A life lived through song

I al­ways have a song in my head and I iden­tify every­thing with music,” says Lluís Gavaldà on the phone from his home in Eng­land. The lead singer of one of Cat­alo­nia’s best-loved pop groups, Els Pets, is talk­ing about his new book, ’Sona la cançó’. In the book, Gavaldà picks 60 of his favourite songs and uses them to ex­plain as­so­ci­ated key mo­ments in his life and ca­reer.

“I didn’t pick any­thing strange or un­known just to look cool. It’s a very eclec­tic choice of songs that re­mind me of mo­ments in my life: my first con­cert, my par­ents’ cas­settes, and so on. The Eng­lish pub­lish a lot of books like this, which are some­where be­tween mu­si­cal mem­oir and au­to­bi­og­ra­phy.

“When [Cata­lan lan­guage pub­lisher] Rosa dels Vents com­mis­sioned the book the idea wasn’t for me to write about my­self, just the songs I like. But when I got started, I saw that I was choos­ing many of the songs for non-mu­si­cal rea­sons and I was writ­ing a lot about my­self through the songs,” says Gavaldà, who turned 59 in April and who has fronted Els Pets for 36 years.

The vet­eran pop band from Con­stantí in Tar­rag­ona is about to re­lease a new album, en­ti­tled 1963, which was the year Joan Reig, Falín Cáceres and Gavaldà – the group’s three founders – were all born. It was also the year that The Bea­t­les re­leased their first album, Please Please Me. In fact, Liv­er­pool’s Fab Four are the only ones in the book to get more than one song, with three en­tries.

“I’m not re­ally a mu­si­cian at all, nor do I have a spe­cial tal­ent for writ­ing songs. I’m more of a music lis­tener than a mu­si­cian. Over the years, I’ve come to re­alise that all the songs I’ve done are in some way re­work­ings of other songs I like. I think that God for­gives you for copy­ing as long as you copy from the best,” adds this in­vet­er­ate music lover who says he lis­tens to music all the time in all the for­mats at his dis­posal, from vinyl records and CDs to dig­i­tal plat­forms.

As Gavaldà says, the se­lec­tion of songs in his book is very var­ied, be­gin­ning with Los Sírex and con­tin­u­ing with the likes of Ella Fitzger­ald, Roberto Car­los, King Crim­son, Joan Manuel Ser­rat, Deep Pur­ple, Clau­dio Baglioni, Sisa, ABBA, Spring­steen, Ia & Batiste, Elton John, David Bowie, The Smiths, Sina­tra, Wilco, De­bussy and the Ra­mones.

The song that Gavaldà chooses by the New York punk rock­ers is Ques­tion­ingly, from their fourth album, Road to Ruin (1978), an un­usual choice in that it is a song rarely in­cluded among the Ra­mones clas­sics. Yet Gavaldà ex­plains that the song in ques­tion re­minds him of a fleet­ing noc­tur­nal en­counter he had with Joey Ra­mone in the Bow­ery in New York. While Gavaldà in­sists he’s not one to ha­rass any celebrity he might run into, on that day he could not help but make an ex­cep­tion and so he fol­lowed the Ra­mones front­man to the bar. Tap­ping his idol on the shoul­der, his courage de­serted him and it all ended in a timid apol­ogy. “I never like meet­ing my idols out of fear of being dis­ap­pointed. I know this from my own per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence: I’m bor­ing, rude and weird.”

Gavaldà’s se­lec­tion also in­cludes less well-known artists and their music, for ex­am­ple, the beau­ti­ful Els cotxes et re­freguen al pas­sar, recorded 30 years ago by the group from Igual­ada, U-tòpics, who at that time shared a record label with Els Pets. “It’s a way of vin­di­cat­ing groups that didn’t have much of an im­pact in the midst of the avalanche of bands that emerged in those years around the phe­nom­e­non of Cata­lan rock (rock català). It’s also a great song that de­scribes very well the rav­ages of heroin, and at that time we lived very close in the Tar­rag­ona coun­try­side,” he says.

Gavaldà ac­knowl­edges in the book that the main short­com­ing of his se­lec­tion is the lim­ited num­ber of fe­male artists he has cho­sen, al­though he does point out that he in­cluded the song Brass in Pocket, sung by Chrissie Hynde of the Pre­tenders.

“While writ­ing the book, I re­alised how few women there are in the first 20 years of my life as a lis­tener of music. This was rec­ti­fied later, from punk on­wards, which is where Chrissie Hynde comes into it. Things are now very dif­fer­ent and I’d even say that the ma­jor­ity of the most in­ter­est­ing mu­si­cal acts today are women.”

Yet this book is not meant to be a com­pre­hen­sive his­tory of music but rather Gavaldà’s per­sonal his­tory seen through his mu­si­cal tastes: “I haven’t looked at the pro­por­tions of gen­res in the list, but I sup­pose that what I like most pre­dom­i­nates: pop with gui­tars, and good melodies,” he says.

Also a de­vourer of music books, Gavaldà rec­om­mends Ian Hunter’s Diary of a Rock ’n’ Roll Star, but also the “fun” bi­ogra­phies of Mötley Crüe and Ozzy Os­bourne. Mean­while, a must-read for him is Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! by Bob Stan­ley, which tells the chrono­log­i­cal story of the mod­ern pop era.

And is the singer happy with the pub­lic re­cep­tion of his book, which has now reached its sec­ond edi­tion? “Peo­ple seem to have taken to it. But I had so much fun writ­ing it that just that alone is enough to make me happy with it,” he says.

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