He was perhaps the most repeatedly arrested citizen in Franco’s Spain, from north to south (“he knew all the police stations”), and he still considers himself “The black sheep of flamenco”, that musical art that, in his voice and in his moan, takes on the form of protest, in line with the sensitivity of what he calls “the singer-songwriters of freedom”. It is Manuel Gerena, a legendary figure, who continues to see cante jondo as “a great way of claiming communication”, and who performs this Friday at the Joventut theater in L’Hospitalet, hosted by the Barnasants festival.
Very little has been lavished in Catalonia in recent decades, he, who between 1970 and 1974 lived in L’Hospitalet and Santa Coloma, and who came to feel that “he belonged more to the ‘nova cançó’ than to flamenco”. Paco Candle and Manuel Vazquez Montalban wrote texts for his book, and double album, ‘Cantes del pueblo para el pueblo’ (1974), and his cante resounded in the concert ‘We are born’, in 1981, along with Lluís Llach, Marina Rossell, La Trinca and Al Tall. “Look, there were Catalan flags at the Camp Nou… Well, there were Andalusian flags like that too!” She evokes her by putting her fingertips together. “And Extremadurans!”
‘Boys’ with guns
Gerena was going to be an electrician, but from the intersection of his conscientious gaze (“at the age of 13 he was already a member of the PCE and CCOO”) with the incipient writing of “coplillas influenced by farm work” and his love of flamenco, a vocation emerged which, starting in 1968, led him to leave Puebla de la Cazalla, his Sevillian town, to sing for immigrants in Germany and France. “I stayed in Paris for a month and got to know the world of exile”, Explain. “To the people from the Ruedo Ibérico publishing house and to Paco Ibáñez, who arranged for me to perform at the ‘L’Humanité’ party and with whom I became very good friends”.
The regime would have preferred him to stay there, outside the walls, but he preferred to continue waging war in Spain, even if he had to deal with tricky situations, also during the Transition. “Children of Fuerza Nueva in the front row of the Monumental theater, in Madrid, playing with little pistols to scare the shit out of me and blow up the concert”, remember. “The police did not ask for their ID to enter.”
From the neighborhood to the university
made friends with Alberti, Picasso and Brossa, featured elite guitarists (Juan and Pepe Habichuela, a teenager Rafael Canizares) and moved “between two worlds”, the popular and the enlightened, taking his self-styled ‘flamenco-protest’ “to the neighborhoods and to the universities”. He was the first flamenco to perform at the Palau de la Música, in 1974, and he still remembers that day, “people from the neighborhoods going through Plaça de Catalunya and asking ‘where is the Palau?’”.
Gerena continues “living on the road”, he says, “touring Spain from one end to the other”, now with guitarist Juan Ignacio González. He returns to Barcelona at 76, after publishing an album (‘En vivo’) and a book with three CDs (‘Sobre el amor y el disenchantment’), and recently recovered from a heart attack. His notion of life and art has not changed. “To the poet who writes in favor of the people, and to the one who also sings for the people, I claim that they must lead a life very similar to the people themselves. You can’t do the opposite of what you sing.” reflect. “And that has nothing to do with money. I say so, I don’t have it.”