Joan Manuel Serrat, ‘The Noi de Poble SEC’, has reached 81 years with an extensive professional career. And it has spent more than 60 years singing his songs for the stages throughout Spain, and has written part of the history of music with his ‘Mediterranean’ classics, ‘Fiesta’ or ‘The Yuntero Niño’. In 2024 he was Princess of Asturias Award from the Arts, an award that raised him as an artistic reference of the new generations. But there is something that worries him, as well as other celebrities such as Fernando Romay, and it is the concept of the elderly when they reach the age of collecting the Social Security retirement pension.
Despite being close to 82 years, Serrat is not considered an old man, it is still useful and in an interview with the BBC he has sentenced about what he thinks about retirement. “Upon reaching 80 years, this ungrateful society in which we live has a certain tendency to not only allow one to retire, but to retire it.” He ensures that in many cases, older people become “invisible.”
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“The right to be visible is also withdrawn and it ends up becoming an invisible being that goes from here to there. I do not intend to give up my visibility or my right to be useful. I am still a useful citizen. What do they want to use for one thing or another? I like them, I will leave myself and those that do not, no.”
A working life loaded with love
“I have written songs, I have sung them, I have had the possibility of sharing them and I have pushed this car that has turned them into people’s sound bands,” he said highlighting that this is a great responsibility.
Joan Manuel Serrat’s musical career began when he was a student. Although he is an industrial expert, he played the guitar as a hobby. At the end of his studies in 1965 he began to play and a little later they were already calling him to sign their first contract with a record. It was one of the pioneers of the Nova Cançó, a well -known musical movement at that time.
Now you can see how time has spent especially when you are already 81 years old. That is why he wants to give visibility to people who reach the retirement age.
“I have all the desire to live and they won’t take them away”
As he pointed out in the interview, Joan Manuel Serrat is more active than ever. That he has stopped singing on stage does not mean that he has lost the north. “I have all the desire to live and they will not take them away as long as I can feel this wonder that life is. This despite the fact that they are running, in which everything is questioned and the sensitivity of man seems to disappear and that it is not good to feel it, that it is not good to give or live in a sensitive world and less in a solidary world and therefore, in a fair world.”