Serrat receives from Pedro Sánchez the decoration for his career as “excellent musician and poet”

“I am excited to receive this distinction with my children, who, beyond seeing a human being in their underpants at home – for so many years in their lives and in such disconcerting situations – that they know that there is a person who has worked and who has done other things”, Serrat indicated in a ceremony held at the Palacio de la Moncloa. Among the anecdotes that he has recounted, he has revealed that when he received the call from the Government announcing that they were awarding him this distinction, he remembered a previous call, years ago: “I remembered an award that was very dear to me, I told my wife, a A very lucid and very serene woman told me: ‘and why you?'”. And this time he thought the same thing again: “And why me?”

Serrat acknowledged that he had this recognition associated in his memory “with something that is given to people who are already elderly and about to retire,” he said with a laugh. He immediately searched the internet —”I turned to Google, which is what all of us usually do when we don’t know the answer to something we are asked”— who else had received it, “from a certain year onwards”: ” I discovered that there was Álvaro Mutis, a friend of mine, Fernando Fernán Gómez, a friend of mine, Conchita Velasco, a friend of mine, and it ended with José Luis Cuerda, a great friend whom we miss a lot and all of that, all friends, comforts me”, he said. “We will try to be a bit like them,” he added.

“The only thing I’ve done in my life is to do what I wanted, how I wanted to do it and in the way that I thought I should do it”, Joan Manuel Serrat also said.

After joking about the meal he would go to later with his friends, present at the event, he said goodbye saying “guys, let’s go, these people are dedicated to governing and they will have many things to do”.

eternal child

“The cross that we impose today is for an eternal child whom we will call from now on, most excellent, most excellent poet, writer, lyricist, musician, citizen,” Pedro Sánchez told him. “We want to accompany you on this journey and this medal is the symbol of the immense affection that we profess for you,” he added. “Each of his lyrics have been inspired by values ​​that we must now claim, such as coexistence, freedom and love for culture,” he added.

“The value of your contribution is to have gone beyond what is purely literary or artistic and demonstrate, as Gabriel Celaya wrote and Paco Ibáñez sang, that poetry is a weapon loaded with the future,” according to Sánchez. “It has helped us to transmit awareness of the diversity of languages ​​in our country, you have claimed the embrace of languages ​​that is nothing more than the embrace of peoples,” he told him about his songs written in Catalan . “You have managed to get millions of people to tune Hernández’s ‘Lullabies of the onion'”, added the President of the Government. “Our history has been sung by you,” he stressed.