There are professions where having the same surname as your father usually opens doors, as in banking with the Botíns, or in law with the Garrigues, and there are others, such as in the world of art, where sharing a surname subjects you to all kinds of comparisons: you sing better or worse, you diverge or continue a saga, you have inherited the talent or you have only inherited the contacts. Perhaps for this reason this 26-year-old from Madrid, named Pablo, refused to see his surname on the poster and multiplied his name by two: now he is simply Pablopablo. You only have to listen to one of his songs to understand that he did not get rid of his surname for fear of comparison, but to allow the listener to enter, free of any expectations, into a musical universe of his own where sounds and voice float rocked by a current that seems to spring from a dream.
We have quoted you in Salvador House, An old Madrid tavern stuck in a time when Chueca did not mean what Chueca means today, and where the red and white checked tablecloths, short glasses and colourful bullfighter paintings still shine with the relics of the old churches. Pablo arrives with a smile and a look of wonder to this vestigial dining room, looking with curiosity at all the paintings and photos that surround us, he holds his gaze for a while at a portrait of Hemingway on our table. The bullfighting theme of the place is sunk in a time and an aesthetic so foreign to him that only the harmless charm of the picturesque is enough for him.
As he sits down, Pablo reveals on his forearm a tattoo of the mountainous outline of El Escorial, the town in Madrid where he grew up and which gives him a faint feeling of belonging, because beneath that tattoo runs a mixture of German, Uruguayan, Scandinavian and Asturian blood. He knows a little about everything and it is not clear where he lives, whether in London, Madrid or on the road. In reality he lives in music, and not in a metaphorical way: Pablo lives wherever the music he composes, records and plays live takes him.
As some broken eggs with blood sausage come out, we ask him to think about his last meal, after which he will die, and we give him the choice between a natural death for him alone, or the end of the world, which is a death shared with all of humanity. Pablo finds a dinner celebrating the apocalypse more attractive. He assures that the end of the world is a very established narrative in his generation. At this point in history they have seen the cycles of idealism and betrayal of the ideal that have occurred from May 68 to 15-M, which is why Pablo believes that the cultural expressions of his contemporaries are permeated with a congenital hopelessness, although he qualifies: this generational uneasiness is somewhat more acute among his English friends, due to Brexit, than in the Hispanic world. “This hopelessness is in the lyrics that go viral on TikTok, there are good messages in this generation, such as the empowerment of women, but there is another that appears all the time and that is that nobody wants to fall in love. She dances alone, but she doesn’t fall in love, which is cool, because she is independent, but the fact that she doesn’t fall in love is not because she is an empowered woman, but because this generation doesn’t fall in love.”
We asked him what the menu would be for this apocalypse, who he would share it with, what music he would listen to. He only has one thing clear, but he has it so clear that he doesn’t take a second to answer: that dinner could only be in a place on the coast of Uruguay, past Punta del Este, called Doveand where his paternal family spends the southern summer. “The whole concept of La Paloma is strange… An ugly place, someone who sees it for the first time would say ‘I don’t get it’, but for me it’s paradise. It’s an arid place, the water is brown, the beach is full of rocks, the first time you get into the water you cut yourself.” The beauty of the place is not obvious at first sight, one discovers it on that beach that never ends, that offers a sensation of infinity, one discovers it at dusk, with the slow pace of the people strolling. It’s impossible to cross the town in less than three hours, he tells us, because everyone greets each other, they get tangled up with each other as they pass, they stay perhaps to play music together, to have a drink, to have an improvised meal.
It will be difficult to gather all the people he loves in one place, his emotional core has scattered around the world, but that night he would like to gather his parents, his family, some cousins from Barcelona, his half-Italian girlfriend, three friends from London and that friend who is a mirror and explains his passage through the world, one from El Escorial who went to Paris “and who is the only friend who has survived all the phases of life, from when we met at one year old in kindergarten to graffitiing street lamps in El Escorial at 12 years old. After the phase in which we like clubs and drugs, we move on to the phase of not liking drugs at all and now we are healthier and we create things, until today when he is a writer and I am a musician.” As if that were not enough at the dinner, he adds between laughs: “I would teleport some famous singer that I love, without his consent, who would die with us that night.”
I ask him what he does to have fun with his friends, and he says very categorically that now, at 26, what he enjoys most in the world is “having a nice drink, with the promise that we are going to go somewhere, but that we are not obliged to go… It is like a preview, you need the illusion that you are going to go somewhere, to then have the pleasure of staying quietly where you are, playing music for us, showing us our projects. In the end you have had the fun at the beginning, but you don’t have to go to a club afterwards and not be able to talk.”
The food part is not so clear to him, he has a hard time thinking about it and it takes a while until he remembers a salad that his mother makes, with roasted peppers in the oven and goat cheese, and a dressing that only she knows how to make, which is what she always prepares for his birthday. Being in Uruguay he doesn’t see how to avoid the barbecue, which he likes a lot, but the indigestion caused by that huge amount of meat, which for hours does not stop coming off the grill every 10 minutes, ends up taking away the pleasure. He would make a very short and contained barbecue, if that is possible, which would leave room for what has been his favorite dish since he was a child: gnocchi with homemade pesto. His gastronomic imagination is starting to heat up now and he orders a Parmesan cheese with parmesan, and then with childish excitement he proclaims the glory of the mayonnaise eggHe says it in French because it must be the same one he tried once in Paris, very simple and on a lettuce leaf, and for dessert he orders something else that he also tried once in Paris, which he can’t name now but from his detailed description everything indicates that it was a flambéed rum baba.
After this feast, with her hunger now satisfied, she could face the drama that was coming to them with the diners. Alcohol would be a good lubricant to start considering death: “I don’t know much about drinks, but my old man taught me palo cortado and it blew my mind, that’s what I would drink.” This is when they would begin to seek the consolation of music, they would start singing the entire Beatles discography, which is something that everyone can connect with and make communion with; after this first act “it would continue like a gig, in the middle there would be a more confessional moment, where each one could play a slightly sadder song, but then we have to finish up again, I don’t really know what with…” Here she chews those broken eggs with blood sausage while thinking. Perhaps when you are on the verge of death, she reflects, “you revert to being a child and those things that you had thought were not cool and that you shouldn’t sing, you could play them, because you don’t care about being cool… Something like reggae, which is now the least cool There are some Bob Marley songs that would be great right now.” This is the point in the interview where Pablo makes Coco Dávez feel old and turns me into a living fossil. When did he stop being cool Bob Marley and why haven’t I heard about it? I wonder. Later, and in that uninhibited way, they would sing Britney Spears, in unison.
Seeing this repertoire, I ask him if you dance at dinner, but he thinks not: “To dance you need speakers and a plug, and you go up so high, you can’t come down from there, because when you go down we remember that the world is going to end, you have to keep a good balance and not go up too high so you can’t come down, but you shouldn’t stop either.” He says that it’s better not to reach euphoria, or hysteria with a thunderous volume, it’s better to stay in a quiet joy, and to be able to achieve that, maybe we should even finish off the Beatles too. What song, I ask: “All you need is love”.
