but it was almost a game for me. When did you discover that attraction to music? I started studying music theory with a prickly pear from my town, Castejón, aged seven or eight. There the bug woke me up and the teacher told me that I had certain skills and learned the lessons well. Although then I forgot almost all of them. I kept three or four things that are what I have used until today. I have written all my work with four chords. Not everyone gets ahead after being a tuno ... Well imagine, I was twice. First in Castejón and then in Seville, at the university. He goes out, he goes out (laughs). Of all that work, is there a song that he regretted delivering to another singer? Yes, but not to keep it because I liked it a lot, but because the one I gave him was very bad. I'm not going to tell you which one, not to point out, but it was at the beginning when I had to survive the music how I could. I wrote what they asked me for who asked for it. Time and success made me more selective, but there is some song that I would erase if I could. How does one get into the head of personalities as diverse and as marked as Isabel Pantoja, Raphael, Rocío Jurado or Miguel Bosé when writing songs? For me it has been a kind of theatrical gymnastics. Raphael asks you for a song and you have to take into account who he is, what his image is. When composing, I have to think about how he would sing it. I imitate them, I put their voice, their way of acting, their language, their audience ... If I write, for example for the Jury or the Pantoja I have in mind that from Despeñaperros down they have a special language that I know well, because I studied there seven years. I know their ways and their excesses and take them out as if I had been born in Triana. I agglutinate all that kind of characteristics of the artist to try to make the song reflect his figure. It's like writing a script for a movie, an exciting challenge. Are there so many things to say about love as you said? I've sung to love and many other things, but record companies clearly liked me more when I became romantic that when I was socially engaged, I also wrote songs like that in my early days, although I never made a flag of that. That's why nobody labeled me as a singer-songwriter. Was the annulment of that political profile a commercial or personal decision? I avoided it because at that time everyone was very meaningful and I didn't want to. I wanted to sing for all kinds of people, I didn't care for the miners of Asturias as for the millionaires of Marbella. And that's it I know that sometimes, for not speaking, they have considered me right, but at the end of my whole story I realize that I have been compensated for not making any political concessions. I have made songs for everyone and they have respected me and others, which is fantastic, the best thing that can happen to you. I have not gotten into politics and everyone loves me, be in the party that is and move in the frame that moves. How many times have you been asked "and how is he?"? Does one end up tired of such a huge popular success? Once Luis del Olmo asked me and I told him that I had been asked that question many times. He got a lot pissed off, because he said then he was not a good journalist if he asked the same thing as everyone. The truth is that it is a song that exhausts me a little, because I did not write it for myself, but for Julio Iglesias. Although I ended up staying it, I have never felt it completely mine, when I perform it on stage is not as authentic as with others. The truth is that, when I sing it, I imagine Julio more than myself. And which one he enjoys the most he has written? The one I am most proud of is that the children sing . It is not my best song, but it is the most loved by me, because it crossed the borders for a very special reason, which was to ask for recognition from people who work with the neediest children. In addition, it was a great promotion for SOS Children's Villages, with which I continue to work today. Are you worried about your legacy? Bécquer wrote that "where there is a solitary stone without any inscription, where oblivion dwells, there will be my grave". I think it will be like that. Everything happens and everything remains, but mine is going to be happening. I do not want monuments or museums or people to know where I am buried and go to see my grave. I appreciate all that they have loved me in life and, later, that they quietly forget me. I will not leave the grave to reproach him.

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