Twenty years in Albuquerque, This album in which Albert Pla (Sabadell, 1966) brought together Fermin Muguruza, Robe Iniesta and Manolo Kabezabolo is celebrating its 27th anniversary. It is therefore an album twenty-year-old to which the versatile singer-songwriter decided to breathe samplers and flamenco guitars to combine it with his first work, entirely in Catalan and published in the distant year 89. Rumbagenarians This is the project that put him at the head of The Surprise Band and that will take him next September to Santiago de Compostela as one of the highlights of the Maré Atlantic music and art festival.
Pla attends elDiario.es from his car. The conversation is difficult with hands-free, the disconnections of Bluetooth and warning beeps coming from inside the vehicle. Pla doesn’t seem to care. In fact, nothing seems to.
Why now this review of I felt like I was changing And Twenty-somethings?
I already wanted to do concerts like that, with people standing, and these two albums will be the basis. For a few years, I was doing more theater shows, so that people would sit down, listen, and I wanted to relax a little and dance.
To dance and also to make the audience dance…
I don’t know how much it is, but a little arm is raised. It’s quite festive.
The government is currently presenting the regeneration plan which promises to reform the tort of defamation. Apart from the owner of the crown, what has changed since you had to convert letter to the king In Letter to King Melchior to avoid a conviction?
I think now you insult the king and you end up without sponsor. That’s how the world changed for me.
So censorship is economic?
It’s always been a bit like that. More than censorship or non-censorship, you are excluded – thank God – from super unpleasant sites, but excluded.
Which sites?
All those places where music plays.
Are you referring to radio stations, places, events…?
Those, yes, yes… those in which everyone can put their music and whoever wants to listen to it can listen to it.
Despite this, over these three long decades, he has created his own space.
We never intended to have more audiences than we wanted, those who want to come to the cinema to see us, those who are interested in ‘let’s see what last stupid thing Albert did’. That’s the way we approach it.
But with the Internet and social media, it is now possible to reach audiences without having to go through these sites and these people who decide who to exclude.
I don’t worry about those things either. I’m very concerned about creating songs, having ideas and being able to create them, which is the most fun. Everything else, I don’t know how it comes. If they want to do an interview with me, I say: “ah, okay, that’s great”, but I’m there, I’m making songs or I’m thinking. It’s not even a worry. There are people who suffer a lot making songs and preparing shows, people who have a lot of discipline, who sweat and cry (laughs and underlines), who bleed! But not me. I’m having a good time and I don’t need it coach to survive in this world.
During this tour, they announce new songs.
I guess. It depends a lot on the site, but I guess this year we will be teaching new songs.
What are you writing about now?
About what? Well, from here, from there…
What things are on your mind?
I don’t know how to explain it to you, because that’s why I spend hours trying to explain it differently.
Yes, with the songs.
Yeah.
And is there anything happening right now that you would like to write about?
No, I want to talk about myself. I don’t want to talk about myself, but IYou know? Well, that…
Is a more intimate Pla coming? More personal?
I just don’t know. I make so many songs and so many things… I talk about me, you, him, her, us… I really don’t know how to sum it up for you. Not now, not ever, have I had an intention when I wrote. I get it. 20 songs come out and one of them says “how good it is to be able to do this right now”. It’s always been like that: you think that things and some of them are achievable now, at this precise moment. And that’s what I do, without further ado.
It seems like you’re having a prolific period, or has it always been like this?
It’s always been like that. Sometimes you get more TV and people think you’re working. That’s it, it’s gone.
It doesn’t seem like he’s stopping working, even if he doesn’t appear on television.
I never left it. The measure of my thoughts and actions is published and the concerts are there: what I did in every concert I had, in every show I presented. For me, my life has always been like that. It is still extraordinary – but it is part of a normality – to see that people come, that they welcome you and damn!, that there are people who buy a ticket and that you are delighted that it is so.
How do you see this political moment?
Well, like all political moments. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s a lie.
Aren’t you worried about the presence of currents that try to transport us into the past, to make us go back?
I’ve been told this since I was born, it’s always existed. The problem is perhaps that those who say this are those who are not moving forward. I don’t see that those who say that everyone wants to make us go backwards are pushing the car very hard to make us move forward.
And how do you explain phenomena like that of Alvise?
WHO?
Alvise. Does that mean anything to you?
No, the truth is no.
A man who built his career on hoaxes and fake news on social media. His party won 800,000 votes in the last European elections.
It’s because you have to have good teachers. If it was full of lies and hoaxes, it doesn’t seem strange to me.
You didn’t know the character?
The truth is, no.
How do you follow the news?
I look in to roll In a newspaper in the morning, I try to see if there is any news about anthropology, or if the king is dead… something like that. But as it never happens, I no longer go into reading the details.
We don’t write much about anthropology in the media, do we?
Don’t believe it, there are. Yes, yes, yes…
I guess it will be like finding a needle in a haystack.
Well, I’m also a needle in a haystack.
