"I've Never Gone Out of Fashion Because I've Never Been in Fashion"

Víctor Manuel (Mieres, 78) claims he has never gone out of fashion because he was never in fashion. Hard to believe, given his nearly sixty-year career. The musician has just released 'Solo a solas conmigo', his latest studio album, featuring fourteen songs that explore themes such as love, hope, and even an anthem to laziness. Speaking calmly and quietly, the artist insists he has always done what he wanted. "And that's a blessing," he adds, as he prepares for an extensive tour across Spain starting in March 2026.

"It's your 28th studio album. Clearly, there are still countless things to sing about."

"Yes, always. Finding them is another matter (laughs). But yes, often inspiration comes from a newspaper page or a news story. For instance, 'Diary of a Robot' was inspired by a photo of Israeli female soldiers taking a selfie with the ruins of Gaza in the background, laughing because their fear was subsiding. That dehumanisation of the dead caught my attention."

"Does it become harder to find inspiration over time?"

"Yes, it depends. What you lose over the years is spontaneity. When I was young, I could write songs anywhere, for any reason. Later, you need certain working conditions, you start searching within yourself, and if you step out of that ecosystem, nothing comes to mind. I couldn't write a song here and now. I need to be in a very closed space, with electric light, no windows... Just darkness, a guitar, a notebook, and that's it."

"And what do you gain?"

"Experience is important. Now I lose fewer songs. Before, things would be left unfinished and never recovered, but now I almost always finish what I start. In general, you secure things much better."

"It's the first time you've sung with your son. How was the experience?"

"Well, he doesn't let himself. It took some convincing (laughs). He doesn't want to sing, but he sings brilliantly, like his mother."

"As a producer, he's more amenable."

"Yes, he started producing my albums in 2003."

"What happens when tensions arise over the direction of a song or album, and the producer is your son?"

"The truth is, we don't argue much. Anyway, I've never argued with any producers I've had, whether in Italy, London... Because the choice is where you might go wrong or get it right. When you work with someone because you're interested in their previous work, I relax and let things happen. I mean, I never interfere, even if sometimes in the studio they're doing something that makes you a bit dizzy... But I've never argued with anyone, so I'm not going to argue with my son. What he brings is rigour. He's someone who doesn't let anything slide, which is good for me because I might leave things unfinished and a bit worse."

"The album begins with 'Deja por Dios que coja aire', a song expressing your frustration with politics and politicians."

"I've been fed up with politics since I can remember, so it's not a big deal. The thing is, now we're in a bit of a Groundhog Day situation, and it's very tiresome. I suppose for everyone, but since I have an excess of information because I read three newspapers a day and watch four news programmes... Also, the level of the political class has dropped significantly in recent years, and this ambient rudeness didn't exist before. Anyone can call anyone a son of a bitch. This is new."

"Has politics become 'salvamized'?"

"Yes, it's a spectacle, with all the consequences. At some point, they'll stop."

"You also leave a message in that song for those who say they don't vote because it doesn't matter."

"But I've always thought that. I understand abstention from an anarchist point of view, but ignoring politics when it affects us all so much, in every way, seems foolish to me."

"In this scenario, do you think some politicians are more to blame than others?"

"Yes, of course, there are. In that song, I say they're always playing the 'and you more' game, but these things can be quantified. How many have been to jail, for example? What I think, and I also say it in that song, is that some people are in politics to advance society, even if only in small steps, and others are not. The proof is in things like when the equal marriage law was passed, and the PP challenged it in the Constitutional Court, but at the same time, they were getting married, and the church was always meddling."

"It's a very eclectic album: there's pop, rock, a habanera, some reggae, and even copla. Where does such variety come from? What's your work process like?"

"I'm not composing all year round, or every month, but there's a turning point when I feel the need to write songs, and once I start, I can't stop. I get a kind of rush, and when I've written a lot, I have to force myself to stop. For this album, I wrote 34 songs. In that search, I always work with notes you take over time, now on the phone. Anything that comes to mind, text or melody, you put it there. Out of all that, maybe 10% is worth continuing to work on. I also force myself to find different ways of composing, trying not to repeat myself thematically and musically. There are several examples on the album of songs I hadn't done before. 'La muerte y el amor no tienen cura', 'Dime adiós con tu mano', or 'Yo nací a la sombra de un cerezo' are types of songs you won't find on my other albums."

"Do you listen to music during those more creative periods?"

"No, not when I'm composing. But in between, I do listen to a lot of music, sometimes from a professional point of view because I'm interested in seeing what people are doing, even if I don't return to it after listening. But when something catches my attention, I immediately make a list on my phone and keep it there."

"Generally, music listeners tend to get stuck in an era, which doesn't happen with other artistic disciplines. Why do you think that is?"

