Joan Manuel Serrat

He was born in Barcelona on December 27, 1943, grew up in Poble Sec —a working-class neighborhood that ended up living inside his songs— and never forgot it. Joan Manuel Serrat, also known as El noi del Poble-sec or simply El Nano, comes from a family of workers: an anarchist father affiliated with the CNT, a housewife mother from Belchite, Zaragoza. That street childhood marked him so deeply that songs like La Carmeta, La tieta and El drapaire portray typical characters from that everyday Catalan postwar world.

Before devoting himself to music, Serrat took a different path: at twelve he enrolled as a boarding student at the Universidad Laboral de Tarragona, specialized in the industrial mining track and qualified as a lathe and milling machine operator. He then studied agricultural technician, a field in which he graduated in 1965. The guitar was, at that time, an amateur pursuit. But that same year he appeared on Salvador Escamilla's program Radioscope on Radio Barcelona, sang his first songs on air and everything changed: Escamilla opened the door, the contract arrived, the first record arrived. His first concert was at the Teatro L'Avenç in Esplugas de Llobregat, Catalonia.