Madrid without the postcard: the city as a stage for songs

I live and work in Madrid. I'm saying it up front because it's almost the only biographical thing you'll read here, and because I want to talk about the city as a stage, not as a CV. Some artists turn their city into an autobiography. I'd rather treat it as a set whose light changes with the time of day.

Madrid has a problem with songs: it already has too many. From chotis and zarzuela, the city's old folk dances and light operas, to eighties pop, this place has been set to music, written about and retold so often that it risks sounding like a postcard. A postcard is a pretty picture that says nothing about whoever sends it. And I don't want to send postcards.

The neighbourhood before the monument

When I write with Madrid in mind, I almost never think of monuments. I think of a stairwell landing. Of an inner courtyard where you can hear three televisions at once. Of the bar where the waiter calls you «cariño», darling, without knowing you from Adam. What interests me about the city happens at street level, or at the level of the neighbour's window.

A title like «La vecina cotilla» (The nosy neighbour) could happen anywhere, true. There are nosy neighbours in Lima and in Valencia. But I read it with a Madrid ear: it sounds to me like an old building with no lift, a spyhole, a blind that rises a fraction when you get home late. I won't tell you what the song is about, because the lyrics are on the website and I'd rather you read them yourself. I'll tell you what the title suggests to me, which is a Madrid of thin doors.

Madrid is a city where everybody finds out about everything, even with millions of people living in it. I find that contradiction wonderful to write from. A big city ought to give you anonymity, and yet on your street there's always someone who knows who you went upstairs with last night.

A city made of people from elsewhere

Another thing I love about Madrid as a stage is that almost nobody is from here. Or they've only been from here a short while. It's a city that has kept filling up with people from other provinces and other countries, and you can tell from how people talk, what they eat and who they love.

That's why a title like «Mi novio de Albacete» (My boyfriend from Albacete) tickles me. The boyfriend comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere sticks to the title as if it were part of his name. It happens a lot in Madrid: you ask where someone's from before you ask what they do. And «Mitad Venezuela, mitad Pakistán» (Half Venezuela, half Pakistan) sounds even more like this city, where in a single metro carriage you can hear five different accents before the next stop.

It's probably not unique to Madrid. But I write from here, and what I see from here is a city that works as a waiting room and a home at the same time. Some people come to stay two years and stay twenty. Some come to stay forever and leave in six months.

You can't talk about Madrid and queer pop without thinking of Chueca, of Pride, of the streets that fill up every summer. That Madrid runs the same risk as the Puerta del Sol: becoming a tourist leaflet. Flags on the balconies, packed terraces, photos that all look the same.

I've nothing against it. I love a party as much as anyone. But when I write, the gay Madrid that interests me is spread across the whole city, not squeezed into four streets. It's the boy who lives in a neighbourhood in the south and takes two buses to go out on a Saturday. It's the elderly couple who've had the same flat for decades and whom the porter still calls "the cousins".

There are more songs there than in any parade. I say it with a certain contradiction, because then I go and write about pride and liberation with every spotlight blazing. I suppose I need both: the street closed off for the party and the ordinary street on a Tuesday.

There's another decision I almost always stick to: not filling the lyrics with street names. I write pop in Spanish for people in Spain and the Americas, and if every line mentions a metro station, the song becomes a map only locals can read. I'd rather Madrid lived in the tone. In the hurry, in the irony, in that way of complaining about everything while never wanting to leave. If someone in Guadalajara, Mexico, hears one of my songs and thinks of their own neighbourhood, wonderful. The stage can be Madrid without the listener needing to know.

With the music videos it's different. I've directed more than 280, and there the city can peek through more, because images play by other rules. A façade, an August sky, a balcony with washing hung out. The picture lets Madrid show without having to say its name.

What the city asks of me

Madrid is famous as the city that never sleeps. It sleeps little, which isn't the same. And in those odd hours, between three in the morning and the first metro, the city looks a lot like a half-written song. Everything's a bit untidy and nobody's quite where they belong.

Sometimes I think the GAYFOLK trilogy, with its made-up planet, is also a way of talking about Madrid without naming it. The first album says there's a place where you can be who you are; the second, the longing to get there; the third, liberation day. For many people, that planet spent years shaped like a big city, far from the village. I'm not saying Madrid is GAYFOLK. Madrid has its impossible rents, and no self-respecting planet would charge that for a flat facing the courtyard. But I understand why so many people have looked this way with an «ojalá», an if only, on their lips.

The full lyrics, each with its music video, are at mikesaintlouis.com.