"I think we're listening to music in a period from about 12 or 14 years old until our forties, and from then on, we only want repetitions. We've been exposed to all possible novelties, you've built your hard drive of songs, but from then on, what you want are repetitions."

"With cinema, that happens less. You can adore classic cinema, but you don't rule out watching the latest Yorgos Lanthimos film."

"Music has a great power, which is being associated with the life we lead. Suddenly, you associate a song with a relationship or an afternoon when you had a great time. Songs always have a place they come from or go to, and that's what nourishes us. People who love music much more, I suppose, keep listening over time, but usually, the rest have a quota of songs and don't go beyond that."

"Precisely, two of the songs you've mentioned have luxurious collaborations. Rozalén sings with you on 'Dime adiós con tu mano', and Mikel Izal also appears on 'La muerte y el amor no tienen cura'. How did they come about?"

"Well, with Rozalén, I have a close relationship because when she was just starting to make a name for herself, but wasn't what she is now, which is a goddess, she was part of an album we did in Oviedo, '50 años más nada'. It was two days of concerts with Serrat and seventeen other singers, from Miguel Poveda to El Gran Wyoming, including Pablo Milanés. She found herself in the midst of that crowd of people, with all her idols, and had a great time. So much so that many times on September 14th, which was the date, she sends me a WhatsApp saying: "It all started with you" (laughs). Besides, I really like the work she does, and she's a wonderful person, so I said to her: "I have a habanera, shall we sing it?" Her response was "Oh yes!"

"And with Mikel Izal?"

"When I finished it, I thought it would suit him very well because of his temperament when singing, and it's a song that has grown on me much more. I didn't hold it in such high regard when I was making it. And then, with his voice and presence, so fantastic, it has grown tremendously."

"Do you think these kinds of collaborations can open up a new audience for you?"

"Also, because they have an audience that I don't have access to because of age. People see you as already amortised. And also because each generation and era have their music. It's another thing if people who aren't my age are interested in the music I make, and in fact, we see it in the concert census, where we've significantly lowered the age. The average age of people attending concerts is now 45, and we've dropped 20 years in a very short time. That also has to do with the ease people now have to find music, where you can browse or click on YouTube and get a list of songs, and you might stay there for 15 or 20 minutes watching things you don't know and don't have to know because there are songs from 40 years ago. With this, you create layers of people of different ages who are the ones who finally go to concerts, and I'm very interested in their world, but I also know my limits. I mean, if I start rapping... (laughs)."

"There are two songs that evoke childhood. The first is 'Yo nací a la sombra de un cerezo', where you narrate what you experienced as a child during Franco's regime. Do you understand that there are young people who say it was a good time?"

"It's pure ignorance; no one can say that with conviction. If I could have a conversation with one of them, I'd point out the disadvantages. Look, girl, 50 years ago, you couldn't open a bank account on your own; you had to go with your husband. Do you want that? Do you want the possibility of having an abortion if things aren't going well in your life and you have a specific problem or not? You start listing things, and from that, no one will say they're a Francoist. The thing is, frivolity is free. Saying that things weren't so bad under Franco costs nothing. And then there's also a part of society that has been pretending for a long time, hiding their true preferences, and now they see there's a free-for-all. If even the President of the United States allows himself to say that killing a journalist and chopping him up is an accident... There's now a moral relativism that didn't exist before because sometimes people say that's your truth, and this is mine, and no, the truth is one. There's also a failure of the older generation and education. Education has had gaps through which a certain type of message has slipped in, which surely in societies like Germany hasn't been possible because they've put up a firm barrier and stood their ground. That doesn't prevent far-right parties from appearing now, thinking that Nazism was good, but they've arrived by a completely different path. Here, that barrier was never put up, nor was it explained what the dictatorship was because, apparently, textbooks always arrived late."

"The other song that evokes childhood is 'Canción para salir de la cama', an anthem to laziness."

"Yes, I had that feeling as a child. I used to make up things as a child to see if I could get out of going to school. For example, there was a rumour in class that if you put one of those blotters that dried ink inside your sock and slept with your socks on, you'd have a fever the next day, and I tried it. And I was always coming up with ideas like what if the school disappeared, if the earth opened up, if the world didn't dawn... It's a very strange song, and I like it a lot because my grandson does the vocals, doing thirds and fifths and all that. He's a genius. In the other one, he's also there with several of his schoolmates."

"In the songwriting profession, you've probably spent more time in bed than the rest of us, right?"

