"R&R is entering an alternative reality, a kind of Olympus that connects with my teenage self as a village kid who devoured everything about music: records, tapes, magazines, books. In fact, when I was young and discovered live music at the foot of the stage, there was no turning back, I became a regular on the scene in my area and tried not to miss a single concert." I need to lunch by the Dead Boys plays just as Ramon Morera has ordered a battle-ready whisky-cola to crown a plentiful banquet at the Bar, in one of several feasts he is celebrating these days as a farewell to Barcelona, where this boy from that village called Oliva, near Denia, arrived seventeen years ago, during which all the most significant things in his life have happened to him.
"Here I became a father, here I worked as a teacher and, also, here I went from being a simple music fan to discovering that I could sing, that I could express myself and connect with the public through my compositions." It all started when he had been in the city for just over a week. "At the Big Bang Bar on Botella street, I met a friend from my village who had also just moved to Barcelona. He was putting together a band and asked me if I played any instruments. I told him no, so he decided I was going to be the singer." This is how the ephemeral Voodoo Rockets were born, with whom the regular cut his teeth on different stages. Then came the Orsini Shakers, the second band.
"With them, we toured a bit more and even opened for the Sonics themselves when they visited La Salamandra in L'Hospitalet, for exactly one song." At the time, there was a lot of talk in the gossip circles of the Barcelonian underground about that first concert song during which, in full frontman euphoria, the regular jumped with the bad luck of landing poorly and dislocating his femur.
"That's when, lying on the stage, I addressed the audience with the well-known question of whether there was a doctor in the house," he laughs. It was many months of recovery to walk again and, after losing that opportunity to shine opening for the mythical gurus of midwest punk, the band didn't last much longer.
A leap forward
While the Orsini Shakers were dying out like the ash of a cigarette smoked too quickly, one of Ramon's favorite bands, Els Trons, dedicated to rescuing the spirit of those 60s beat bands that sang in Catalan like Eurogrup, Els Dracs or The Bonds, also came to an end. And, curiously and against all odds, that coincidence meant that fatal leap onto the Salamandra stage ended up becoming a leap forward for his career.
Morera had literary inclinations that he never fully developed, "perhaps because writing is a very solitary activity, while music is collective, it is mystical""Paradoxically, the incident at the Sonics concert had made me more or less known in the city's music scene and, suddenly, I found that members of the recently dissolved Els Trons contacted me to create a new band. I had been a big fan of theirs since I lived in the town, a lot, and the idea of starting a new project with them almost didn't seem real to me", says the singer with the whisky-coke half-drunk, regarding the birth of Mossén Bramit Morera i Els Morts, through whom he recovers the spirit of Screaming Lord Sutch, "but writing songs and singing them in Catalan, my language, and divesting myself of R&R clichés to pour into them my likes and dislikes," such as a song about Margarida Borràs, the first documented victim of transphobic hate. "I think I've made good songs and I love seeing the audience chanting them at the foot of the stage, making them their own." In its eleven years of trajectory, the band has recorded two EPs, a 10-inch, and an album, "and we are preparing a new album, because even though I'm moving to Valencia, I'm going to keep coming back, the band is going to continue, because we are at our best moment," he affirms.
—You write about very diverse topics in exquisite Catalan and quote poets and authors who are not exactly mainstream. Have you not considered developing this more literary facet?
The regular smiles. "The truth is that when I was very young I did have literary ambitions, but I didn't quite develop them, perhaps because writing is a very solitary activity, while music is collective, it's mystical. It's a party."
A party that Ramon, a night owl, although years and fatherhood are taking him away from the endless night revelries, never wanted to miss.
A city to be active in
"To live in a place is to be active. To fight alongside neighborhood entities, to commit to the social environment, to get involved. The opposite is to end up being a kind of Erasmus who just looks at Trip Advisor to see which restaurant to have dinner at that night." The Barcelona experienced by Ramon is this: "A city I arrived at from a Valencia that was much more democratically backward, where I reinvented myself and became an adult, and of which many things made me fall in love, starting with the Sunday market of Sant Antoni."
A city that, in recent years, "has been taking an ultra-capitalist turn that has driven so many essential people away from here," laments the singer, who clarifies that "I'm not leaving out of weariness or anything like that, I'm returning to Valencia due to a series of family and emotional commitments and I am currently thinking about the new relationship I am going to build with Barcelona."
The notes of the Bye bye baby blue by the Undertones interrupt the conversation and provide the regular with a break to finish his drink and roll a cigarette to go out and smoke it.
—By the way, it just occurred to me that you haven't had dessert. I don't know if after the cigarette you'll want to try something from our dessert menu.
And something lights up in Ramon Morera's eyes, who affirms emphatically while confessing that, for him, "sweets are a vice, an addiction" that he doesn't want to resist. A bit like the party of that music, that R&R that echoes in his head and in his life.