"Well, I'm privileged in the sense that I do what I want and have done what I want at every moment, which is why sometimes I've hit myself hard. Sometimes things have gone well, and sometimes terribly, but I've always made the decisions, and the decision to stay in bed and do nothing is also mine. This is a very free profession in the sense that I only depend on myself, on putting a ticket on sale and people coming. The day they don't come, I'll disappear like smoke, I won't be able to keep singing, but I've been living off doing this since I was 17, and that makes you very free and with very few dependencies. The only dependencies you have are those of education and, well, not making too many mistakes, not fighting with people, that sort of thing. And in that sense, I feel very happy. I've made money, but I've earned it in a very direct way, I haven't had businesses, I haven't made investments. I've lived off what the public has decided was my due. And then I've never gone out of fashion because I've never been in fashion, in the sense that I've never been in a specific trend of dressing or composing, so I've never had to move from my place. I'm not saying I've only done good things, but I've done what I wanted, and being able to say that at 78, that you've done what you wanted, is a blessing."

"You mentioned that it's the public who decides if one continues or not. Isn't that daunting?"

"Yes, but now you put tickets on sale with a lot of time in advance, and you more or less know how things are going. The last few years have been fantastic in that sense, singing when, how, and where I wanted."

"What's the worst part of the job?"

"The worst part is hotel pillows. In the end, what tires you out a bit isn't the travel or the city, because if I go to Valencia, I'm already planning what I'm going to do in Valencia and where I want to eat, but the hotel world and all the hours you spend in it is the heaviest part of all."

"Have you ever gotten tired of music?"

"No. Well, I listen to a lot of music out of pure profession. Bad Bunny has sold out ten Metropolitans, I'll listen to him to see what he's done. And that's it, if I'm interested, I'll go back to him. You know what happens? I come from a very tough time, in the sense that when you were waiting for a Stevie Wonder album, you knew there were twelve or fourteen groundbreaking songs from start to finish. So, my generation is very spoiled, and it's not that I think the music made then was better, it's just that now there's a lot of repetition of things and schemes you already know, and it's hard for someone to surprise you. Even so, you constantly find people who surprise you because they've made a great song, and that's unbeatable. Then there's too much pollution, but I think there always has been, in our time there was a lot of crap too, but it wasn't hegemonic, but that didn't fill ten stadiums back then, and there wasn't a habit of playing in stadiums either. And then there's the damn algorithm, which is what rules all the time, that if you happened to listen to something once, it bombards you constantly. It happened to me a long time ago when this algorithm thing was starting, there was an American portal called Pandora, and one day I was listening to a bunch of James Taylor songs, and the next recommendation the algorithm sends me is Julio Iglesias. Well, to hell with that (laughs)."

"You dedicate 'Gracias por todo' and 'Cuál sería mi vida' to your wife, Ana Belén. Couldn't have a better muse, right?"

"Yes, really, and I like both of them a lot because they're very different from each other and very beautiful."

"In one of them, you imagine what your life would have been like if you hadn't met her. Does Víctor Manuel have many regrets? Anything left undone?"

"No, I think within my possibilities in the singer-songwriter world I've moved in, I've done everything I wanted to do. I see colleagues who have written songs that didn't occur to me, and I'm envious, but I'm sure it happens to them too. I listen to 'Mediterráneo' and say: "Why didn't I think of that?" I like it a lot, but look, Juanito wrote it (laughs)."

"In 'Aún no está todo perdido', you talk about work and inequalities. Are you afraid we're taking steps backwards?"

"We're not going backwards, it's impossible. There have been so many social achievements in these years, especially by women... It's another thing if things slow down and the big tech companies have a plan for us. If they could clip democracy's wings, so there was no dissent, no one protested, it would be the perfect world for them. The thing is, we get scared because we see things we haven't seen before. There hasn't been a president of the empire like this strange being placed there by 77 million idiots, but it's not an eternal picture because the world doesn't commit suicide for free. I'm sure there's a lot of people in the United States who don't agree at all with what this man does daily."

"What role do young people play in all this? Because they don't seem to be the most activist generation..."

"No, because they're with the toy (gestures holding a phone). They have substitute toys for anxiety and, surely, because they're not that bad and haven't hit rock bottom. It strikes me that capitalism has become insatiable. I saw it years ago when David, my son, started doing work for audiovisuals, they made him sign contracts where they asked for rights they couldn't collect. David could collect them if he had them, but the producer couldn't, but just in case the intellectual property law changed in the future, they already collected them. And I never thought we'd get to this because in the world one has known, wealth is shared, but this voracity now, I didn't think it would reach these levels. In that sense, young people are in a very tough moment. The housing problem is real, it's there, and it overlaps with the fact that travel is cheap, and people are being pushed out of city centres to make tourist apartments. These are new things we don't know how to face, but they'll have to get their act together. This is a torrent that sweeps everything away, and millions of angry young people... well, you have to think about it."